April 2026

a somewhat random smattering of things gathered together here today—but happened to get quite a bit of poetry in there not totally on purpose, which is a delightful serendipity. read two top-notch, new favorites—City of Brick and Shadow and The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi.

currently trying to decide if i want to try and loosely theme my may reading or just follow my heart, so i guess we’ll have to see in a month where i ended up! two new releases, a book and a film coming in may, that i am EAGERLY anticipating—Paige Lewis’ Canon and Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, so look forward to hearing if they live up to the hype that me and like three other people have for them haha

Picturing Christ: Understanding Depictions of Jesus in History and Art (2026), Daniel Becerra, Jennifer Champoux, Mark D. Ellison, Matthew J. Grey

A quick read that pairs scholarly rigor and devotional approaches—a lovely example of what disciple-scholars can do.

reviewed for AML

This Will Be Fun (2024), E.B. Asher

this book is certainly fun! some the princess bride energy with a queer twist. even manages to be somewhat moving in the midst of all the playful, fun, cozy rom-quest stuff going on. it’s a little on the tell-y side (prose-wise) and some of the tech/magic of the world-building was a little eye-rolly to me, but the characters are fun, and it’s got just a nice, light, playful vibe all the way through rooted in some more complicated human emotions. will definitely read the sequel

City of Brick and Shadow (2014), Tim Wirkus (given name currently stylized as T.I.M.)

oh man, i can’t believe i waited this long to read this! i heard Wirkus do a reading either from this book or a short story around the time of its release, back at BYU (unless my memory is deceiving me!), and was intrigued then, but just never got around to it until now and wow, what a blast! twisty! noir! missionaries behaving shockingly like missionaries might behave! mystery! fascinating questions and ideas of faith woven into the nature of the mystery and the plotting of the book and its resolution(s). i’ll be thinking about this one for a long time. loved it.

Sacred Scar: Poems (2026), Scott Hales

The ecumenical and deeply personal nature of Scott’s poems here is the true strength of collection. The poems are always grounded in some emotional truth/kernel that matters to Scott, in a way that you can feel. the poems pull from all sorts of sources—christian history, family history, scott’s life, and more—and use each of these sources to demonstrate the idiosyncratic influences at work on scott’s spiritual life, offering a glimpse of how he pursues spiritual truth through his poetry. and the result is lovely.

reviewed for AML

Brighter and Brighter Until the Perfect Day (2025), Sharlee Mullins Glenn

may we see more and more wondering and imagining that pushes even further than glenn does here to new horizons for mormon thinking! love to see someone so willing to wonder and imagine and hope we can get more of that and that those that love glenn’s work can give it the close attention and care that it deserves.

i can’t help but feel that an epic poem needs to be longer! bigger! push glenn’s insights and wonderings to even further extremes! perhaps our day and age needs just a tease of an epic, the speculative prelude to what could be, but i wanted more! (and maybe this is also tied to me being a weirdo that has spent lots of time speculating in some of the same directions as glenn that i wanted to really see glenn take those initial impulses and run with them further—the arc of the poem here felt like setting the stage, getting all these interesting pieces in place and then ending rather than letting them play out more completely)

Loved Ones: Poems (2026), Kevin Klein

really enjoyed these lovely poems by kevin! a fantastic slice of latter-day saint life and spiritual imagination.

reviewed for AML

Vigil (2026), George Saunders

still chewing on this one. it’s interesting for sure and worth digging into. would love to read and discuss with a group, fruitful stuff here for discussions and analyses.

didn’t quite LOVE it, but worth a read.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (2023), Shannon Chakraborty

this on the other hand i ADORED. just a delight from start to finish. loved loved loved it. retired-pirate captain who is also a muslim and a mom forced to come out of retirement for one last job to save her family engaging in some john wick style shenanigans and a somewhat hidden magical world? SIGN ME UP.

really love the way that the magic feels fully integrated in and organic to the world that Chakraborty builds here and particularly the way that religion is nested within that broader sense of magic, with religious folklore and characters’ religiosity, including religious practices, embedded in how they act and make choices, without overwhelming the main action of the plot. so many great sequences and interactions.

there’s a few moments that feel a bit out-of-time-present-day-y, but for the most part, i was in the world and loving it. opens itself up at the end for more adventures (the sequel is coming out later this year!) and i will eagerly pick it up, but it ends with sufficient resolution that you could stop here if for some reason you don’t want to continue sailing the indian ocean with our beloved muslim pirate captain

Circe (2018), Madeline Miller

interesting to read alongside/just after The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi and in fairly close proximity to The Song of Achilles. this one spoke to me less than those two, but is still lovely and melancholy and haunted and interesting in how it touches myth, history, etc. definitely worthwhile.

