five things no. 17
music and literature and perfect little moments
Hello and welcome to another installment of five things, where we discuss the handful of moments/books/films/series/people that have made me more or less happy to be alive recently. I have been making an effort to live my life slightly more intentionally (?) lately and this has tragically (?) led to more things to be happy about. I do not appreciate it when the haters are right, like when they said working out would improve my sleep and then it did. But nevertheless we persist.
If you’re curious, here are the last couple of five things for your viewing pleasure:
And if you’re looking for a regular cadence re these installments… good luck, babe.1
*
1. Literacy is alive and well thank you very much …
Over the last fifteen years, do you want to know how many times I’ve started The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s super chill novel about patricide? Four times. Each time, I managed a couple hundred pages before abandoning the Russian tome and turning to more manageable tasks, like scheduling root canals and understanding tax law. Which is why when Henry Eliot announced it as his 2026 read-along, I took a deep breath, bought the cheapest edition I could find, and set myself up for a fifth iteration of self-imposed disappointment. I told myself that well, I had a whole year to read it, and that was the point: slow, conscientious reading of this, a normal and uncomplicated novel admired by famously-normal and uncomplicated people like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Sigmund Freud.
So imagine my surprise when, on April 29, sevenish months ahead of schedule, I somehow reached page 870 of the Wordsworth edition I’d been carrying with me from bed to couch and from couch to bed for the last three months.2 I felt accomplished. Successful. An academic, almost. The next time people referenced The Brothers Karamazov, I realized, I’d be able to say something obnoxious and insane, like “you know, I read it, but I prefer Anna Karenina.”3 God. What a thrill.
2. … As is the celebration of low stakes anniversaries
Last week, I was out with a friend when we realized that the next day would make a year since we’d first met. And how can I say this … the news of our upcoming friendship anniversary caught us with a couple of drinks in our system, so inevitably: we made it a whole thing. We made the event everyone’s business, explaining why we were checking the time every fifteen seconds in the run-up to 12 o’clock. And then, when the clock—our respective phones, not-so-delicately tapped with increasing frequency—did strike midnight, we whooped and cheered and clinked our nearly-empty glasses like it was New Year’s. It was wholesome and silly and made my entire week.
I’d make accidental celebrations of low-stakes events my new personality trait, but it’d be a bit like trying to recreate a perfect day crafted by luck and happenstance, wouldn’t it? Can never step into the same river twice and all that.
3. We can enjoy one (1) parent-coded show, as a treat
Back in March I started watching the new HBO show Rooster, starring Steve Carrell and Danielle Deadwyler.4 Let’s get this out in the open: Rooster is not what I would call an example of good television. At all. If aliens came down to earth and asked for recs, I’d advise them to watch like, Roswell (1999-2002), before alerting them to the existence of Rooster.
The thing about Rooster is that it is undoubtedly a parent show. And I know you know what I mean. You’ll call your parents on a Sunday afternoon and after hearing about all the new illnesses besetting distant family members you’ve never heard of in your life, there’ll be a brief pause and suddenly your mom will be like, “oh, your dad and I started watching this new show The Seven Problematic Lives of the Sicilian Gentleman and His Much Younger Third Wife, have you heard of it? It’s on Paramount+ and it stars Ewan McGregor.”5
No one else has heard of this show but your parents but when you google it you realize that it is real so you say “that sounds cool, I’ll check it out.” And then you never do. Because Paramount+ costs $117/month.
Well. Joke’s on me, because this time I was the one recommending such a series to my parents. This time I was the one with the deranged elevator pitch: “It’s about a writer played by Steve Carrell who starts teaching at this prestigious liberal arts university in New England to get closer to his daughter, also a professor, who is spiraling because her husband—also a professor, and you’ll know him because he played that guy on Ted Lasso—cheated on her with a grad student.” Shameless. Shameless pandering to the parent-coded audience. But I don’t care, because I’m enjoying it. It’s low-stakes and Connie Britton is occasionally a guest star and it’s cozy because it’s set in a college town in New England and it panders to the liberal elite, to which I happily belong. Again: objectively not a good series. But it doesn’t make me wanna eject myself directly into the surface of the sun, and that’s not nothing.
4. A few of my favorite recent newsletters
I’m trying to catch up on newsletters and manage the Absolute State of my inbox, but a girl’s only got 24 hours in a day, and once the weather goes on spring mode, it takes all of me not to just spend all my time frolicking in the sun.
