My newsletter publishing schedule is woefully off track, largely because I keep going out of town at the start of the month, when these typically get written and sent out. Most recently, I’ve returned from 2 weeks in Greece (more on this next time), and have been fighting a steadily losing battle to return to my standard routine. Between wrestling with jet lag and watching the darkness roll in earlier each evening, all I want to do these days is light a candle, read a bunch of fantasy novels, and take copious naps.

It’s hard to believe sweater weather is finally upon us. It feels like just yesterday it was too hot to even leave my blinds open during the day. And prolonging my summer by scampering off to the Mediterranean, where the temperatures never quite left the high 90s, certainly hasn’t helped this sense of discombobulation. I think this is the other factor driving me to seek refuge indoors amongst blankets and books: a complete lack of desire to remember how to dress for cold weather again.

Is it prosaic to talk about the weather? This is, after all, the kind of small talk most people resort to in order to break an awkward silence, or when all other conversational gambits have been exhausted. But can I confess something? I genuinely love talking about the weather. As I write this, the driving rains of the past few hours, courtesy of the nor’easter battering the East Coast, have abated to a light mist coating the streets and sheening with all the reflected gleam and glitter of the city. I’m cocooned in a tenuous, weighty silence, as if the very clouds are holding their breath. It’s peaceful. I hope you’re staying safe, if you’re within reach of this rain; I hope you’re staying cozy, regardless.

Chasing lighthouses in the Outer Banks

2026 has been a good year for indulging my various hyperfixations, what with Stamps Expo in May and the tall ship visits in July. In August, I achieved the Hyperfixation Trifecta by embarking on a road trip with a friend to see as many lighthouses on the North Carolina Outer Banks as we could cram into a week.

My love of lighthouses traces its roots back to fall of 2023, when I got sidetracked en route to Portland, OR, and ended up in Cape Disappointment State Park, WA. Driven only by a vague desire to see if the park lived up to (or, perhaps, down to?) its name, I spent a day wandering aimlessly amongst the trails and trees, ultimately making my way to the North Head Light, which rests on a scrubby promontory jutting out into the Pacific. Here I stood in awe for long minutes, staring into a rolling fogbank that hid the ocean from view, though I could hear its waves crashing tumultuously against the rocky beach some distance below. The sun hung low in the sky, the fog blurring its light into a dandelion-fuzz halo; the air seemed almost to coalesce into salt crystals on my tongue when I breathed deeply enough. And in the middle of it all, a picturesque, stone-trimmed, alabaster lighthouse rose like some stately sentinel, a queen on a chessboard, simultaneously observing and guarding against the ferocious whims of the waters beyond.

In many ways, that moment marks the beginning of this current phase in my life. You can trace a near-direct line from the North Head Light to my growing fascination with the Age of Sail to my love for physical correspondence to the various adventures I’ve gone on this year. So it feels satisfyingly full-circle to round out the year with a bit of lighthouse chasing.

My friend and I started in Corolla, NC, to reach the northmost lighthouse in the Outer Banks: the Currituck Beach Light, 162’ tall with an unpainted brick facade. We reached her an hour too late to climb her stairs, but she was sufficiently breathtaking even glimpsed solely through trees and fenceposts.

From there we moved south, stopping first at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island to be mesmerized by sea turtles and sharks, then at the charmingly squat Roanoke Marshes Light, before continuing on to the Bodie Island Light Station (pronounced “body”, not “boh-dee”). This time, fortunately, we were able to make the slow ascent to the top, where we were buffeted by a wind so strong we genuinely feared it would pick us up and carry us over the edge. Thankfully, we both survived, though my baseball cap was not so lucky: the wind snatched it right off my head, forcing me to make an embarrassed and rapid descent past several bemused park rangers in order to scoop it up before anyone else could get to it.

