It doesn’t seem like I get an official pro capture of a musical just recommended to me out of the blue, particularly one I hadn’t heard of. It happened to be that Erin caught this in my feed and so we made time to watch it on Independence Day 2026.
Growing up, women’s suffrage was taught to me as a thing that women very nobly demonstrated for and rightfully earned during a period of the United States just kind of getting naturally more progressive at the beginning of the twentieth century. Suffs poses that the struggle for women’s voting rights was violent and as messy as any given change to an entrenched social order. We all know Woodrow Wilson was a racist bastard, but Suffs will make you hate him for more reasons still.
I wanted to see the movie and my father-in-law had the book to lend. Andy Weir has a gimmick about making his scientist protagonists relatable to the point of not being a person with recognizable interiority. His protagonists in this book and in The Martian think in their private mind the way I believe other people pretend to be in social functions. But I don’t think any human actually thinks this way.
That said, I very much enjoyed this and would take this over the Dungeon Crawler Carl craze happening at the moment. Weir has an excellent sense of tension and stakes in the progression of the plot. He could write some of the greatest sci fi of our era if those moments didn’t come with a “well, that happened” punctuator.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency(1987)
by Douglas Adams
April 2026
The most relevant anti-AI book of our time.
I’m a big Hitchhiker’s Guide fan, having enjoyed my first exposure to proper satire during my lonely middle school days and then discovering over time that almost everyone I liked to interact with had a similar experience.
I’d known about Dirk Gently in theory, but it wasn’t until our book club selected it that I had a chance to read any non-Hitchhiker’s books from Douglas Adams.
The core wit is there and refreshing in how deftly it’s weaved in with a denser plot. Our club had the consensus that the density of jokes is far fewer than the most well-known parts of the Hitchhiker’s series and while I’m a little neutral on how the central mysteries involving the Electric Monk and Gordon Way are handled, one of Adams’ messages resonated with me.
He warned us to not get super reliant on technology and use tremendous amounts of resources to do basic tasks of living.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is an anti-artificial intelligence book written 40 years before the explosion of generative AI and LLMs.
How timely. I’ll read it again.
Escape!(2026)
by Stephen Fishbach
March 2026
Fishbach’s best move since pairing up with Jeremy in Cambodia
Coinciding with a return to a Survivor era of my life, I received this book a couple months into 2025 after pre-ordering it last year. I rarely pre-order books, but Stephen Fishbach promised me more “Blood on the Clocktower” YouTube videos if I did that, but as the show that popularized him taught me: trust nobody.
I can praise Escape! as being a page-turner. Fishbach commits to escalation of plot and introduces a varied enough cast of characters with potential arcs you’ll want to see close out, much like Survivor does. He has flashes of damn good writing, particularly in the final act when his characters are really pushed into moments of existential reflection.
But it’s important to see this as something of an absurdist plot and I wonder how it will play to people who haven’t been following pop culture discussion of “the edit” or even to fans of reality TV that don’t follow survival shows. At times it feels like Fishbach gave in to a thought exercise and the conclusion feels like something unearthed rather than purposefully crafted. Still, a good airplane read, as I made significant progress on my five-hour flight from California to North Carolina.
Wuthering Heights(1847)
by Emily Bronte
February 2026
I’d like to see the full adaptation, please.
I feel like I was told this would not be the stodgy 19th century romance that I expected, but I was still surprised at how much Bronte was committed to writing bad people who do bad things.
I do think my experience was helped by still finding ounces of sympathy for Heathcliff, Catherine the elder, and all of them. Even Joseph. Bronte excelled at setting up the internal motivations and the traumatic experiences that built these people up to act as they do.
I was a little harangued by the narration model and I didn’t care to see the world through Lockwood’s eyes at the beginning. Thankfully, the narrator MVP is Nelly Dean, who I think should have started and ended the whole thing.
Our book club theme for September was “banned books” and our nominations list included this one, Looking for Alaska by John Green, Sold by Patricia McCormick, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, and The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier.
Interestingly, the one we settled on by a substantial margin was the book that wasn’t banned by a typical Western and Christian-influenced censorship apparatus. Whereas books like “Boys Aren’t Blue” and “Fun Home” are banned for exploring queer identities, “Verses” was censored in over 20 countries due to controversy over its portrayal of Islamic mythology. The book’s place in history is anchored by the fatwa declared by Iranian religious leaders more than thirty years ago. The bounty placed on Rushdie’s head did eventually lead to an assassination attempt by a random New Jersey man just a few years ago. (Rushdie survived and published a memoir revolving around the violence).
The uncomfortable thing about online discourse of this book is that there seems to be a micro cottage industry of people who use this book as a way to grind an axe against Islam as a faith. Looking for videos on the book will often surface a dark muttering of commenters who say that the fatwa controversy surrounding “Verses” justifies everything they think about Islam and Muslims.
A befitting irony for the novel’s themes of narratives that are imposed on people and events is that this is hardly a book dedicated as a polemic or committed to poking a finger in the eye of Muslims. It can be irreverent – cheekily so. There’s cynicism about organized religion and since Rushdie was born into a Muslim family, he uses the backdrop of Islamic history to make some points. But if you’ve ever read a satirical retelling of Christian Biblical events, like Lamb by Christopher Moore or seen The Life of Brian movie, you’re already familiar with this approach from writers emerging from Christian worldviews.
Ultimately, my favorite chapter of Satanic Verses is one of the several allegorical visions that alternate with the main plot. It involves a village that has become extremely devout due to the power of a prophetess and is now embarking on an arduous pilgrimage on foot to Mecca. The chapter’s title, “The Parting of the Arabian Sea,” indicates what the final obstacle will be for these pilgrims. I suppose one could walk away from this chapter and say “wow, Rushdie really portrayed some truths about the darkness of religious extremism,” but I came away feeling like this was Rushdie’s acknowledgment about the power of faith and some of the downsides of steadfast skepticism.
Faith is a well. One can draw strength from it, but that well can be poisoned. In a desert with no other reservoirs, one can become so dependent that it leaves you vulnerable to corruption. But in the harsh conditions of reality, an oasis can still be the only reason we preserve and find respite.
I guess I just felt like Rushdie’s views on the faith background he came from are a little more nuanced and complex than the discourse would have you think.
