2026 read #49: Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell.

Someone You Can Build a Nest In by John Wiswell

310 pages

Published 2024

Read from October 3 to October 30

Rating: 4 out of 5

Damn, I’ve hit another reading skid. It’s been about a month and a half since I finished a book that wasn’t a table-read. I tried a handful of books before landing on this one, which I’ve slowly gritted my way through — a tedious process, not through any fault of the writing or the story, but because I’ve been fighting upstream against my attention span this whole time.

Someone is a beautiful allegory for queerness, otherness, neurodivergence, generational traumas, and love that breaks all norms. It’s full of sweetly quotable ruminations on how we react to our hurts, how systems of abuse sustain themselves, how those of us who respond with kindness and empathy are ground down into emotional subservience and self-sacrifice. It is also the story of a shapeshifting monster that reproduces by laying eggs inside a human host. It deserves all the adulation it gets.

2026 read #48: The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

91 pages

Published 1952

Read October 24

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Back at it again with another table read event, meaning another classic play getting treated as a book for the purposes of my blog. Unlike A Midsummer Night’s Dream a couple months back, I hadn’t seen any production or adaptation of The Crucible before this table read.

You can tell this play was written by a man in the 1950s. The climactic portrayal of John Proctor as a flawed but ultimately noble man of principle elicited its share of scoffing and laughter from the table read. Miller hits upon a halfway interesting idea when Abigail goes off on the hypocrisy of every person of authority within the strict patriarchal hierarchy of her society, but then has the narrative dismiss many of her words as the rants of a love-crazed teenager, longing for a future with her married father-figure paramour.

Still, it is a well-constructed play that, within the conceptual limitations of its time and its intended audience, has some interesting things to say about structures of power and how precarious they can be when McCarthyan accusations sweep through the village.