We devoted Episode 45 of One Bright Book to Alive Munro’s Open Secrets. I wrote these remarks to introduce our conversation.
Andrew Wyeth, Day Dream, 1980
Hello and welcome to One Bright Book, the podcast where three friends real ALL the books, taking it one book at a time. My name is Dorian Stuber and I’m here as always with Rebecca Hussey and Frances Evangelista, this time to discuss Alice Munro’s short story collection Open Secrets, first published in 1994.
Before we go any further, I want to give an important content warning. Today’s episode will contain discussions of sexual violence, abuse, and rape, specially the sexual abuse of children.
Our podcast has always been focused closely on whatever book we’ve chosen to talk about. We bring biography and critical reception and historical context into the conversation, but usually only as secondary approaches to our encounter with the text.
Today, I suspect, will be different.
The outlines of Munro’s career are well-known. Born in 1931 in southwestern Ontario, near Lake Huron, the setting of so many of her stories, Munro went to university on a scholarship but left after two years to move to British Columbia with her husband, James Munro. The couple started a bookstore which is still in business. The couple had three children, but the marriage was difficult and they divorced in 1972. Four years later, Munro married a man named Gerald Fremlin, a retired geographer who had served in the Air Force in WWII and with whom she lived on a farm in rural Ontario. Munro had started writing already in university; as a young mother on the west coast she focused on short stories, claiming it was the only form she had time for. That may be true, but it’s also the case that from the start she was preoccupied by the possibilities of the form. How much time can be contained in something “short”? How many points of view can it offer? How many different ways can it be constructed? Beginning with Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, Munro published 14 short story collections. As the years passed and the books accumulated, so too did her literary fame. The stories were published in places like The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, but above all in The New Yorker, where more than 60 first appeared.
She won many prizes, both in Canada and internationally, capped off by the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2013. In her last years, she suffered from dementia, a fate prefigured by her mother’s experience with Parkinson’s and the subject of one of her most famous stories, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” At her death in 2024 she had settled into a position as a writer both lauded and loved: a grandmotherly figure whose stories were psychologically sharp and brilliantly structured.
That status was shattered a few months after her death when Munro’s youngest daughter, Andrea Skinner, revealed that Gerald Fremlin, her stepfather, had sexually abused her starting in 1976, the year he married Munro: Skinner was 9 years old at the time. The abuse continued for several years. Skinner told Munro about it in 1992: after briefly separating from Fremlin, Munro returned to him, effectively choosing her husband over her child. In 2005, Fremlin pleaded guilty to sexual assault and received a suspended sentence. The rest of the family, as well as others in Munro’s close personal and professional circle, including her Canadian publisher, knew what had happened to Skinner but kept quiet. Nobody knew, but a lot of people knew. It was an open secret.
I wanted to discuss Munro on the podcast because, as a Canadian and a reader, she has been in my life for a long time. The revelations of her failure as a parent adds so much complexity to what was, for me, already a complicated relationship. I first encountered her in junior high when we read her famous story “Boys and Girls,” from her debut collection. It’s about a girl whose father raises foxes for their pelts and whose ability to help with that work is curtailed by expectations of what a girl should be or do once she reaches puberty. I remember a note in our textbook, something about how the girl is like the foxes, how their pens symbolize the narrator’s own imprisonment. That interpretation, though in retrospect pretty obvious, made a big impression on me. It was one of the first times I thought of a story as something made, the first inkling I had of the truth that each text teaches its readers how to read it.
Later I would veer away from Munro. The more famous she got, the more she became a Canadian writer loved around the world, the more I looked at her askance. That’s just my own pigheaded personality, but I did find her, on the occasions when I read one of her stories, such a chilly writer, a bit heartless really. She seemed to me to epitomize the emotional detachment, even stuntedness of the white Anglo Protestant settler Canadian class. (Even though, in stories like “The Wilderness Station” in the collection we’ll be talking about, she is also a critic of that mindset, the more powerful for being of that world.) In her Nobel address she talks about growing up among Scots-Irish immigrants and their descendants, a world in which it was considered poor form to have an emotional life and even worse to admit to any accomplishments. The title of her collection Who Do You Think You Are summarized that world.
In more recent years I would often teach some of Munro’s stories and came increasingly to admire their richness and strangeness. They are made to be re-read, in my opinion. Then Andrea Skinner told her story. For me, there is no way to separate this part of Munro’s life from her work. After all, the stories are so often about bad things—moral wrong, pain, hurt, betrayal—lurking in plain sight. I chose Open Secrets as the collection for us to talk about because that phrase seems to be the motto of her whole work. And I was genuinely shocked when I read the last story in the book. It’s called “Vandals,” and it’s about a man who abuses two young children and his partner, the woman who failed to care for them. It’s probably useless to speculate on a writer’s motivations, but I really wonder what Munro was thinking when she wrote it. Was she processing? Gloating? Apologizing? Was she not thinking at all? It’s past time for me to finish this introduction, so I’ll only say that despite what we know now and without excusing her in any way, I find myself captivated by the stories. I don’t know what that says about me or how I feel about that. I do think it’s important that we talk about them and about her, even at the risk of causing further hurt to Andrea Skinner and the legions of other child victims. For if we don’t—if we stop reading Alice Munro or if we separate art from artist—then we are back in the world of half-told truths. We are back in that dangerous world of open secrets.
In May I puttered along, running my runs, doing my little jobs, seeing a movie or two. And drinking my coffees. I haven’t said this yet, it’s so hopelessly dad-coded, but in January I bought a Mokka pot and I’m not sure any object has ever given me such joy. Once I’ve fussily brewed my very small, very strong coffee I make it a rule to sit somewhere without music or phone or book and drink it mindfully. Ridiculous, right??? Anyway, I also read these books.
Edward Hopper, Le Bistro aka The Wine Shop, 1909
Artem Chapeye, The Weathering (2021) Trans. Daisy Gibbons (2026)
Written the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion, The Weathering references the occupation of the Donetsk, the gangsterism of the 1990s, and other events in recent Ukrainian history. But Chapeye’s engrossing novel mostly concerns an imagined future. A young couple escape their jobs in Kyiv for a well-earned holiday off-grid in the Carpathians. Weeks pass: first blissful, then ominous. Why haven’t they seen any locals? Why can’t they bring themselves to come off the mountain? And once they do, where the hell is everyone? In the seemingly abandoned capital, they are met by men with guns, guys from the neighborhood whose militia cosplaying soon turns deadly. As philosophical as it is action-packed, The Weathering asks what it means to live with violence: “How should you act when facing an armed man and still preserve your dignity? And the dignity of others? How?” Many of the novel’s pleasures stem from its being so Ukrainian, but those anguished questions pertain to us all.
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)
I read this with an eye to assigning it to my future 11th graders. Well, I abandoned that idea quickly. Its sentences—so gorgeous, so thorny—too hard. Its sexual politics too complex. Now that I’m almost finished Another Country (more on that in next month’s installment) and planning to get through as much of his work as I can this summer, I see that widespread self-loathing is a part of Baldwin’s work more generally. I don’t mean his own self-loathing; I don’t know enough to diagnose him that way. I mean something like cultural self-loathing, the ways minorities are hated such that they internalize that hatred.
Once I gave up hoping it would be suitable for my classroom, I sunk into the novel, amazed at how it could be so lovely and so ugly. (It’s about David, an American in 1950s Paris, who falls into a passionate affair with Giovanni, an Italian immigrant. Neither man is willing to admit he is gay in the way present day readers might demand. David and Giovanni are able to be together only in the confines of Giovanni’s shabby rented room, less bower than foxhole. There’s one glorious scene in which the pair, going home together for the first time, walk along the Seine through early-morning Paris. (Giovanni works nights at a bar owned by a miserable queen.) Otherwise, though, the book is a litany of hatred, shame, and disgust. Its depictions of homosexuality are so regressive. And yet the book is so good. What gives? Thank god Garth Greenwell pointed me to his essay about just this problem. As you would expect from Greenwell, it’s as gorgeously written as Baldwin’s novel. And smart and helpful about what one can take from works of art that don’t align with our sensibilities the way we might want them to.
Sally Carson, The Prisoner (1936)
Sequel to Crooked Cross, which Persephone has reissued in the UK to general acclaim, and which Vintage will publish in the US this fall. Carson spent some time in Bavaria in the early 30s—exactly how much and whether it was more than a holiday I don’t know for sure—and used that experience to write a trilogy about an ordinary German family in the first months of Nazi rule. The Prisoner is the second book in the series; I went into it with excitement and trepidation, the latter after Rohan’s post got me wondering if whether I liked Crooked Cross as something more than a historical document. You can read my comment if you’re so inclined.
