read: The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani trans. Sam Bett, read by Cindy Kay (2024). A friend of mine was shortlisted for a Lammy Award (check out The Uncontinented Stars by Haden Cross under Transgender Fiction!) so I went poking around their archive and realized they give out a LGBTQ+ Mystery award every year! Big moment for me. I immediately cross-checked every recent nominee against my library holdings and this was the first one to hit. I don’t know that I’d say I enjoyed this book, so much as I enjoyed the fact that it’s a queer thriller from a Japanese woman that reads like a John Wick film. It’s harsh and violent and I found it extremely illuminating.

exhibition: Amy Sherald: American Sublime at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I was in Baltimore for work and was treated to a tour of the Amy Sherald mid-career retrospective. Sherald’s oeuvre is not really my area so I wasn’t sure how into the exhibition I would be—I loved it. I love CONTEXT and the context of her entire career thus far added to getting to experience the sheer scale of some of the works was fantastic. It’s sold out and about to close but if you get the chance to see Sherald’s work in person, take it.

read: Mirage City by Lev AC Rosen (2025). Speaking of award-winning queer mystery, I gobbled up the newest Evander Mills mystery. This has Andy leaving San Francisco on a case for the first time and finds him back in his hometown of Los Angeles, navigating his relationship with his mother as well as the Mattachine Society and a motorcycle club. I know a fair amount about this era of the history of gay rights, and I found the story really compelling. Five stars from me.

exhibition: Fratino and Matisse: To See This Light Again at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The BMA has a huge collection of works by Matisse, courtesy of the Cone sisters, and this little capsule exhibition puts him in conversation with Louis Fratino, a contemporary artist whose works are lush and explicitly queer. The result is magical and I was so grateful to the friend who pointed it out to me. It will be up through September 6 and is free! Highly recommend.

read: Nobody’s Baby by Olivia Waite (2026). Another highly anticipated sequel for me. The Dorothy Gentleman series poses the question: what if one of Bertie Wooster’s aunts was a detective in space? And the answer is: it would rule. This novella gives us more time with Dorothy’s fellow ship detectives, as well as with her nephew and his husband. I found it a delight and only wished there were more of it.

read: Charlotte Illes is Not a Detective by Katie Siegel, read by the author (2023). Another find from the Lammy list. Charlotte Illes was once Lottie Illes, kid detective, but these days she’s 25, jobless and depressed, and determined to do anything BUT detect. There’s a mystery that gets solved in this book, but in a big way it reminded me of my heyday of reading Harry Potter fanfic, where the best stories were engaging with the reality of saving the world and then growing up and living in it. (I don’t engage with anything related to HP anymore though.)

food: Some cookery successes this month: paneer makhani, cherry coconut almond cake, hummus spaghetti, and my very first batch of from-scratch brownies.

read: Star Shipped by Cat Sebastian (2026). Genuinely astonished how much I loved this book. I’m on record that Sebastian’s strength is fully realized mid-century settings, so her first contemporary outing wasn’t really on my radar. The romance here is a crunchy not-quite enemies to lovers (antagonists to lovers is closer) but the appeal for me is Simon, an actor who is riddled with anxiety, mild OCD, and debilitating migraines and never externalizes anything he can internalize instead. He’s prickly and mean and I loved him immediately.

watch: The Mentalist (2008-2015). For reasons I cannot satisfactorily explain, I decided to rewatch USA Network crime show The Mentalist (a show that poses the question: what if a team of competent detectives came with an irritating little guy) for the first time since it originally aired. This has been enjoyable for several reasons: it’s fun!, I can remember my initial reactions and think I am a better and more interesting person now, and y’all remember network tv? 20 episodes a season? We did not know how good we had it in 2008.

read: Sick Houses: Haunted Homes and the Architecture of Dread by Leila Taylor (2025). I picked this up at City Lights when I was in San Francisco for a friend’s wedding last year, which while it IS a tourist stop is also, crucially, a really good bookstore. Sick Houses is the kind of nonfiction that I really enjoy, where the author pulls references from all over, although Taylor is deliberately focusing on horror. I had a great time with this, and also found it quite spooky on its own merits.

dogs:

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