this month started with a very ill cat and has ended with my having covid for the first time, and although some fun things happened in the middle (family beach vacation!) it’s difficult to remember them now. i am sooooo ready to put summer behind me.

read: Stories for Summer: And Days by the Pool ed. Simon Thomas (2025). I’ve never been terribly interested in short stories, and it’s something I’m trying to fix, because every time I read them I enjoy it? So I picked this up and have been trying all summer to read it by a pool. I finally managed it this month. This was full of bittersweet stories of longing, and I ate it with a spoon. Paperback from my local shop.

film: Rose of Nevada (2026). Gorgeous, haunting film about a fishing boat and the things that happen to its crew. Doesn’t explain a thing to you, which I love. If the trailer appeals to you, I encourage you to watch it without looking up more.

read: The Original by Priya Parmar (2026). As a Katharine Hepburn superfan, I was extremely interested in this novelization of the beginning of her life in Hollywood, and it was good! The emphasis was on Hepburn, but it also touched on other “originals” at a point in time when you could almost be queer in Hollywood, before the Hays Code changed a great deal onscreen and off. In typical fashion, I was most interested in the facts behind Parmar’s fiction. Library hardback.

game: The Red Pearls of Borneo (2026). This is a browser-based detective game where you play as a psychic who is trying to piece together what took place in the days leading up to an attack on a plantation in immediately pre-WWII colonial Borneo. I love detective games but need something visual to grab me, and this was just perfect. Totally free. Highly recommend it.

film: A Room with a View (1986). Somehow had never seen this, but it seemed like the perfect thing to add to my summer film series of things happening to women on vacation. I loved it. I loved the look of it (the costumes and setting!!), the chapter headings, and most especially the characters. I loved the characters so much that I immediately hit my local used bookshop for a copy of the book, to see if they’re as delightful in Forster’s original. I suspect they are but will report back.

read: Murder on Sex Island, written and read by Jo Firestone (2025). This is one of the funniest murder mysteries I’ve read, and the fact that the audiobook was read by the author made it even funnier. I cannot imagine this book in anyone’s voice but Jo Firestone’s. This is about a woman who moonlights as a private detective under an assumed name (and face), then is asked to go undercover to investigate the disappearance of a contestant on a Love Island knock-off show, wig, veneers, and all. Libro.fm audiobook.

film: The Eternal Daughter (2022). Another off my syllabus, this wasn’t exactly a bittersweet summer vacation movie, but it was so exquisite I didn’t mind. Another gorgeous, haunting film, this features Tilda Swinton playing both a mother and daughter who are staying in a country house the mother knew from her childhood which has since been turned into a hotel. It’s the bump-in-the-night kind of ghost story, which is my favourite. Every time the fog rolled in, I cheered.

read: The Someday Garden by Ashley Poston (2026). I don’t read much (any) contemporary het romance, but even I cannot resist the siren song of a secret garden. In Maine. This is a romance, but it’s really about grief, and really effectively about grief. I did enjoy the romance, but it was Sophie struggling to move on after the death of her best friend that really got me. Paperback from a beach shop.

game: Lost & Found: A This Bed We Made Story (2026). This is a little dlc for This Bed We Made, a 2023 mystery game that I loved. It’s a little nibble of a thing (Sophie is asked to track down stolen items on the cruise ship where she works), but I loved it and I love that we’re getting more of Sophie.

film: The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Another one that’s been on my list for ages that I finally got to thanks to my syllabus. Beautifully shot, makes perfect use of Italy, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman is there schooling everyone in how to act. Despite having a general idea of the story, I was still unprepared for how violent it was. Still thinking about it days and days later.

read: A Will to Kill by RV Raman (2020). Despite the cover image, there is only briefly a train in this book, although it is a good one. It took me a few tries to get into this book, which is set in modern India and follows a retired detective, but once it got its hooks in me I was in. It’s a very Golden Age mystery—locked room, isolated manor house with a set cast of characters, even a contested will! I had a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed the writing. Paperback from my local shop.

telly: covid sucked but I packed in a lot of tv while sitting miserably on my sofa.

• The Other Bennet Sister (2026): I liked this as long as I didn’t think about it too much. Indira Varma was wonderful as Mrs. Gardiner, and I am still quite pleased with the theory I developed early on based on Lucy Briers’ presence (she plays the Bennets’ housekeeper Mrs. Hill) that the whole thing was dreamed up by an earlier Mary Bennet as an autobiographical au.

• Tommy & Tuppence (2026): I don’t much care for spy stories, so Tommy & Tuppence were never my thing. I do, however, care deeply for Antonia Thomas, so I was not gonna miss this. It’s a modern set origin story for the pair, and I had a wonderful time. More please.

  

• SurrealEstate (2021-2025). This is a show about people selling haunted houses. Is it good? No. Did I love it? Yes. I miss the heyday of Canadian SFF television.

• Banjo & Ro’s Grand Island Hotel (2026). I enjoyed this reality show about a couple renovating a house on a tiny island in the Hebrides so much I wrote about it here. Delightful television.

• Ludwig (Series 1, 2024). Everyone is right about Ludwig. It’s a good show!

read: The Primrose Murder Society by Stacy Hackney, read by Stephanie Németh-Parker. This book is about a woman and her young daughter moving into an apartment building for people 55+ when their lives fall apart, and solving a decades-old murder. I largely found it delightful except that it’s set in the city where I (and the author!) live, so I had some minor quibbles about some of her choices. And one major quibble about the book’s romantic meet-cute happening when a guy steals a coffee shop table from the protagonist and then fights her about it, a thing I have literally never seen happen in my prodigious experience with Richmond’s coffee shops and, it must be said, an act so rude I’d immediately run the guy out of town. Library audiobook.

Comfort: When I was feeling my worst this month I wanted two things: to watch The Decoy Bride (2011), and to play Myst III: Exile (2001). I managed both (one while wizard high) and you know what? It helped.

dog:

cat: