3 Things I Loved, June 2026
Since I have this space, I want to keep a record of the things I loved each month. It can be a book, a movie, a song, an album, a manga series, something I saw on TV, or heard, a new recipe I tried, a dish I ate, or even a material object. Why? Because it’s fun to talk and read about beloved things!
So, in June 2026, I got really into:
1. The Archives of Trevosa
This is a great little browser-based deduction game that turned out to be a very enjoyable way to pass two hours or less. The premise is simple. You are presented with a stack of documents from the archives of a fictional fantasy world and given the task to fill in a royal family tree. You do this by scouring the documents for context, translating cultural terms, working out the language rules, and deducing identities and relationships.
Piecing this puzzle together reminded me of the tough first chapters of a new fantasy novel as you try to adapt to the new fantasy vernacular, and the narrative deduction takes inspiration from another great game in the genre. This familiarity and the ease with which it drew me into the task was soothing, and I was charmed by the game’s simplicity: a story that doesn’t try to do too much and a deductive mechanic that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
2. Sea of Tranquility and The Glass Hotel, Emily St John-Mandel
Having read Station Eleven some years ago, I knew that Emily St John-Mandel’s prose is the sort I find reliably beautiful and would always make for poignant reading. But because the synopsis for The Glass Hotel (Ponzi schemes and container ships?) did not seem immediately engaging, I put it aside for Sea of Tranquility, which, according to the synopsis, is about “art, time travel, love, and plague”. Isn’t that enticing? As expected, it was lovely and ambitious and moving, and convinced me enough to pick up The Glass Hotel almost right as soon as I turned the last page.
Well, joke’s on me, because it turns out the two novels are linked, with The Glass Hotel serving as a prequel of sorts to Sea of Tranquility. Reading them out of publication and chronological order was fascinating— A character that was just an off-mention in Sea of Tranquility turns out to be a main viewpoint character The Glass Hotel. An event that devastated that character’s life in The Glass Hotel is just an incidental event in the sequel, and vice versa. You know from the first page how everything is going to turn out, yet this doesn’t detract from the experience at all. Instead, it’s a different but just as delectable kind of tension; the pleasure that comes from being bestowed a different perspective.
3. Interview with the Vampire Season 3
Speaking of things experienced out of order… I cannot not speak of the latest season of Interview with the Vampire which began airing this month.
It is driving me insane.
How much can you rewrite history? How much can you really retell your own story? Is memory mere performance? How (un)reliable are our own memories, and is this by choice? How true are the stories we tell? Whose story is the right one? Can such a thing even exist? All these issues are portrayed wonderfully on screen, reminiscent of how Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day did it on the page.
The previous two seasons of Interview with the Vampire have been magnificent feats of acting and storytelling, both marked by narrative twists of such immense and daring scale, I still can’t believe I got to watch it happen. I suppose it’s only to be expected from a show that deals with personal narrative and repressed memories, and all the necessary filters and lies of omission and editorialising that arise from relaying your autobiography to a third party.
But trust me, by the end of each season, you’ll be clawing at your face to rewatch every episode that came before, because so severely do these reveals turn things on their head and recast everything you have previously been shown in a whole new ghastly light— as hindsight does, as life often does. It is just so impressive how the show pulls it off, and not out of nowhere. Everything has been right under your nose all this time. Everything has been deliberate. You can watch everything all over again and you will find that the signs really were there, all this time.
And at the moment, the third season appears to be in the midst of once again executing yet another mind-boggling twist, the implications of which would be truly wild, adding insane layers of pain and depth and heartbreaking romanticism to the narratives we have already been presented with. I am beyond interested to see how it pans out, how it alters the past we think we know, and how they’ve covered it up all this time. Sundays cannot come fast enough!
30 June 2026