In comparison to Crooked Cross, The Prisoner is heavy weather. The first book ended dramatically; the second picks up just weeks after those events. It would be wrong to say nothing happens: the family moves to Munich, for example, to literally distance itself from the tragedy of the first book, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the strategy doesn’t work. But The Prisoner is more about emotional fallout than anything else. It’s an interior book, and Carson, not always the nimblest writer, relentlessly keeps her characters turning over their emotions. Sometimes I felt the influence of Lawrence, but without the latter’s regular ability to astonish and make language strange.
The best part of the book comes near the end when a subplot from the previous novel returns in surprising, eventful, and heartbreaking form. Here Carson dramatizes both the appeal and the horror of Nazism in a manner that feels fresh because it’s written from the moment, without hindsight to govern the presentation of events. There’s no ominous foreshadowing—Dachau exists, but Sobibor is as yet unimagined—and few of the clichés that structure our depictions of Nazi rule. I won’t say Carson is more accurate historically than a writer today would be. In some ways, she is more blinded, less aware of the scope of things. She has the freedom and helplessness of anyone writing about their own moment.
It would be wrong to say that I loved this book. And yet I powered through it in a long weekend, and I’ll be first in line when the third volume is reissued. I suspect that one will be more like the first.
Mahmud El Sayed, The Republic of Memory (2026)
Engrossing multigenerational starship novel from British Egyptian writer El Sayed, clearly a talent to watch. Halfway through its 400-year-long journey to a new world, the city-ship Safina sails on amid rising discontent from its citizens, even as the ship’s “ancestors”—scientists and military leaders from Earth frozen until they can guide the settlement of the new world—slumber on in one of the lower decks. A revolt thirty years into the voyage disabled the ship’s AI and replaced its autocratic government with a republic. Generations later, the promise of that revolution has stalled. Upward mobility is a thing of the past, the ship’s resources can barely satisfy the increased population, and the attempt to replace ethnic and religious differences with language has been foiled by a self-interested translator caste.
After a dangerous power outage, a long-awaited revolution (modelled in part on the Arab Spring) promises to change everything. But while the ship limped along on minimal power, the decision was made to awaken the ancestors. And they want to quell the uprising. This book has it all: terrific world-building, well-developed ensemble cast, and even an invented language. The only problem is that we’ll have to wait a year to find out what happens in the last part of this promised duology.
Tim Sullivan, The Dentist (2020)
A bad book I couldn’t stop reading.
The protagonist, DS Cross, is autistic: his neuroatypicality makes him both an excellent detective and a trying colleague. He spends a lot of time deciphering the equivocations, half-lies, and body language that comprise so much of daily life for neurotypical folks. The book doesn’t make fun of or fetishize Cross, but it also acknowledges that his condition can exasperate those who know him and bewilder those who don’t. It seems, in other words, even handed. I had assumed that Sullivan must be autistic himself, but turns out he’s not. And that changed my feelings about the book. I wouldn’t call it exploitative, but I also don’t understand why Sullivan felt emboldened to write from this perspective. Surely there are autistic writers who could tell a story like this themselves.
Before writing the Cross novels—apparently a big hit in the UK—Sullivan wrote and directed films and television. (Surely a series is in development.) The prose is accordingly serviceable and pacey. At least it’s not overwritten. The mystery was solid enough, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the plots get better further into the series. (Each installment is named after the profession of the victim.) The supporting characters are good, especially Cross’s father, a retired engineer who helped build the Concord. His willingness to take his son in stride is heartwarming, and I imagine Sullivan might do a lot with the character.
I dunno, I got the second book from the library. We’ll see if I read it.
Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (1927)
Read this with the group organized by Sean Breathes Books. (Six books into what has turned into a project to discuss all of her books, we now have a name, The Edith Wharthogs, and a spiffy logo, designed by James.) Regular readers will recall that I was underwhelmed by her memoir, A Backward Glance, our previous text, but our latest was a tremendous surprise. I hadn’t heard of it until Smith & Taylor included it in their first batch of reissues. In the afterword, Brendon Taylor rightly calls this a more compelling Gatsby. (I’m talking through my hat a bit, not having read Fitzgerald in over 30 years, but boy I sure will be familiar with his most famous novel soon: it’s a set text at my new job.) Wharton’s novel is uncannily attuned to our present moment: it features addiction, self-actualization, influencer culture, and the joyless pursuit of rest.
Pauline Manford, the character at the heart of this investigation of life in the previous century’s Twenties, has a lot on her plate, so much that her day is scheduled in fifteen-minute increments. There’s her philanthropic and charitable work. (No matter if the causes are at odds: she chairs both a league in support of birth control and a society for the furtherance of motherhood.) There’s her support of—some would say victimization at the hands of—a rotating series of gurus, healers, and self-proclaimed wise men who help her lose weight, worry less, and find inner fulfillment. And there’s her family: two husbands (current: accomplished lawyer; former: neurasthenic invalid) and two children (Jim, son by first marriage, doggedly pursuing a career in the law that he doesn’t much care for; Nona, daughter by the second, something of a younger, female Newland Archer, amused at the society in which she has been raised but more dedicated to its mores than she might like, having renounced her chance at happiness in allegiance to ideals she doesn’t believe in). The husbands and siblings all get along, especially now that their collective concern is focused on Jim’s wife, Lita, as ruthlessly devoted to pleasure and rejecting societal expectations as she is beautiful. Lita matter-of-factly wants to leave Jim (and poor Baby, never named and largely ignored) to be in the movies. And the movies want her. A producer (Jewish, grasping, natch), terrifically named Klawhammer, has his eye on her. How could Pauline and the family ever survive such shame? Can they keep Lita and Jim together? More troublingly, what designs does Arthur Manford have on his step-daughter-in-law? How many nervous breakdowns will feature before the end of the book?
A busy novel, as you can see. (A mere 230 pages in the Smith & Taylor edition.) And a tremendously entertaining and thoughtful one. The title comes from a much-touted new anesthetic given to mothers in the delivery room. But it refers more generally to the fugue state of modern life: those regular hits of excitement that are as necessary to our ability to make it through the day as they are enervating. For me, it’s as though Wharton had described, already a century ago, that helpless fugue state I fall into when I just can’t stop scrolling.
In case you can’t tell, I loved this book. It’s filled with Wharton’s terrific prose too. Let me end by sharing the opening:
Miss Bruss, the perfect secretary, received Nona Manford at the door of her mother’s boudoir (“the office,” Mrs. Manford’s children called it) with a gesture of the kindliest denial.
There’s a sentence doing some work! So much information yet so little action. Three characters are introduced (four, really, though we don’t yet know how many children Mrs. Manford has). Two qualifying clauses impede our syntactical progress even as they grant us a lot of information. Will Miss Bruss’s (the brusqueness hinted at in her name is forced on her by her employer) epithet prove to be accurate or ironic? Where does the description of the qualifying phrase come from? Is “the perfect secretary” an instance of omniscience or of free indirect discourse? Speaking of irony, do we hear grudging admiration along with the gentle dismissal of their mother’s work in that description of boudoir as office? What would “a gesture of kindliest denial” look like? However we picture it, we’ll encounter it a lot in the novel: resolve softened by good manners, but no less steely for that.
This is a beginning that has me raring to keep reading. Hope it entices you as well.
Garry Disher, Mischance Creek (2025)
I’ve written before about how much I enjoy Disher’sHirsch books, about a cop in rural far western Australia. By his own admission, Hirsch is as much social worker as policeman, and most of the time he’s checking in on people, some of whom go days, even weeks without seeing anyone outside their household.
This installment begins with him doing the rounds of his annual firearms audit. Everyone in this district has a gun or two. Are they locked up? Are the bullets stored separately? These questions are important, but they’re also a pretext for a more pressing one: How are you doing? (Are you going to use that gun on someone else or yourself?) The answers are mostly a resounding no. A brutal drought has pushed farmers and ranchers to the brink. Starving sheep are being shot en masse. Banks are repossessing farms. People are angrier with each other than ever, eager to vent grievances. These bad feelings are the kind of thing that led to the resounding failure of the Australian Indigenous Voices referendum, referenced more than once. Nominally, Mischance Creek centers on a cold case (the deaths of a husband and wife, found separately in the bush, where they liked to go rockhounding; seven years later their adult daughter thinks she has found new evidence.) But that’s not especially important. Disher succeeds, as usual, in keeping many balls in the air: some of these plot elements are satisfyingly minor. I appreciate his refusal to tie everything to the main case the way most crime writers do.
But really the book is about the question of how good liberals can respond to contemporary authoritarianism. The previous book in the series, concerning the aftermath of Covid restrictions, was the weakest so far because it seemed completely at a loss in this regard. Mischance Creek does better, not because it has a solution, but because it’s at least aware of the cluelessness of the institutions it’s centered on (not least the institution of the procedural). In the past, Disher skated past the chasm between cops and social workers (sometimes their roles overlap, but fundamentally their philosophies are totally different). Now he’s got a larger problem: a lot of characters—and people in the world this book represents—don’t believe in either of the roles, or the philosophies for that matter.
Mischance Creek taught me about the sovereign citizen movement, which I didn’t realize was a thing. (We’d have a lot more of that kind of thing in the US if “sovereign citizens” hadn’t coopted the government and other institutions of the state.) “Sovereign citizens” blithely deny that they are members of a larger politic (they aren’t Australians, say); they answer to no one but themselves. Hard to see how this doesn’t eventually lead to fascism. Hirsch and his colleagues in the district, along with the teachers and doctors who make up the social system of this vast, remote area, are, in Disher’s view, tragic figures, emblematic of a lost world—but, and this is what Disher doesn’t seem to get, that very world did nothing to stop its loss.
Philip Clarkson Elliott, Shelocta, PA, 1943
Good month! Aside from the Sullivan, I have no regrets. What about you? How was your reading month?
I really buried the lede in my description of March. Forgot to mention the most important thing. I got a job! I’ll be teaching 8th and 11th grade English at an independent school just ten minutes from home. (This seems to be St Louis-speak for what I always knew as “a private school.”) I’m excited for the opportunity—though also quite anxious, never having taught anyone younger than a college freshman.
I spent April beavering away at various jobs: consulting, editing, working my shifts at the bookstore, and, this month, working with two theater productions. I served as the dramaturgue for the New Jewish Theater’s excellent production of Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic and participated in a panel on Upstream Theater’s delightful production, in Phillip Boehm’s translation and adaption, of Jura Soyfer’sEnd of the World Cabaret. Maybe you know as little about Soyfer as I did. Check out the link to his Wikipedia entry. A fascinating but all-too-short life. It was genuinely thrilling to watch a production from its very first table reading to final performance. Theater people are truly amazing! And St Louis seems to be a great theater town.
I was busy and didn’t read as much as usual, but here’s what I did make time for.
Rebecca chose this novel-in-linked-stories about seven women living in a tenement building in an unnamed American city, and I’m glad she did. It has all the things. Struggle, resilience, community as sustenance and as suffocation. Joy, despair, sex, death. The use of real estate and domestic spaces to tell the story of 20th Century American racial uplift. Tellingly, doesn’t feel dated. Would pair well with Ann Petry’s The Street, though Brewster is slightly less committed to realism. Reminded me too of Bryan Washington’s story “Alif,” which is also about a neighbourhood where everyone is all up in each other’s business. This book was around a fair bit in my 1990s bookselling days, but I’d never read it or indeed anything by Naylor. I’m glad I did, and I plan to read more.
Francis Spufford, Nonesuch (2026)
Iris Hawkins wants to be rich. Not for the comfort that money can buy, though that’s nice too. But because she wants “to be part of the way the world works… to be in the room where decisions are taken… to make things happen… to see the angles.” She wants men to have to see her and not be able to ignore her.
At first this is difficult because she’s a secretary at a financial firm in the City in 1939. But with the advent of the war she’s able to take on more responsibility. Men are deployed. Her boss has checked out from worry about his son, a POW of the Germans. He distractedly acquiesces to her plan to short the market, a plan that pays dividends. She even impresses John Maynard Keynes when she unknowingly meets him at a country house party.
It’s impressive that Iris can do all this, because the rest of her life is more than a little busy. A one-night stand with an engineer in the still-fledgling industry of television turns serious, not least when the man’s father, a charming, helpless old coot in thrall to the study of the occult, turns out to know what he’s talking about. Iris is soon being pursued by magical creatures and in a race with another young woman, the aristocratic golden child of the British fascist movement, to unlock angels that have been entombed in London sculptures. Oh yeah, she also needs to foil a plot to assassinate Churchill and replace him the pro-German Lord Halifax.
This is all as busy as it sounds, and frankly I can’t work out how Spufford wants to connect the secret systems of finance and the occult. Maybe this will become clearer before long. Turns out that Nonesuch is the first of the duology. On Bluesky, Spufford said the second book is due next summer. Better be because Nonesuch ends on a real cliffhanger!
Christoffer Carlsson, The Living and the Dead (2023) Trans. Rachel Wilson-Broyles (2025)
Crime novel set in the same region of western Sweden and featuring some of the same characters as Blaze Me a Sun, which I enjoyed a couple of years ago. Less interesting than its predecessor, unfortunately. Similar structure (a crime in the past, hitherto unsolved, leads to a new crime in the present), similar themes (young people become middle-aged people who find their lives haven’t had as much in store for them as they expected). All done just a little less compellingly. Diverting enough—the audio got me through a long drive—but nothing special.
Tana French, The Keeper (2026)
Wrote about this here. An ongoing conversation with Elle has me wondering if it’s more pro-vigilante than I had credited. I loved the book, though: what does this say about me?
Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices (1980)
The second selection for Leviathan’s Women of a Certain Age book club. Another rousing discussion of another terrific book. Hadn’t read it in more than ten years: happily, a joy to revisit. We considered the novel’s structure, its cast of characters, the difficulty of discerning a protagonist, the relation of these obliquities to the historical period in which it is set, namely, the period in 1940 from Dunkirk to the beginnings of the Blitz when the war, as far as Britain was concerned, was both all-consuming and distant. We thought about the novel as a portrait of an institution—someone mentioned Shirley Hazzard’s book about the UN as a comparison—in this case, the BBC, and the flattening of any distinction between the employees’ personal and professional lives. The higher-ups, in particular, basically live in Broadcast House, but eventually the building’s theater, previously used for orchestral recordings, is turned into a dormitory for all employees. Convenient and safe, but also frustrating in that the room’s excellent acoustics make every snore, sigh, or groan crisply audible. This is an example of Fitzgerald’s inimical tone, which veers suddenly from humor to heartbreak. The ever-present possibility of death turns monomania from a joke to a noble enterprise: I’m thinking of the example Dr. Vogel, a German émigré and expert in recorded sound, whose perfectionist tendencies see him record several hours’ worth of church doors squeaking, only a few seconds of which will feature in a planned “Sounds of Britain” program. We might find Vogel’s obsession annoying or even irresponsible in the face of larger dangers. But we are bound to feel differently when he is killed by a piece of flying drainpipe in the aftermath of a raid, as he is patiently explaining to an air raid warden on behalf of a stranger that English law allowed the man to enter his bombed-out building twice, once to get his mattress and once to take any other personal effects. Suddenly pedantry seems less persnickety and more the foundation of the rule of law.
Dozens of moments like this fill the pages of this terrific short book.
I didn’t plan to read two Blitz novels in such short order, and I don’t have anything smart to say about the differences. I can only note that when memory becomes history—as it has in the 45 years between the publication of these two novels—then literary modes other than realism seem reasonable in a way they might not have before.
Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs (2014)
First novel in Bennett’s first fantasy trilogy, which I bought because it’s been reissued in a spiffy new edition. I’d have never looked twice at the old one. I’m shallow that way. Which would have been bad, since the premise is good. Bulikov (vaguely Russian or Eastern European) was once the continent of gods. Magic ruled the day. The place was wealthy and powerful. It colonized the rest of the world, all the places the gods did not favour. That was especially true of the island of Saypur, whose people suffered greatly at Bulikov’s hands. But then everything changed. New technology allowed little Saypur (vaguely Islamic or Mughal Indian) to kill and/or sequester the gods and now once-mighty Bulikov is an impoverished vassal state of the highly militarized Saypur. When a famous Saypuri academic, a specialist in the old gods, is found murdered in Bulikov’s former capital, a city whose geography has been rearranged by the technology that killed the gods (an event known as The Blink), a Saypuri diplomat is sent to investigate. It’s not long before she, along with her very cool sidekick, finds that those murdered gods might not be so dead.
City of Stairs is often great (premise, world-building, characterization) and sometimes not great (too long, slow start). But I got so into it that even before I finished I’d bought the other two. I moved on to the second book right away, but before long I got stuck. It has a bad case of “middle novel” syndrome. I’ll get back to it, though.
