This was a busy month, so I’m once again doing the bare minimum with the monthly recap, sorry! I am, however, catching up on the missing week of April as promised. So you won’t get much personal fluff, but you do get all the recommendations and even a bit more!
What I’ve read / Texte
📚 Books / Livres
In English
- Fiction
- The Evander Mills series by Lev AC Rosen is still excellent with book 3, Rough Pages. I love detective novels, and I love when the detective doesn’t do well with cops, is gay, and lives in 1950s San Francisco.
- Did not expect to have so much fun reading I hope this finds you well, a novel where a woman convinced that everyone hates her gains access to her colleague’s emails and private messages and knows that 1/ everyone does hate her and 2/ she now has ammunition to survive the upcoming layoffs. And of course, all this with a very cute HR rep.
- The Golem of Brooklyn had me laughing out loud several times and crying a couple more times. « But that was America these days—go outside to smoke a cigarette, and you might come back in to find your history erased, your culture canceled, and little Johnny telling you he wanted to piss sitting down from now on. »
- If I was your girl joins my « trans 101 » collection. It’s a good book for cis people, it’s a good book for teenagers, and it’s still dark and sad and hopeful and a great read for everyone else. The author includes a postface to tell cis readers that she made the easiest trans character possible to help them learn: a girl who passes perfectly, who medically transitioned before puberty, who knew from the youngest age, etc. I appreciated that acknowledgement.
- I love Olivia Atwater novels and The Witchwood Knot was no exception. Her faerie romances are amazing and this one, much darker than her usual tone, is no exception.
- Ann Napolitano’s Within Arm’s Reach was a beautiful family tale.
- Chencia C. Higgins’ A little kissing between friends was a hot sapphic love story.
- Non-fiction
- I finally finished Shane Burley’s anthology Why we fight: essays on fascism, resistance, and surviving the apocalypse. Usually when you’ve got twenty essays by different people, at least one of them sucks. Here, they were all different, and of course I didn’t love them all equally, but I’d still recommend all of them!
En français
- Fiction
- Faïza Guène avait conseillé Les meufs, c’est des mecs bien de Mourad Winter en disant que c’était le livre le plus drôle qu’elle ait lu depuis des années. Ma note de lecture à chaud était : « bouquin de gros forceur mais très rigolo j’admets », et je reste d’accord avec moi-même. Vous en ferez ce que vous voulez.
- Pierre Lemaître écrit le moins bon livre de sa série historique avec Un avenir radieux, ça donne donc un bouquin très bien.
- J’ai lu La Peste d’Albert Camus pendant que je me remettais de
la pestela grippe contractée dans l’avion (si je tue la planète je tue mes poumons, c’est un juste retour de karma). C’était, euh… un peu moins inclusif que ce que je lis d’habitude. Mais c’était sympa. Mais c’est un tour de force de faire un bouquin entier en Algérie et d’avoir un figurant autochtone (de mémoire, « un Arabe avait été assassiné par un jeune homme sur les quais »).
- Non-fiction
- Corset de papier de Lucie Barette se penche sur l’histoire de la presse féminine. Un livre très court et très instructif, avec de belles pistes de réflexion.
🔍 Papers / Articles académiques
I’m going to retire this section because I don’t read nearly as many papers as I used to and because if they’re not overwhelming, then they belong in books or web links. Goodbye, trusted « 🔍 Papers / Articles académiques » section!
📰 Web links / Liens web
Okay, told you this would be a big month.
In English
- A cool study on what Americans know about medieval history and what it -means to a medievalist.
- Joan Westenberg keeps churning out bangers. Here’s a top 3:
- James argues that we should call them web readers, not RSS readers: it’s the function that matters, not the protocol
- Maybe we really do want a faster horse
- How to start a babysitting coop in your neighbourhood. I love babies and children! I want to babysit for my neighbours! And therefore I read this article that’s, understandably, aimed for parents.
- From Ask A Manager, my employee keeps insisting he looks much younger than he is but he doesn’t is a hoot.
- No as a service returns random rejections. It’s great.
- IA Writer’s staff wrote about the history and comeback of Markdown
- Ben Werdmüller talks about what he’d do if he ran Mastodon
- Author Malinda Lo remembers that protests tells us we’re not alone, and that’s always worth it.
- On Culture Study, what is millennial hobby energy? Answer: it’s what I have.
- Kodo Simone wants to make advertising illegal.
- On Scribble Scrabble, the art of pretending like your life is a cozy game. Also, some good game recommendations.
- People’s brains are being warped by ChatGPT. They display addiction and withdrawal symptoms!