Then we were off to the Cape Hatteras Light, the tallest brick lighthouse in the US and second tallest in the world. Known for her distinctive black-and-white barber-pole striping and for having been physically picked up and relocated 2900’ inland in 1999 to fend off shore erosion, she would have been the highlight of our trip—had we not arrived to find her stripped of her paint, bereft of her lantern room, and covered pedestal to pinnacle in scaffolding. For a good five minutes, we debated whether we had come to the right place, so unrecognizable was she.

This is how we found out various NC lighthouses, Cape Hatteras included, are undergoing extensive restoration this year. Cape Hatteras in particular has been stripped down to her very brickwork so that she can be freshly repainted, and all of her ironwork has been removed in order to be recast. A replica first-order Fresnel lens is being specially constructed as well in order to restore the lighthouse’s functionality. One ranger noted wryly that restoration efforts of this magnitude would likely never be carried out again; in fact, he told us, Cape Hatteras had originally been slated only to have her paint touched up, but the repainting process had revealed missing window pediments, and a closer inspection of those exposed the general disrepair of the brick- and ironwork throughout, and the whole project had snowballed. Disappointed but vowing to return once she’s been restored to her full glory, we grudgingly departed.

That’s when the storm we’d been trying to outrun hit in earnest, bringing rains heavy enough to wash out roads in the Corolla area. Not wanting to be stranded, we decided to cut our trip short and got the hell out of Dodge, taking vehicle ferries first to Ocracoke, where we rushed to visit the Ocracoke Lighthouse, then to Cedar Island on the mainland, where I did some math and realized there was another lighthouse—a bonus lighthouse, if you will, completely unaccounted for in our original planning—just a 20-minute detour off our path.

So with a squall hot on our heels and the sun sinking lazily downward, we made our way as far south and east as we could, until we sighted the Cape Lookout Lighthouse: a faint, unpainted pillar standing tall across the sound. We could not go all the way to her, as the ferry that would take us there had stopped running some hours ago, but we waded out into the tallgrass to reduce the distance as much as we could.

Standing on the coast of the sound, as the breeze danced through the grass and birds skimmed the water to pluck fish from the whitecaps, is the closest I’ve come to true serenity in a long time. An ibis took flight near us, and another, and then a whole V formation of them winged past, low to the ground before abruptly wheeling off into the distance, and I had to blink back a sudden welling of tears. I wish I could have bottled up that tableau somehow, and all the joy and inconceivable beauty that suffused it. But I’ll have to content myself with the memory, and let the moment itself be carried off with the ibises.

Turnpike Troubadours

One of the unexpected joys of adulthood has been discovering that I don’t have to be a die-hard fan of a musical artist in order to enjoy seeing them in concert. Upon returning to NYC from my lighthouse adventure, I was whisked away upstate by a different friend to see a band called Turnpike Troubadours. My friend, who is a die-hard fan of this group, pitched them to me as follows: “They’re from Oklahoma. Like you.” And, well, it worked, so I can’t razz him too much for it.

We drove up on a Saturday afternoon, with a pit stop at Boot Barn to acquire cowboy hats and boots for maximum immersion. (My hat was, of course, pink, and also a child’s XL, which disgruntled me only until I learned how expensive adult-sized cowboy hats are in comparison.)

The band’s albums formed the soundtrack for our drive, with my friend providing color commentary on which tracks were his favorites and which were most likely to make appearances on that night’s setlist. The hasty highway primer did its job, enabling me to recognize and sing along to Gin, Smoke, Lies and A Tornado Warning a few hours later, and inspiring me to work through the rest of their discography in the ensuing weeks. If you enjoy country music, they’re definitely worth a listen, with rich instrumentation and lyrics that paint vivid pictures.