There is a thing about Bennett, whose Ana and Din books I so much enjoyed earlier this year, that I should mention because some of you might find it disqualifying. The guy has a mania for the solecism “hence why”: it’s appeared at least once in each of the three books I’ve read, and it’s like fingernails of the chalkboard. What are the editors even doing???
Daniel Greene, Naked Maja, 2009
Not much of a reading month, really. All that theater stuff kept me pretty busy. Fear not, May brought a better assortment.
Springtime all right. Sometimes too hot, but then suddenly too cold. The fruit trees did their best, but the New Climate was too much for them, and they weren’t as glorious as they might have been. A friend visited from Germany and we drank many cappuccinos. I experienced the St Louis church hall Lenten fish fry: a beautiful thing. I read these books.
I hadn’t read this since graduate school; I guess I’d say it’s my least favourite Woolf. (Keeping in mind I’ve yet to read The Years or Night and Day.) She clearly had a lot of fun with it, and good on her. Her idea of fun is not mine, is all. The jokes about how writers have been a pain across the centuries are well and good, and the pastiches of former literary styles impressive, but I just don’t care much for writing about writing. Still, as I said in our conversation, I was glad to have read it again. There are some marvelous moments—I especially loved the opening Elizabethan sequence: the impromptu fair on the frozen Thames is unforgettable—and it’s interesting to see Woolf’s fascination with the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity play out in another register from her most famous works.
Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Quest (1997)
Final book in a fantasy trilogy that probably felt more innovative at the time than now, but which absolutely holds up. (I read volumes 1 and 2 last fall, when I couldn’t be bothered to blog.) The books get progressively longer, especially this one, which is almost 900 pages of pretty small print. I gather their length has been held against them, and I guess this last book, especially, could have been shortened, but I was absorbed, especially because female characters become much more important in this last volume. I recommend these highly, especially to readers like me, who used to read a lot in the genre but moved away for a while, or to those curious to give the genre a try—the first book is only about 300 pages, so you aren’t making a huge initial commitment; plus the covers of the reissues won’t scare or embarrass the fantasy-averse.
As to what they’re about, I direct you to Elle’s unimprovable post. Her points about Hobb’s representation of disability and the long-term effects of physical and psychological abuse are especially good.
A couple of final thought for those who have already read these: Nighteyes is the best—imagine a whole novel centered on him! The idea of Old Blood is one I would have liked to see further developed. Maybe that happens in one of her other trilogies? And, finally, Molly and Burrich: I approve!
Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (2017)
Bui trained herself to draw comics in order to create this graphic memoir, which took her twelve years to finish—and that’s not including the time it took her to compile the oral histories on which it’s based. The book traces her parents’ lives in Vietnam under French colonization, during the Vietnam War, and their departure, with their children, including Bui herself, who was three years old at the time, as “Boat People” on the way to an eventual new life in the US. The back-and-forth structure—Bui toggles between interviewing her parents in the present (a project given further poignancy by the birth of her own child) and depicting their past experiences—is taken from Maus, as she freely admits. The similarities between the books are uncanny, especially in their shared depiction of cross-generational trauma. Yet for whatever reason, The Best We Could Do has left little mark in my memory. I don’t regret reading it, but I thought Thien Pham’s Family Style, which covers similar territory, has a more powerful visual style.
Yosha Gunasekera, The Midnight Taxi (2026)
Novel about two South Asian women in NYC, one a taxi driver and the other a public defender, who band together when a fare turns up dead in the first woman’s cab. Fine premise, but weak writing and poor plotting make this thin gruel.
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
I’m the last person to read this, which means you already know it’s great. And you’ve heard what others have rightly said about it: Butler predicted our present all too well. (The book is set mostly in 2027.) The collapse of public services, the shrinking of the United States into a set of semi-autonomous armed conclaves, the violence and despair that comes from extreme income inequality, the terrible release of powerful opiates, the climate change: it all hits. President Donner and his oligarchic-fascism is uncannily reminiscent of Trump and his coterie.
N. K. Jemisin must have been inspired when writing her Broken Earth trilogy by Butler’s creation of a condition she calls “hyper-empathy” or “sharing,” a double-edged experience that shapes the lives of some of the characters, including the protagonist. Parable of the Sower is a violent, desperate book, but not despairing. It ends with another quintessentially American phenomenon: the founding of a utopian community.
As soon as I finished, I started on Parable of the Talents, which I was also enjoying, but then I unaccountably stopped, because I’m like that.
Vivek Shanbhag, Sakina’s Kiss (2021) Trans. Srinath Perur (2023)
You know how every family has its catchphrases? Things like nonsense words (your kid’s adorable mispronunciations.) Or lines from a tv show (ours is “Bags must be properly folded!”—real ones know.) As he did in his brilliant debut, Ghachar Ghochar, Vivek Shanbhag puts this kind of language at the heart of his new book. The two examples in Sakina’s Kiss couldn’t be more different. One is cute: a father’s magical incantation to his child. The other is tragic: a misunderstood phrase with terrible consequences. But gradually they reveal themselves to be versions of the same thing. After all, they come from the mouth of the same character, the novel’s narrator, a middlingly successful professional in the tech hub of Bengaluru. This man, we learn, is a master at using language to conceal truth. And Shanbhag is even more adept at helping us to see things his narrator cannot. He crams as much incident—violence, rebellion, stolen inheritances—into his two hundred pages as a 19th century doorstopper. Don’t miss this one.
Kim Fay, Kate and Frida (2025)
Another from the “James recommends books to me” file. In the 1990s, two women become best friends when one, living the American in Paris gap year dream, writes to a bookstore back home requesting a copy of Martha Gelhorn’s The Face of War. The other suggests she might also like Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, and so begins an epistolary relationship filled with recommendations of books, music, and food. The pair form a mutual hype club, encouraging each other re: work and love lives. At first I found Fay’s writing too earnest and twee, even for me, and almost stopped reading. But I kept on because I remember those days fondly, and next thing you know I was up after midnight finishing the thing. Every time the book threatens to go wrong—one character finagles her way to Sarajevo during the siege with a woefully underprepared idea of becoming a stringer—it surprises by handling the moment more interestingly than you’d expect. Not an all-timer, but a charmer, especially for my fellow Gen Xers.
Gwendoline Riley, The Palm House (2026)
When I paged through the opening of the copy that NYRB kindly sent me, as I like to do, I soon found myself engrossed and before you know it I’d read pretty much the whole thing. (It’s a quick read.) I wouldn’t mind reading it again; I’ve a hunch it would repay that attention. I loved that this is an oblique, slightly peculiar novel that, happily, is about stuff, not least the London housing market, without ever aiming to report on “the state of the nation.”
It’s mostly about the narrator’s friendship with the editor of a highbrow publication for which she has freelanced in the past. The editor has been pushed out, replaced by a bro who talks big but knows nothing (his “philosophy” is to move fast and break things) and indeed does not last long in this new job. The former editor claims to be taking it in stride, but really he’s not. He and the narrator have drinks and meals and walk along the river. They never sleep with each other or fall in love or anything. It’s a real friendship. They are careful with each other. Close but not too close. Riley does this thing where she presents successive pieces of dialogue as separate when they are actually from the same character, and it has a pleasingly slippery effect. I dunno, it’s good.
Miklós Bánffy, They Were Divided [The Transylvanian Trilogy: Volume III] (1940) Trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (2000)
Most of the time I’m so haunted by the enormity of everything I want to read that I race through books, often starting another one the minute I’ve finished. (I’m aware this is no way to live, thank you very much.) But once in a while I get so immersed in the world of a book that I’m sad rather than glad about the shrinking number of pages. Such was the case with the third volume of Bánffy’s trilogy.
Things become even more sour and unhappy in this final volume—and why not: the reader has known from the beginning that WWI is coming to destroy the marvelous, terrible Hapsburg Empire. But by the end of They Were Divided, even the characters know it, though of course they do not yet know what that will mean. (It ends as our hero, the would-be progressive landowner Bálint Abády, drives to the mustering point for his regiment.) The sadness within the book became tangled with my own feelings as a reader. I started most mornings over the past months reading my daily pages of Bánffy, and that will be a reading memory I cherish for years.
One last thought, neither here nor there: I don’t think I’ve read a novel from this time and place in which Jews feature so infrequently. Striking!
Irene N Watts and Kathryn E. Shoemaker, Good-bye Marianne (2008)
Illustrated adaptation of Watts’s middle grade novel of the same name. The latter is the first in a trilogy modeled on the author’s own experiences: loving childhood in Berlin in a middle-class German Jewish home; increasing persecution, most painfully being expelled from school in the days after Kristallnacht; a fortunate but difficult escape on a Kindertransport, leading to a new life in England and, later, Canada. I plan to track the novels down at some point, not least because I’m curious how they compare to Judith Kerr’s similar novels.
