I was away for about ten days (more on that in the focus on section), meaning I skipped last week’s culture roundup. So I have three weeks of books and music to talk about today.
Roundup
Music
As is probably apparent by now, I’ve been struggling to figure out the rhythms of 2026’s music release cycle. There are jam-packed weeks of fascinating new releases, followed by weeks of, not quite radio silence, but the next thing to it. We’re in a bit of the latter kind of moment right now. The biggest release of late (in more ways than one) has been Drake’s triple-album Iceman, but since I’ve never been a huge Drake fan, and since as far as I can tell, this new music has done nothing to change the downward trajectory he’s been on since his disastrous Kendrick Lamar feud, I don’t have much to say about that. On a more positive note, I enjoyed the new Bleachers album, everyone for ten minutes, even if I don’t think it does anything superlative that will be memorable by year’s end. The same can be said for Maisie Peters’ new album, Florescence, which is lovely, but earned more of a polite clap from me than a resounding ovation. The new album I’ll probably revisit the most is Kurt Vile’s Philadelphia’s been good to me. But we’re almost at the point where the prominence of ’00s artists this year is starting to feel like a warning signal rather than fun nostalgia. By far the most impactful music released over the past three weeks was the second pre-release single from Olivia Rodrigo’s upcoming album, “the cure.” She’s now two for two for big and engaging singles for this new project, which has me very excited for June 12.
Albums
- God Save the Three (glaive and kurtains)
- BELOVED: ACT II (GIVEON)
- everyone for ten minutes (Bleachers)
- Florescence (Maisie Peters)
- Philadelphia’s been good to me (Kurt Vile)
- The Boys of Dungeon Lane (Paul McCartney)
Songs
- “the cure” (Olivia Rodrigo)
- “Parachute” (Maren Morris)
- “Hit the Wall” (Gracie Abrams)
- “We Should Talk” (Bleachers)
- “HOES” (Lizzo, ft. Sexyy Red)
- “From Down Here” (Lola Young)
Reading
I didn’t have much time for reading in the lead-up to my trip, and much of my reading on my vacation was taking up by a long piece of non-fiction, so it’s a little slim pickings here:
- The Persian Boy (Mary Renault, 1972)
- Epic Earth (Lindsay Nikole, 2025) – nonfiction
- Oye (Melissa Mogollon, 2024)
- We Have Always Been Here (Samra Habib, 2019) – nonfiction
- Two Rogues Make a Right (Cat Sebastian, 2020)
- The Dunwich Horror (H.P. Lovecraft, 1929)
- Yoga (Emmanuel Carrère, 2020)
- Hearts on Fire (Michael Barclay, 2022) – nonfiction
- Blood on the Snow (Jo Nesbø, 2014)
- Babycakes (Armistead Maupin, 1984)
Focus on: Revisiting Very Old Stories
One of the major trends in publishing over the past fifteen years has been the rise and reign of the myth retelling. I’ve also recently been reading through two series set among prominent figures in the ancient world, Mary Renault’s classic Alexander the Great trilogy and Annabel Lyons’ duology featuring Aristotle and his family (soon to be adapted for Netflix by Jacob Tierney). Moreover, this Summer’s biggest expected blockbuster film is Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. With all this in mind, we might rightly wonder why we keep returning to these very old stories.
The most obvious reason is that, especially when we’re talking about Greco-Roman stories, for us in the West, these are our foundational stories. They are important for us because they were important to those who built our society, and to those who built theirs. But in these postmodern times, it’s become common to re-read these stories through the lens of those the stories themselves marginalize. And so we’ve had a spate of (wonderful) books exploring the Trojan War cycle through the eyes of the female characters. Or one of my favourites of the genre is Phoenicia Rogerson’s Herc, which looks at Hercules’s life through the eyes of the many men and women who were the victims of his love (thanks to Hera’s curse). A recent publication, Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody, explores the Trojan War through class politics. These stories exploit the holes in the stories and fill them in looking for a broader perspective.
Another reason why we come back to these stories and characters is that they are psychologically compelling. Last summer I read Medea, a roughly 2500 year-old play, and was blown away by the psychological depth and complexity of the characters. Similarly, Odysseus is famously introduced as polytropos, ‘a man of many turns’. Does this mean he is wily? resourceful? a trickster figure? a manipulative liar? Depending on what we bring to the text, it’s really any of the above. And that’s fascinating.
Matthew Root 