Light in the Canyon (2026), Darren Cools

got an ARC of this and was very excited when the pitch compared it to A Wrinkle in Time (which i recently reread and found a new deep love for), so perhaps i was doomed by impossible/idiosyncratic expectations, but i’m getting a bit ahead of myself. i liked the book! it’s decent and doing some interesting things, with some compelling religious/spiritual stuff baked in. it feels a little constructed/artificial/convenient in how everyone ends up being connected to each other and the big emotional climax fell flat for me (partially because i wasn’t quite sure what the big/main concern was going into it and partially because of a cliffhanger-y structural choice that i found very annoying.

ALSO there’s stuff going on with gender and maybe i just have heightened sensitivity to that conversation and kept waiting for some polarized take to jump out, but the way the book deals with gender is strange and muddy—perhaps because it defies clear bounds of the current political discourse or because it isn’t fully integrated/thought through.

Joseph: An Epic (2025), Zachary Hutchins

i was equally intrigued and skeptical of this book when i first heard about it, but was finally pushed over the edge to read it and took it all in over a couple of hours in an afternoon. it took me a bit to settle into the rhythm of the book (maybe the first 30min of those 2hrs) but once i did, i really dug what hutchins was doing here. lots of fascinating thinking about joseph’s place in american history and what sorts of religious ideas and experiences are allowed to be taken seriously there, as well as some provocative interrogations of gender and how that has played out throughout the history of mormonism.

i especially loved the more explicitly speculative, imaginative, bits—particularly the whole court of devils and all the things going on there and also the recreation of the lost 116 pages.

hutchins says in the prefatory material that he chose to end the poem where he did partially to enact for the reader the sense that joseph’s life was cut-short and all of that, which i think is a partial accounting for my experience with the poem. but i still think that epics need to be LONGER. maybe in part here because i am quite curious what hutchins would do with nauvoo and polygamy and all the stuff going on there!

all to say, glad i read it—lots to think about

Pete Holmes: Silly Silly Fun Boy (2026)

another comedy special forcing me to confront that i don’t really know how to evaluate them! i laughed!

The Prince of Egypt (1998)

incredible

really hit hard emotionally by the tragedy of ramses this watch—came to believe that he couldn’t be loved or wouldn’t matter unless he was Powerful and Strong and then was so stubborn and prideful and hated being told what he had to do and bewildered by the change in moses that he doubled-down again and again until he lost everything

and moses! the burden of prophecy! of being turned against your brother and your former people by god to liberate your people by blood! devastating. moving.

AND it tells all that with breathtaking animation and top tier songwriting and manages to have an incredible tonal balancing act (so bittersweet!) and thematic richness and nuance without toning down or softening the story

a masterpiece

movie night with the fam

The Aeronauts (2019)

decent performances from our two leads, but structurally this film is weird! and the arc of the plot has peak tension way too early and then has a funky episodic quality that makes it feel much longer than it should and then also its relationship to history is just bizarre (and maybe offensive?)

Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! (2004)

cece insisted that this was something that needed to be seen to have a true understanding of mid-/late-aughts teen girl sleepover culture. and it is undoubtedly a fascinating cultural artifact! what a soundtrack!

Dogma (1999)

okay, this is like one-half to two-thirds a movie made for me and then one-third to one-half a movie decidedly not made for me. but the sheer, this is clearly the result of someone just going all in on their ideas of it all is pretty infectious, even when it’s the sorta stoner-sex-comedy stuff that i am just utterly disinterested in

but super fun to see lil’ matt and ben with some good omens energy and all the bonkers theology stuff is certainly my jam

had hoped this would become a new all-timer for me, but it’s not quite the right cocktail for that. but certainly glad to have finally seen it. a wild wild ride. and a top tier cinematic depiction of god.

The Swan Princess (1994)

“you lost your queen…”
“that’s twice in one day!”

movie night with the fam

Apollo 13 (1995)

very very very sleepily watched this, but it’s pretty good, even sleepily watched!

The Pitt, Season 2 (2026)

this show is so good. it takes its structural constraints/premise (real-ish time coverage of a single shift, each episode one hour for the characters and a little under an hour runtime) and then uses that to the fullest to explore what it is interested in thematically. great performances, fantastic a-plot/b-plot pairings, periodically pointed social commentary that still feels pretty organic to the world of the show. so good.

The Incredibles (2004)

top tier superhero film right here. really excels at weaving the humanity of the characters into their super-ness and using their powers and such to dramatize and explore those human struggles at a bigger scale, always keeping the stakes grounded in real human emotions and relationships.

incredible.

movie night with the fam

Invictus (2009)

this is good! a somewhat interesting genre fusion of political drama and sports movie (more of a political drama structurally) that uses the two things to good effect. matt damon’s accent is strange, but not overly distracting. should be a decent way to introduce the kids to south african politics/history down the road

Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

aside from the tragic mis-/under-used Tess, this is pure heist movie shenanigans at the top of their form. a great time.