At the heart of the book is Marianne’s friendship, in the weeks between being forced out of school and leaving the country, with a non-Jewish boy who is visiting his aunt, the landlady of the building in which Marianne lives with her mother. (Her father has had to go into hiding.) Ernest is good fun. Like Marianne, he loves Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, and inventing games inspired by its scenarios. He’s always up for exploring the city. But he belongs to the Hitler Youth and is matter of fact about Jewish inferiority. He says something hateful—but also has the wherewithal to consider what that means. Shoemaker’s lovely pencil drawings soften the harshness of the story, without every downplaying anything, making this book suitable for readers from 5th grade on up.
Funny story: my wife spells her name the same way as the character, and when she saw this on the dining table she said, “Anything you want to tell me???”
February in St Louis was warmish but not dismayingly so. We could still pretend winter is a thing. Lots of good running weather. I beavered away at my various gigs. I probably saw some movies but now I can’t remember. I should start writing those down. My review of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers was published in The Wall Street Journal. Canada lost both gold medal Olympic hockey games, and that really hurt. I also read some books.
Leo Lesser Ury, Cafe König at Night, 1925
Qntm, There is no Antimemetics Division (2025)
We live in a world of memes. Internet jokes, catch phrases, bits of culture that spread with the persistence of an earworm. But what if there were such things as antimemes? Ideas, cultish beliefs, even malevolent forces that circulate with similar force except that they have the power of being forgotten, such that we are unable to recall their effect on us. And what if a governmental organization had been set up to protect us from these antimemes, which seek to crush us with their own dark virality?
That’s the premise of this brilliant novel, which broke my brain in all the best ways. The scientists and operatives in the Antimemtic Division routinely forget everything they’ve done, requiring elaborate protocols and dangerous actions to make sure that the world is kept safe from REDACTED and REDACTED. Author qntm, pronounced “quantum,” the pen name of British writer Sam Hughes, concludes that the human ability to forget anything is both what keeps us going and our greatest vulnerability.
Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption (2024)
Ana and Din are back! This time they venture into the most forbidding and dangerous place in the Empire: the Shroud. In this floating station off the coast (part oil derrick, part Pequod), a handful of Alchemists process leviathan corpses, harvesting the raw material from which all-powerful bodily modifications stem. In addition to avoiding the dreaded “middle volume sag” and offering another satisfying tale of detection, A Drop of Corruption picks up the hints in the first volume about stakes larger than this one case, which will presumably be developed in the third book in the series, due later this year.
Lea Ypi, Indignity: A Life Reimagined (2025)
It starts with a photo.
A young couple enjoy the snow and sunshine of the Italian Dolomites. They look at the camera with quite different expressions. He seems wary: eyes narrowed, perhaps against the glare, two furrows etched on his forehead; she, nestled in a fur, smiles broadly. It’s early 1941. These newlyweds are on their honeymoon. How could they be enjoying themselves while the war rages and the Balkans, including Albania, where they have made their home, has been plunged into factionalism? And why hadn’t Yea Lpi, professor of philosophy and the subjects’ granddaughter, ever seen this picture before? As the photo circulates online, people make all sorts of claims. Her grandmother was a communist spy; she was a fascist collaborator. Is any of this true?
The photo turns out to be a red herring—Ypi doesn’t even reproduce it in the book, save in highly cropped form on the (beautiful) cover of the US edition. (It’s easy to find online, though.) Instead, her book reconstructs her grandmother Leman’s life, from her childhood in an Albanian family long devoted to the Ottoman Empire in Greek Salonica, through her decision, as a young woman of 18, to move to Tirana, where she found a career and, briefly, a husband, a man recently returned from studying law in Paris where he knew, though did not particularly like, another expatriate, a young striver named Enver Hoxha. Ypi’s grandfather’s decency and reformist leftist tendencies put him at odds with the postwar Communist government. He was branded an enemy of the state and imprisoned for 15 years, during which time Leman and their young son (Ypi’s father) were forced to work at manual labour far from their home in the capital
Central to the story are the documents in Leman’s secret service file at the formidably named Authority for Information Concerning Documentation of the Former State Security Service. As always, documents turn out to be fundamentally inconclusive, especially when a late revelation prompts Ypi to wonder if anything in them is at all trustworthy. It doesn’t help that Ypi is researching her grandmother (as opposed to her grandfather or any other male relative). As a fellow scholar puts it, women and archives don’t go together: when woman appear at all, it is almost always with their husband’s name. Better, the man tells Ypi, to write a novel.
Which Ypi has done, sort of. Her treatment of Leman’s life is novelistic: filled with thoughts and feelings she could have had no access to, even though Leman was a beloved figure in her upbringing in Communist Albania in the 1980s and 90s. Most impressive is her glorious evocation of the multicultural world of early 20th century Thrace, tragically destroyed by successive waves of ethnic cleansing, from forced population transfers between Greece and Turkey in the wake of WWI to the Nazi eradication of Jewish Salonica.
Beneath this personal and political history is a philosophical investigation. From its epigraphs, citing Kant and Schiller, to its closing pages, the book considers the idea of dignity and its titular opposite. Dignity is the drive to “rule over adversity with moral force,” a tendency that Ypi argues, following Schiller, is fundamentally human. Dignity is what allows a person to decide to suffer, rather than instinctively to seek to free themselves from pain. And people most suffer, Ypi concludes, when they want to acknowledge both that the meaning of their lives both incorporates and exceeds the larger identities of family and nation and gender and religion of which they are part. (Ypi is a modern day Kanitian.) In this way, Ypi has given us a way to think not just about her grandmother but all the ordinary people who live through history, as she puts it, the first time as tragedy and the second time as even greater tragedy.
Ray Nayler, Palaces of the Crows (2026)
After enjoying Where the Axe is Buriedlast month, I was excited to get my hands on an advanced copy of Nayler’s forthcoming novel. And when I learned it was set in the forests of Lithuania (or perhaps Belarus) in WWII I was even more intrigued. Why had the sff writer Nayler chosen to write historical fiction? The answer is that he has found another way to investigate the animating question of his fiction: what kinds of relationships can exist between human and non-human animal societies? His first book considered octopuses. His second, elephants and mastodons. Here it’s crows.
Four teenagers—one Jewish, one Roma, one a Pole who has enlisted in the Red Army to help his family survive their forced exile in Siberia, and one a mute boy whose origins are uncertain—find each other in the chaos of the German advance into the Soviet Union in summer 1941. The Jewish girl, Neriya, whose family has always, in the years before he war, left their home in Vilnius each summer to vacation in a country village, and whose doctor parents have encouraged her to read Darwin and von Uexhüll, has over the years befriended a crow she names Buster. Buster is smart, even for a crow. He remembers Neriya from year to year, and masters the various games and puzzles she sets for him. He introduces her to other crows, each of whom has their own personalities. When she hides from the Germans in the forest, the birds appear at times of trouble, helping her and the other teens survive. For although the forest is vast, it is peopled with all sorts of threats: partisans, Germans, Russians who have gone AWOL, and others who, like our protagonists, are simply trying to survive. These other people are dangerous—though not as much as the terrible winters. The teens need all the help they can get.
The crows have created an avian city in the heart of the forest—more than a city, a real society, in which they look out for the most vulnerable members, much more than humans do. Chapters set during the war are interspersed with others from the 1970s, when the teens, now adults, each of whom has navigated life in the USSR in a different way, return to the forest. How can they protect the descendants of the crows who once protected them? Palace of the Crows might wrongfoot or disappoint some of Nayler’s earlier readers, especially those expecting a book a set in the future, but those who persist will see that this book, too, is about how we tell the stories of who we are, both within and between species. I hope Nayler keeps up his current writing pace!
Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure (1989)
Stella Bradshaw is a working-class teenager in Liverpool in 1950. Her dream is to be in the theater, so she’s pleased in her closemouthed way when she is hired as an assistant stage manager in a regional playhouse. As the troupe prepares for a production of Peter Pan (the novel’s title comes from that play’s description of what death is sure to be), Stella becomes embroiled in its complicated relationships. She falls for the director, oblivious to what is obvious to readers: he’s gay. What at least this reader was oblivious to—surprising, because I’d seen the film, though admittedly not since it was in theaters in the late 90s—was the novel’s turn from comedy to tragedy. That ending! (And, yes, it’s all explained on the first page, Toni Morrison-style, but I’m slow.) Excellent stuff. Could have taken the Booker from A. S. Byatt if you ask me.