- Elle writes about abundance on the Internet. When did we accept infinite scroll and « for you » pages? Give us song-by-song piracy back. (Loosely related: I panic-bought an ipod shuffle last week. Can’t wait to receive it.)
- Lou reflects on feeling like crap with this intro, « One of my life-long problems before I got sober was this feeling of being terminally unique. » He shares this amazing website: Why do I feel like crap?
En français
- Livraison du dernier kilomètre, quelles solutions ? par Tristan Bouvon pour The Conversation
- La fatigue moderne sur Cdlt
- La Déferlante se demande si on peut encore lutter en ligne, et Basta se pose la même question
- Basta sort un super dossier sur Wikipédia, avec des bouts de moi dedans.
- Pour The Conversation, Jul & Johnny Hallyday: même combat. (Je suis d’accord. D’ailleurs, je n’ai eu à vérifier l’orthographe que d’un de ces noms. C’est une preuve.)
What I’ve watched / Vidéo
🎞 Movies / Films
Italian special.
C’è ancora domani started out as a comedy about domestic violence, I guess? It’s all in Roman dialect, it’s in black and white, it’s very funny and very sad at the same time because of course, with this topic. It felt so weird the entire time. All in all a great movie with an extremely underwhelming ending − which I had no problem forgiving.
I watched Habemus Papam as homework for my Italian class. I expected a boring drama about choosing a pope. The pope is elected in the first ten minutes of the movie. Then, he has a panic attack and refuses to be sworn in; the Vatican brings in a psychiatrist, the Pope runs away and hides in Rome. The movie is brilliant and hilarious and touching, with very serious treatment of very absurd situations − my favourite kind of humour.
📺 TV Shows / Séries
I am still unfortunately on a Grey’s Anatomy spree.
📷 Online video / Vidéos en ligne
In English
- A video essay about how cheer’s top teams are squeezing out the underdogs in pretty unfair ways
- 🔏 On Nebula (if you don’t have a subscription, I have 3 one-week guest passes!)
- We took the train from the Arctic to Africa
- We played hide and seek across NYC − this might convince me to buy the game. Oh no.
En français
- 🔏 [Abonnement L’Équipe] Chloé Aurard est la première française en PWHL (la ligue nord-américaine des hockeyeuses). L’Équipe a fait un court documentaire sur elle, intitulé Première lame. Tout le monde est lesbienne et en plus c’est intéressant.
- Pourquoi ce scammer me donne de l’argent ? Ça commence rigolo, ça finit en traite d’esclaves.
What I’ve listened to / Audio
🎤 Podcasts
As usual, I only include links if the podcast has bothered to have a website. All episodes are available for free on your favourite podcast app / RSS reader. 🔏 are Patreon episodes: send me a message and I’ll send you the file.
In English
- On Bad Therapist : The life coach school
- On If books could kill :
- The Let Them Theory
- 🔏 The free speech’s warriors’ guide to fascism
- On LGBTQ&A: Susan Stryker: Trump’s war on transgender people, a historian’s view
- On Srsly Wrong: it’s so over, we’re so back (also how i feel about this podcast − after a disappointing season, we’re so back!)
En français
- La Dernière du 30 mars 2025 avec Rachid Benzine : je recommande rarement La Dernière parce que c’est toujours bien, mais celui-là l’était encore plus que d’habitude. (Vous l’aurez remarqué, là aussi je rattrape le récap d’avril.)
- Chez Le code a changé (France Inter), un épisode pas chiant sur la GenAI, comme quoi c’est possible (surtout quand on parle de linguistique)
- Le fabuleux épisode Glee de RomComment ? qui m’a fait replonger à pleine vitesse dans mon adolescence.
🎹 Music
I haven’t listened to enough music recently and it makes me sad.
Where I’ve been / Lieux
Québec was nice! I will probably not post a recap, because we ended up doing much more « let’s visit places from Alex’s past » than « let’s be tourists » and I can only list so many different Tim Hortons before the list gets boring.
Je suis aussi allé à l’enregistrement live de La Dernière à Grenoble et c’était : encore mieux qu’en podcast hihi ! Toujours à Grenoble, M. et moi sommes allés encourager Grenoble pour sa victoire en demi-finale de Pro D2. Cette fois, c’est la bonne − et l’ambiance était ouf !
Bonus Pride :
Definitely adding the Shane Burley one to my reading list, and I relate very much to the millennial hobby energy one. Also I love the 3d ace pride sign lmao
Mouahahahah, ce dernier étandard de Pride est vraiment très très bon !! 😀 😀