I’d somehow managed to persuade my friend to chain the concert with a bit of meteor hunting, as the Perseids were just past their peak. So our next stop was Margaretville in the Catskills. It took us a few tries to find a suitable patch of Dark Sky both untainted by local light pollution and close enough to civilization to still have cell signal, but ultimately we settled in the Belleayre Mountain Ski Lift parking lot. For once, the skies cooperated and stayed blessedly cloud-free; we witnessed a full 15 meteors in the 2 hours we spent sprawled on the gravel. And in the quieter moments between sightings, I tested my ability to identify constellations and other celestial objects, having spent the time since last year’s Orionids drilling flashcards. I’ve gotten quite good with the Summer Triangle, but Ophiuchus and Hercules continue to elude me. Guess I’ll just have to go upstate again to get some practice in.

Listen to Turnpike Troubadours on Spotify || Find a patch of Dark Sky near you

Star Shipped

by Cat Sebastian

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I’ve spoken of Cat Sebastian before. To tell the truth, despite my effusive praise of We Could Be So Good, I was surprised to have enjoyed it as much as I did. You see, until recently, Sebastian has mostly traded in Regency historical romances, which I’ve found to be broadly unremarkable. I expected even less of We Could Be So Good, with its midcentury NYC setting, as I’ve encountered few authors who produce better work when departing from their usual fare. But the book wowed me enough to leave me cautiously optimistic when Sebastian announced she planned to foray into the contemporary space with Star Shipped.

Suffice it to say, Star Shipped is another knockout. This book follows anxiety-ridden Simon and former foster child Charlie, co-stars on a cheesy Star Trek-inspired scifi TV show, as they take an impromptu road trip that forces them to finally dissect the hostility that has characterized their 8-year working relationship. Like much of Sebastian’s recent oeuvre, this is less a genre romance and more a character study, spending more time inside Simon’s head than moving forward an intricate plot.

Full disclosure: I am predisposed to fall head over heels for complex portrayals of mental illness and for characters who think they’re unlikable being shown that prickliness does not preclude being loved. Sebastian’s portrayal of Simon delivers on both fronts with aplomb. He’s messy, and petty, and bad at social interaction, and none of this diminishes his ability to love and be loved. Charlie’s no saint either, with his own pain points and snags that cause friction when they rub up against Simon’s. But with time and care, they learn to navigate each other’s rough edges so they can fit together without slicing each other to shreds.

I know this is an incoherent book review that doesn’t tell you much about the book itself. But the crux of it is that this book let me raw and aching and unwilling to return it to the library because I wanted to live in its pages just a little while longer. If you enjoy character-driven novels, or if you’re looking for a specific flavor of emotional catharsis, give this one a shot.

Get it on Bookshop

Master and Commander

What do Temeraire, San Diego, and LOTR all have in common? They all have ties to Master and Commander, a book series with subsequent film adaptation about naval captain Jack Aubrey and his onboard surgeon Stephen Maturin. Temeraire started as fanfiction of Master and Commander; San Diego’s Maritime Museum is home to the ship used in the film; and Billy Boyd, who plays Pippin in the LOTR movies, has a small part in this movie as well.

Both the books and the movie are acclaimed for exemplars of historical fiction in their respective mediums, and yet I’ve never gotten around to engaging with any of it. I finally rectified this a few weeks ago, on a quiet night with the nor’easter keeping me confined indoors. With a bowl of popcorn in hand and a candle flickering atmospherically, I settled in to watch ships turn oceans into battlefields.

As is often the case when I engage with media that has been around forever, I fear I can offer nothing new to the discourse. The allegorical elements, the cinematography, the grandeur of filming on a proper ship in the open sea—it’s all been said before. Instead, I can really only share my own impression, which is that I was surprised by how slice-of-life the movie felt, despite being billed as a war drama. For all the bloodshed and misery occurring onscreen, very little of it is sensationalized or milked for dramatic effect. Amputations and dumb puns and inclement weather and string duets are all portrayed with the same straightforward simplicity, resulting in a movie that feels more concerned with painting a candid, if fond, portrait of seafaring than it is with detailing Napoleonic warfare. Personally, I found the change of pace refreshing, and perfect for a stormy fall night.