I’ll be reading this again soon: it’s the June title for the Leviathan book club. If you’re in St Louis, please join!
Miklós Bánffy, They Were Found Wanting [The Transylvanian Trilogy: Volume II] (1937) Trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (2000)
See my thoughts on volume I. This continued to be excellent. Plenty of heartbreak, though. Things not going great for Laszlo.
Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died (1977)
A moment ago, I mentioned a forthcoming meeting of the Leviathan book club. Pym’s late, great novel was our first selection. And what a terrific choice that turned out to be! I was thrilled to lead a discussion with such a smart and energetic group. I’d actually read this last August (one of those months I never got around to writing about) when NYRB released its beautiful edition. My first Pym, and from what I gather not the most representative, but absolutely terrific. I would say it even improved on re-reading. A woman coming up on 50—cool, elegant, manipulative, as Jacqui puts it in her review—meets an antique dealer and his 24-year-old nephew, who he’s training in the business. The antique dealer imagines a future with the woman, but she has designs (of what sort is never quite clear, even to herself) on the younger man. People behave badly—but, also, everyone has their reasons. The title, from Keats, is about the anguish—or is it the thrill?—of loving something to death. I would call The Sweet Dove Died Jamesian in the sense of being a study in cruelty. And an object lesson for any of us obsessed with the idea that the surroundings and events of our lives must be just so.
Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte (2023)
Historical romance and vampire story set in the early part of the Mexican – American War (aka the US invasion of Mexico). As children, Nena and Néstor are inseparable, even though she’s the daughter of the patrón of a hacienda and he’s the son of a vaquero. Everything changes one night, when their expedition in search of buried Spanish silver coins goes terribly awry. Something, some creature, eyeless, all teeth and silent destruction, attacks Nena. The boy fights off the beast and carries the girl to the main house, but convinced he is responsible for her death he runs away never to be seen again. Until ten years later, that is, when he returns to join the forces the local ranchers are putting together to fight the Yanquis. When he sets eyes on Nena—who eventually recovered from her mysterious wounds—he freaks out. As does she, but for a different reason. She’s furious that he never wrote and can’t understand that he thought she was dead. This sets off an enemies-to-lovers story during a desperate mission in the wilds of northern Mexico: conveniently, the two become separated from the rest of the auxiliary cavalry during a battle. (Nena is there because in the intervening years and under the tutelage of Néstor’s grandmother she has become a curandera or healer.) Can the two overcome their differences to admit their love for each other? If so, what will happen when they return to the rigidly stratified world of the hacienda? And what are the terrible creatures the Yanquis have captured and forced to fight for them? You can probably guess the answers to all these questions. Vampires of El Norte doesn’t ever surprise, but it’s plenty satisfying. I do think Cańas needed to get a better handle on her allegory: those damn Yanquis are indeed vampiric but in the book’s most interesting moments the vampires are literal creatures, not just symbols. Just where did these vampires come from, anyway? It’s all a bit fast and loose. Still, I enjoyed this enough to seek out Cańas’s other books. Thanks to Hope for putting this on my radar.
Gonna knock out some posts on this year’s reading before we hit the half-way mark of 2026. Here’s what I remember about January in St Louis. A snow storm came through near the end of the month. It was cold for a while. That was great. I ran as often as the street cleaning allowed. I spent some time applying for a job that I would later get. That was very good. And I read these books.
Childe Hassam, Messenger Boy (1902)
Georges Simenon, The Two-Penny Bar (1932) Trans. David Watson (2014)
What, you expect me to remember the plot of a Simenon I read five months ago? What I do remember is that this is one of the atmospheric-outskirts-of-Paris Maigrets. The search for the killer of a moneylender (Jewish, natch, boo) whose body has been seen being dumped in the river leads Maigret to a group of friends who spend weekends and holidays at an inn (the bar of the title) near Morsang, a village on the Seine about 40 km from the capital. They fish, paddle about, play cards, chase children, eat fulsomely, drink a hell of a lot, and sleep with each other. Maigret insinuates himself into the group, which is no trouble for him since he loves all those things too. (Except the adultery part. Maigret could never.) The vibes are immaculate, and the crime gets solved too.
Seichō Matsumoto, Tokyo Express (1958) Trans. Jesse Kirkwood (2022)
Born in 1909 in Japan’s Fukoka prefecture, Seichō Matsumoto did not publish until 1950. But then he made up for lost time, publishing over 450 books in the next four decades. These range from procedurals to psychological slow-burns in the vein of Patricia Highsmith or Celia Dale. Until recently, Matsumoto was hard to find in English. Happily, Modern Library (following on the heels of Penguin UK) has launched a program of reissues and they’ve started with one of his best. Tokyo Express (1958) begins with the discovery of the bodies of a man and a woman on a remote beach. Investigators rule the deaths a lovers’ suicide. But two detectives—one local to the scene, older, out of fashion; the other from the city, young, full of new ideas—aren’t buying it. Before long, they think they know who did it—but not how. Part odd-couple buddy story, part oblique criticism of a society desperate to repress its wartime past, the novel is famous for its plot, which centers on the detailed scrutiny of train time-tables. Trust me, this is a lot more exciting than it sounds. Tokyo Express is so clever you’ll be left shaking your head in appreciation at Matsumoto’s skill—and counting down the days until the next reissue appears.
Ray Nayler, Where the Axe is Buried (2025)
Nayler’s second full-length novel—after the excellent The Mountain in the Sea, about octopus intelligence—offers what are coming to seem his trademark elements: compelling characters; clear explanations of how systems function, whether these be ecological, political, or technological; and deep knowledge of political organizations and local customs gained from his other career in the foreign service. Set in an unspecified future in which many parts of the world are run by AI systems designed to maximize resources and human flourishing whereas others rely on more old-fashioned methods of coercion and surveillance, Where the Axe is Buried is a compendium of authoritarian strategies—and the resistances they inevitably provoke. Whether you read for the heart or the head, you’ll find much to appreciate here.
The central concepts of this terrific novel are cowardice and cruelty. Which is not to say it is a cruel or cowardly novel. How could it be, given Trollope’s amused interest in even the worst of the rogue’s gallery that makes up its cast of characters? But there sure is a lot of cruelty in its pages. Maybe we should be glad that even its worst characters don’t seem to take pleasure in their cruelty. (They are not Stephen Miller cruel.) But they are cowards, and in their desire to have things go their own way they will say or do anything, especially if it means they can avoid making a hard choice. Saying enough’s enough to someone else’s bad behaviour; taking responsibility for one’s own actions: these are things almost no one in this novel will do. That cowardice is what leads to cruelty. Something to think about re: our own day. Turns out The Way We Live Now is also about the way we live now.
Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum (2018)
Anne Youngson was unknown to me when I noticed her two novels on the shelves of Leviathan. I figured James had a good reason for stocking them, so I asked him to tell me more. His response: “Light reading that doesn’t insult your intelligence.” Since that is my favourite kind of reading, I immediately moved them to the top of the TBR pile.
I started with Meet Me at the Museum because I love epistolary novels. As a teenager, Tina Hopgood wrote a letter to Professor P. V. Glob at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark about the Tollund Man, which he had recently gained fame for identifying after the 2500-year-old body was found, perfectly preserved, by two peat-cutters in a bog. Glob—a real guy: his book was reissued by NYRB a while ago—wrote back, prompting the young woman to promise herself that she would visit the museum one day. Since then forty years have passed. Tina, now a middle-aged English farmwife with grown children, writes the professor again, this time because the friend she had planned to take the trip with all those years ago has just died. A reply to her lament for lost time arrives—but not from Glob, because he too is dead.
The letter writer is a curator named Anders Larson, who expresses mild interest in her past encounter with his famous predecessor and condolences on her recent loss. From this kind but detached beginning stems a lengthy correspondence in which two modest and decent people open up to each other about their shared puzzlement at how they came to have more life behind than ahead of them. The obvious comparison to Meet Me at the Museum is 84 Charing Cross Road and if you liked that one you’ll like this too. Like its more famous forbearer, Meet Me is gentle and modest in its ambitions and prose—but thrilling precisely because it doesn’t try to do too much. Its sincerity becomes it. As usual, James is right: it never insults your intelligence.
Youngson was in her 70s when she published this, her first book, written after her retirement from a career as an executive in the car industry. I’ve written before about how much the idea of the late bloomer means to me. (Maybe I’ll still do something with my life!) Learning about the author’s circumstances made me enjoy this lovely book all the more. I think a number of you would dig it, too.
Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup (2024)
Rex Stout with monsters. The most dangerous place in Khanum is its sea-walls, where soldiers and engineers must constantly guard the empire from malevolent leviathans that inflict terrible damage any time they manage to breach the defenses. Yet these monsters don’t just threaten Khanum. They are also the source of its most powerful technologies. Alchemists have figured out how to synthesize the beasts’ blood and organs into bodily modifications that grant supernatural abilities and are thus coveted by the Empire’s citizens even though they are so powerful they often cause early death.
The narrator, Dinios “Din” Kol, has chosen to be modified as an Engraver: he remembers everything he ever hears, sees, smells, tastes, and touches. For obvious reasons, Engravers serve in law enforcement, typically serving as assistants to Investigators. At the beginning of The Tainted Cup, Din meets Anagosa “Ana” Dolraba. She is brilliant, idiosyncratic, vaguely disreputable. And she has asked for Din by name. Ana needs an Engraver more than most Investigators, because her agoraphobia and neurodivergence (she is so easily sensorily overstimulated she needs to wear a blindfold) generally keep her inside and away from crime scenes. (See what I mean about Nero Wolfe? And Sherlock Holmes for that matter.)
The pair have been tasked with solving the murder of a prominent Engineer. The man was found dead while visiting the home of a powerful oligarch, killed by dapplegrass, a modified plant that explodes from the inside anything that inhales or consumes it. Shortly thereafter, a section of seawall is breached and several of the Engineers responsible for protecting it are found dead in the same way.
I loved The Tainted Cup from start (a wonderful map) to finish (a teaser for the next volume). The solution to the crime is as good as the world-building: an impressive feat. A lot of books that try to do just one of those things don’t succeed. This is Bennett’s third series. I’ll be getting to them all.
Hans Peter Richter, Friedrich (1961) Trans. Edite Kroll (1970)
Postwar German children’s classic about the persecution of a Jewish child in 1930s Germany. The unnamed narrator has a best friend named Friedrich: the boys, born one week apart in 1925, grow up in the same apartment building, in an out of each other’s lives. At times, the narrator wishes he were part of Friedrich’s family. He looks up to his friend’s parents, warmer and wiser than his own. But the boys diverge as they age and Nazism takes hold on German life. For a time, the narrator manages—like his father, who remains friendly to Friedrich’s parents even after throwing in his lot with the Nazis, thanks to whom he has found work after long-term unemployment—to reconcile his friendship with the new norms of public life. But the contradiction can’t hold: the best part of the book concerns Kristallnacht, when Friedrich finds himself, in a moment of genuine ecstasy, that is, of being thrown outside himself, joining in with the destruction of Jewish property and life, starting with Friedrich’s home.
Richter served in the German army (he lost an arm on the Eastern front); after the war he studied psychology and sociology, but found his calling as a writer for children. Friedrich, the best known of his books, was for years a classroom staple in Germany. It’s easy to see why: it exemplifies the universalist school of representing Jewish life in the Nazi period: that is, it believes German Jews were as ordinary and as German as anyone else; their Jewishness was contingent and incidental to their lives. (In the guise of openness and acceptance, this view manages to reject the idea of Jewishness as meaningful in its own right.) It is also frank about German culpability. Which makes sense, given the audience it was written for. For the same reason, though, it’s not the book contemporary readers, especially non-German ones, are likely to most want on the subject. We might expect a book on the Holocaust to foreground Jewish experience, for example. We might want such a novel to have a Jewish main character. But that doesn’t mean the book isn’t worth reading. It is a document of its time, and carries its own interest, especially its willingness to suggest that there might be a thrilling element to destruction and persecution. A middle-grade book today probably wouldn’t do that, either. And that might be a loss.
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)
The past couple of years I’ve been part of a group, headed by Shawn of the Shawn Breathes Books YouTube channel, reading Edith Wharton’s collected works. Regular readers will know I think she’s a genius. I was excited to learn more about where that brilliance came from, and enthusiastically agreed when someone suggested we tackle her autobiography. By the end of the book, I wasn’t so enthusiastic anymore. I didn’t quite expect a tell-all, but I certainly thought it would be more personal than it is. Which makes sense: A Backward Glance predates the era of personal writing. Wharton is discrete to the point of obliquity about her failed marriage to the Boston Brahmin Teddy Wharton and silent about her lengthy love affair with the journalist Morton Fuller. Her look into the past is glancing indeed.
Still, I remember a number of moments, including:
Wharton’s claim that she was taught only two things as a child (she had, to put it mildly, erratic schooling): modern languages and good manners.
Her further claim—which you can see motivating a book like Age of Innocence—that her childhood was worth remembering only because the New York of that time is as vanished a world as Atlantis.
What William Dean Howells told her when the dramatization of The House of Mirth flopped: “What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”
Little Edith, carrying around a book and making up stories from it even before she could read.
A nearly silent visit with Henry James to the aged George Meredith, in the grip of locomotor ataxia and deafness.
Countless drives in an open car through the English countryside with a profusely sweating Henry James, who adored motoring, though of course never drove himself.
What I took most from the book is that Edith Wharton was an excellent, devoted friend. Her shyness and social anxiety caused many to ignore or be disappointed by her. But those who got to know her were richly rewarded. Readers of this book, however, can only glimpse that person. A Backward Glance is interesting but underwhelming. Certainly not the place to start with Wharton, who just looms larger and larger for me as a great 20th century writer.
With The Keeper, French concludes her trilogy about Cal Hooper, a former cop from Chicago who settles in a village in west Ireland, a place where young women find jobs in the city and old men worry about who will take over the farm.
Anthony Haughey, “The Edge of Europe” (1996)
The book begins when a body is fished out of the river; the death roils the vicious and tender emotional undercurrents that structure the life of any rural community. Not least because the victim was the fiancée of the scion of the local grandee. The latter is a businessman who has been buying up property for reasons that are uncertain but unlikely to bring anything good. (He is variously described as immobilizing, as a straitjacket, as a substrate in the soil under the town’s very walls: images like these imply that his superficial efforts at ingratiating himself with the people he’s grown up around hide something more ominous.) Hooper has never had much to do with the man, but now he finds himself unable to ignore or dismiss him. That’s because, although he’ll never be a local, Cal has forged ties to the place: surrogate father to a local teenager, a girl he has mentored from near-feral distrust to righteous confidence; partner to a middle-aged widow, a woman who wanted to get away from the place but never quite could; and friend to some of the guys down the pub, a gang led by his cantankerous neighbour, Mart.
The lads’ banter is one of the books’ reliable pleasures, as is their depictions of dogs. French writes brilliantly about the relationships between dogs and people, at once attuned to each other and separate. Look at this beautiful sentence:
Off in the distance, a man tramps steadily behind a wheelbarrow, his dog running in wide curves around him.
How vivid this picture, which pivots on the opposition of its verbs: the man “tramp[ing] steadily,” the dog “running in wide curves”; the man at work, the dog at play, two forms of aliveness; the one a line, the other a circle. French writes some of the most fully realized dogs in literature. They’re always bringing the offering of a sodden toy into a room charged with human argument, huffing as they roll over onto their other side in front of a fireplace, or questing off after the scent of a small creature they’ll never catch.
The dogs are pure joy, but The Keeper, although as pleasurable as all the rest of French’s work, is a nervy book. When Mart asks Cal to look into the death, officially ruled a suicide, though the antifreeze in the victim’s system might suggest otherwise, Cal finds himself taking sides in what he didn’t realize was a conflict, a fight between differing visions of the town’s future. As always, French’s plotting is impeccable, but even back when she was writing her Dublin Murder Squad novels, she was always more interested in the challenges of living and working with others than in solving crimes. Her novels are populated by colleagues, neighbors, and mentors, categories that approach without ever quite assuming friendship. Think about the title. Does it refer to a gamekeeper? Someone who protects a place on behalf of someone else, someone more powerful? Or to the keeper of tradition? Or to a good boyfriend? (“He’s a keeper, that one.”) Cal could be taken to be any or all of these roles. But whatever the referent—and whoever fills it: I’ve been assuming Cal, but maybe I’m being too obvious—I think the term’s connotations are more ominous than protective. A terrific example of how crime fiction can chart its post-copaganda future, The Keeper will delight anyone who has exchanged their old life for a new one—or wanted to but never could.
Regular readers will know that for the last several years I’ve solicited Year in Reading reflections from friends and trusted readers. Here, belatedly, is the last entry in this series. It comes from friend of the blog and reader extraordinaire, Scott Walters. The tardiness is all mine: I’ve been sitting on this, unconscionably, for months. I think you will agree, though, that some things are worth the wait. Scott, whose piece here is his fifth, launched the much-lamented blog seraillon in 2010, and expects to return to it one of these days. He largely follows Primo Levi’s model of “occasional and erratic reading, reading out of curiosity, impulse or vice, and not by profession.” He lives with his partner in San Francisco.