That being said, ahead are some of the newsletters I’ve loved the last few weeks:
India Knight’s “Me & My Desk” series is the writer’s version of a what’s in my bag and it delights me—her most recent edition with Juliet Nicolson was no exception;
BDM’s “sometimes books are hard to read” was a perfect preaching-to-the-choir moment for me because am I not always saying people should become more pretentious, which is really just an annoying way to say people should at least occasionally consume art that challenges and improves them?6;
I loved Madison Huizinga’s dive into the perils of overindulging on nostalgia “You Liked It? Watch It Again;”
Valerie’s “AI’s got nothing on a woman’s loneliness” because imagine writing “I am lonely and I will never stop trying not to be, and that doesn’t make me a fool” and then just going about your day;
Laura Kennedy’s “‘Just Know That You’re Poisoning Yourself’” made me laugh multiple times!;
Tell the Bees’s “Imaginary Injuries” was a brilliant review of The Drama and a response to some people’s (insane) reaction to it; and
I’ll join the chorus of admirers and recommend Haley Nahman’s “The Botox Psyop,” which served as a gentle little slap in the face for whenever I’m like everyone I know is doing things to their faces except for me like ok Clara get a goddamn grip.
5. It’s a great time for music for people who are sad while understanding that, rationally, they should be happy
I’m not sure what we’ve done to deserve all the incredible new albums released this spring—maybe it’s a reward for surviving, etc. When you make it through the winter and emerge from the underworld, good weather is TBD but there is a new Kacey Musgraves album waiting for you and isn’t that just as good as sunny skies? The argument could be made!
A few new albums I’ve been listening to:
Noah Kahan’s The Great Divide because I love when music panders to my chronic malaise and I mean that (there was a day last week I listened to “23” approximately seventeen times, and then he showed up at hayley’s concert and they sang “Downfall” together and so the next day I listened to that on repeat)7;
Jorge Drexler’s Taracá, a celebration of candombe and homecoming and the inherent, inevitable creation and evolution of music that’s proved a lovely balm to any Kahan-aided despair (“Ante la duda, baila” immediately went into my Spring ‘26 playlist and thus far it’s never once failed to cheer me up);
Yerai Cortés’s POPULAR, because you very much cannot beat the energy of modernish flamenco on a warm spring day (listen to “PIOPIOO” and tell me I’m wrong!);
Kacey Musgraves’s Middle of Nowhere, which is an unapologetic return to country and Texas and small towns and yes, to a fair bit of melancholy, too. I might write more about it because when it comes to constructing cohesive narratives via albums, Musgraves is one of the best to ever do it, and not just within country music, either. It’s why when I listen to her music, it’s hard for me to isolate it to one or two songs instead of experiencing the full album (that being said, I’ve been allowing “Hell On Me” to crush me multiple times a day since I first heard it on Friday).
Thanks for reading! You can find me on instagram. The newsletter is fully supported by readers, so if you often find yourself thinking I enjoyed that and also I happen to have disposable income, please consider sharing the newsletter with a friend and/or becoming a paid subscriber for $6/month or $40/year. If not, honestly, that’s fine, too. I get it.
I’m working on it.
I should mention that I only read this so far ahead of the read-along schedule not because I’m a particularly fast reader or I have some sort of complex about wanting to get there before other people (although I’d understand if you didn’t believe the latter), but because I know myself, and I know that the odds of my finishing a long book diminish the longer I take to read it. And I was determined to succeed where I had previously failed, if you’ll briefly allow me to write like a Silicon Valley motivational speaker. Apologies to Mr. Eliot, whose Brothers K essays I nevertheless plan to continue reading over the course of the year.
Obnoxious and insane but nevertheless true.
If you’re keeping score this is my second Deadwyler mention in as many weeks and that is because I will see Danielle Deadwyler become as famous as she should be.
This is not, as far as I’m aware, a real show. Give it time, though.
Back in February Clare Frances wrote that Kahan “makes 2011 American Idol music, and looks like it” which apparently tickled me enough that I’m still thinking about it months later. I’m a fan of his but I’m also an adult, which means I get to have a sense of humor.
Your footnote content and placement are always little treats to read
I too have fallen into the Rooster trap and my explanation for it is that it’s an example of “the campus novel” in TV form but completely divorced from the hellscape that campuses have now become. Perhaps I would have stayed in the academic path if this is what awaited me 😅