july 2025
what ho, friendlies! this has been a big month for catching up with friends, being sweaty, and discovering really good mystery series. on a personal note, my bowling team (The Bowlsheviks) got a full suite of strikes in a single frame.
read: The Verifiers and The Rivals by Jane Pek (2022 & 2024). I think I saw The Verifiers first on a pride month rec list, and I’m so glad I checked it out because I loved it. This series follows Claudia Lin, a queer underemployed Taiwanese-American New Yorker who finds herself working for an agency which investigates peoples’ dating app matches to see if they’re telling the truth about themselves. When one of their clients dies suddenly and they learn that she was lying about her own identity, Claudia finds herself drawn in to the case. The mystery element is great, but for me it’s Claudia herself who is the most compelling element here. Her personality, her way of speaking, her relationships (in particular with her extremely complicated family) are a pure delight. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment.
read: Murder By Memory by Olivia Waite (2025). On the whole I tend to enjoy Tordotcom’s sci-fi novellas, and this one, a cosy mystery in space, was particularly compelling. It follows a woman named Dorothy Gentleman who is a detective on a colony ship, one whose inhabitants are in the process of living out centuries of lives on repeat until they reach their destination are will be allowed to finally die permanently. Dorothy is in-between lives when she finds her brain abruptly placed in the body of someone else entirely and with a murder to solve. The setting of this one is really fun! Dorothy herself is a bit like Miss Marple if she was also Bertie Wooster’s aunt (this will not be Bertie’s last appearance in this newsletter) and gay. This was just my cup of tea, and I have already preordered the sequel.
read: Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard (2024). Aliette de Bodard is a seasoned writer of sci-fi mystery and diplomacy yet I am always impressed by the way she manages to sketch in so much information about her worlds without overloading the limitations of a novella’s word count. This follows a ragtag group of diplomats, each representing a different clan, who are sent to investigate reports of a rogue intergalactic beast and find themselves in an increasingly complicated situation when their de facto group leader dies suddenly.
read: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses by Malka Older (2025). I don’t always post my reads in chronological order in this newsletter, but I am this month purely because I’m enjoying reflecting on the fact that I read five lesbian (sci-fi-ish) mysteries in a row. The next in my sapphic sweep was the third of Malka Older’s series about a holmes-and-watsonesque duo in a civilization in Jupiter’s orbit. As pastiches go, this one felt more like Gaudy Night, as Pleiti embarks on a solo investigation at a distant university while Mossa stays behind.
visit: National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Despite having spent many of my formative years in the halls of the various Smithsonians, I had never been to NMWA before this month. I was blown away by it. The permanent collection and the way it is presented in the galleries is incredible and their current exhibition, Uncanny, is extremely effective. The NMWA Library also has an exhibition on which I highly recommend, about artist books. In fact, the curator of that exhibition will be there giving a talk this weekend if you are in the D.C. area. NMWA is a glimmering star in the D.C. museum firmament, and I highly recommend it.
film: Superman (2025). I went to see Superman. I know, I was surprised too. I liked it! It was fun but felt like less of James Gunn leaning on the JOKE lever than his previous superhero outings. I loved Mr. Terrific, I loved the use of John Williams’ score for the 1978 movie (which my mom had on a mix tape when I was a kid, so it sounds like childhood to me), and I loved that there are some real primary colors in this movie. Hope it’s a signal that the age of grim and gray as an indicator of seriousness in film is behind us.
read: America Goes Modern: the Rise of the Industrial Designer by Nonie Gadsden and Kate Joy (2022). This came across my desk at work and I picked it up and couldn’t put it down. Published by the MFA in Boston, it uses one collector’s bequest as the basis for an overview of the history of industrial design in America. It’s lushly illustrated and incredibly informative. New information to me included the various types of plastics being experimented with in the post-war era. It has largely been remembered as Bakelite, but that was just one of many and the differences between them were fascinating. Here’s Belle Kogan’s “Smug” clock, made of Plaskon specifically:
read: Inheritance and The Mirror by Nora Roberts (2023 & 2024). One day this month I woke up sad and took myself off to the public library as a way of cheering myself up. Also in the way of self-soothing, I borrowed a newer Nora Roberts book. I’ve read a great many Noras in my life, so I reasoned it was a known quantity. In fact, I was surprised by it—first that there were so many gay people in it (unprecedented in my day), and second that it ended on a cliff-hanger. At some point during the years since I stopped regularly reading Nora Roberts she apparently decided to change some things up. I loved Inheritance, which is about a house full of ghosts, and eagerly went back for The Mirror, which is…not. I mean, the ghosts are there, and they’re still the most interesting part of it, but in between it’s mostly a quartet of people doing their jobs competently and drinking Coca-cola. Seriously. I have begun to suspect that Nora Roberts has a sponsorship deal. I will read the third because I want to know what happens with the ghosts, but this did not have to be a trilogy.
read: Maids of Misfortune by M. Louisa Locke (2009). This is a historical murder mystery, the beginning of a series set in the late 19th Century in San Francisco, and following Annie, a young widow who runs a boarding house and moonlights as a “clairvoyant,” hiding her solid financial advice behind a more believable smokescreen than “a woman knows how to read stock reports.” When one of her clients dies suddenly and the police write it off as suicide, Annie gets a job in the man’s household as a maid in order to investigate. I enjoyed this book, but found the setting and historical details much more interesting than the mystery. It was not at all surprising to learn that the author is a historian of the period.
film: Ballerina (2025). Very stupid, fun action movie. A LOT of grenades. Was delighted in particular to see Lance Reddick one last time.
read: The Anty Boisjoly Mysteries by PJ Fitzsimmons (2021-2024), audiobooks read by Tim Bruce. I don’t listen to a lot of audiobooks, but I wanted one for a drive and my library had the first of these (The Case of the Canterfell Codicil) and immediately I was hooked. Anty Boisjoly is a monied idler in the Bright Young Thing mold with a reputation as a problem-solver who inevitably is asked to solve a murder. He’s very much as if Bertie Wooster was secretly a genius but still identical in personality. Fitzsimmons’ prose is sharp and funny (especially if you enjoy social commentary in the vein of P.G. Wodehouse or Noel Coward), the mysteries are usually of the impossible sort, and Tim Bruce’s narration is so good that I can’t imagine reading them in any other voice—even my own. My single caveat is that Fitzsimmons seems to favor a good punchline over historical accuracy, so be prepared if you know much about the British culture in the 1920s.
dog & cat