Nan Goldin, Self-Portrait in Blue Bathroom, London (1980)
Though I’m becoming increasingly picky about my reading choices, that didn’t stop me in 2025 from mostly following my nose – and allowing for books to choose me rather than the other way around. I made no concrete plans but still managed to read some books that had long been on my list and some marvelous new surprises. Highlights and more below.
Three Big Books
Three fat tomes structured my reading year. First was Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924, trans. John E. Woods), the tale of the young Hans Castorp, whose brief visit to a tubercular relative in a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps turns into a long-term stay when he is trapped there after his own diagnosis. To read this book is to go on a long journey, arduous at times and tested by low oxygen, but offering spectacular views, inner alpenglow, and snowy literary heights nothing short of thrilling (okay, okay, enough of that). It is a deeply strange book, which Mann refers to it in his preface as a kind of fairy tale, and also a great one, borrowing freely from other models but prescient regarding both history and literary form. The near linear narrative, obsessed with time, teeters on boring the reader, breaks into a few background chapters, devotes 200 pages to three weeks, takes 500 to speed through the next seven years, then abruptly leap-frogs more years, indulges in dialectical (even trialectical) philosophical conversations, and near the end keeps introducing important characters into this European antechamber on the eve of World War I. An unnamed omniscient narrator occasionally interrupts to use the royal “we” and reference his own anxieties, which readers may share, Mann’s anticipatory novel serving as a kind of measuring stick between its time and our own. [Ed. – Yes, it is a truly great book.]
Little of the Dickens I had read prepared me for Bleak House (1853). This grand conception, capacious and constantly surprising, forming an indignant portrait of a city and country, roars for something to be done about poverty and injustice, pleads for beginning the world anew. Bleak House also seems a kind of spring, irrigating the literature that would follow it, anticipating modernism and some of the later movements of 20th century literature (the influence on Joyce, for example, is clear). [Ed. – Say more!] Even the often dismissed-as-novelty instance of human combustion, near the exact center of the book, comes across as exploding the hinges. To the right and left are human splatter, the human stain and residue, presented in a gem of literary black comedy. Joining a friend’s book club when I learned that Bleak House was on the menu, I was dismayed to find some who viewed Esther Summerson as merely a saccharine goody two-shoes. Is she not one of the great characters in literature? [Ed. – She is.]
A reader acquaintance in town for an evening mentioned Jon Fosse’s Septology (2019-2021, trans. Damion Searls). I’d read one Fosse work and had no intention of reading more, but Septology had other ideas: from a box of books I spied on the sidewalk the following morning, a pristine copy offered itself up, and I quickly found myself needing to read it each evening. Septology’s three novels form a triptych, the three sections of the central book flanked by two sections in each in the first and third novels. “The Other Name” in the first novel’s title is the same as the first name, Asle, held by both the narrator, a painter, and another Asle, a despondent alcoholic, both living alone near Bergen, one with his paintings and memories and the other with his bottles and memories. One scarcely knows where one Asle ends and the other begins, these doppelgängers, manifestations perhaps of divergent and not-so-divergent paths in the same life. It’s a nifty narrative device: the reader wanders in and about the one and/or two Asles and even more variations on the name, including Ales, the painter’s late wife, and Asleik, his neighbor. Past and present mingle. The discursive repetitions of Asle’s narrative seemed like the looping curlicues in a Cy Twombly painting: thoughts turn back on themselves, run on the same tracks for pages, return like waves, new and familiar. The frequent absence of page and paragraph breaks and the total absence of periods further a narrative relentlessness, as though we’re listening to an extended monologue, even when two people speak. [Ed. – Gotta say, that sounds dismayingly hard!] Ruminations range freely, from quotidian minutiae to explorations of art and faith, from meditations on social responsibility to the virtues and vices of solitude. A Nordic coldness blows through Fosse, but I came away from Septology knowing I’d encountered something new, unforgettable, and, in another iteration of hazy identities, now a part of me.
Playing with History
I was surprised to find so much historical fiction—not a genre I often deliberately seek out—among my standout works from 2025. Here they are, each approaching history in its own inimitable way.
Manuel Mujica-Lainez’s Mysterieuse Buenos Aires (1950, French trans. Catherine Ballestero) uses 42 fictional vignettes, in chronological order, to relate the history of Argentina’s largest city. A well-known translator from Spanish to English once said Mujica-Lainez was the author whose works they most wanted to see in English, and as a fan of Bomarzo (recently republished by New York Review Books for the first time since it appeared in English in 1969), I was thrilled to find another of his works, even if in French. Mujica-Lainez daringly pushes borders by fusing fact and fantasy, relying largely on figures from history’s margins, never passing up the opportunity to make a scene flourish in a dense riot of glorious language. The book opens in 1536 with a Boschian hellscape of famine and guerilla ambushes as the native population greets the Spanish invaders and continues through to 1904. I especially loved the longest tale, an “autobiography” by a tattered edition of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s roman à l’eau de rose, Paul et Virginie, as it gets passed along from Europe to the New World.
Anja Wilner’s 2024 Year in Reading post sent me to Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (1984, trans. John E. Woods), in which fiction and historical documents relating to an ill-fated 1872 Arctic expedition [Ed. – is there any other kind?] merge into an obsessive account of explorers confronting the elements. A parallel narrative follows the story of a young Italian fixated enough on the 1872 effort to book passage on an Arctic research ship in 1981, only to vanish mysteriously once back on Spitzbergen. The unnamed narrator is himself obsessed with the Italian’s disappearance. Various texts propel the narrative – logs, letters, lists, diary excerpts, tales of other expeditions, failures, vanishings – accompanied by black & white images. The overall effect is bewitching, as Ransmayr uses the explorers’ own words to probe their motivations, as shifting as the ice: a try for the pole, discovery of new lands, fame for the homeland, a promised payout. But the terrors of ice and darkness surge forth everywhere. Frostbitten-hands-down the most affecting work I’ve ever read on polar exploration.
A past Year in Reading post by Brad Bigelow led me to Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March (1948), as superb as Brad had promised, standing above most contemporary American novels in its densely researched, inventive treatment of historical material that expands the epistolary form to incorporate everything from mandates by Caesar to clandestine notes passed between conspirators to graffiti on a Roman wall.
Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queiros (1897). What a treasure, this 55-page novella by the wonderful de Queiros, translated into English for the first time by the wonderful Margaret Jull Costa. De Queiros’s take on Genesis has ape-like Adam sliding down from a branch “on the twenty-eighth day of October at two o’clock in the afternoon,” and had me laughing throughout, astonished that no one else seems to have approached such an absurd creation myth in such an inside-out, satirical manner. I gave out copies to friends like candy.
My Italian discovery of the year was Sicilian writer Annie Messina in The Myrtle and the Rose (1982, trans. Jessie Bright)and Le Palmier de Rusafa (1989, French trans. Jocelyne Sephord, unavailable in English), two of three novels Messina wrote, all towards the end of her long life (the third remains untranslated). Though the characters and locales differ, the novels tell similar tales of a Middle Eastern warlord developing an intense relationship with a rescued slave boy. The rather spare Myrtle seems almost a draft, sowing seeds that in Rusafa blossom into an extravagantly exotic baroque masterpiece. This is extraordinary, riveting fiction, fiercely red in tooth and claw and shrinking from nothing. [Ed. – Intriguing!]
Other Italian Journeys
You, Bleeding Childhood, by Michele Mari (2009, trans. Brian Moore) left me embarrassed that I’d never before heard of Mari, apparently among Italy’s living literary treasures. The 13 tales here center on characters who encounter literature at a young age. In “The Black Arrow,” the narrator steals his father’s copy of Stevenson’s novel of the same name, then is thrust into a moral conundrum when his father returns from a trip bearing another copy of the book as a gift. The child’s discovery of textual differences due to the gift being a different translation opens a world. In “Eight Writers,” the child’s obsession with sea adventures by eight famous authors encounters a case of mal-de-mer when he begins to mark their stylistic and thematic differences. In a favorite piece, “The Covers of Urantia,” Mari considers the impact of cover art, as his young reader reminisces on the covers of a popular series of horror magazines. Never let it be said that you can’t judge a book by its cover. Terrific stuff.
L’Île des âmes (The Island of Souls), by Piergiorgio Pulixi (2019, French trans. Anatole Pons-Reumaux):a mystery of the “Sardinian Giallo” genre, concerning the reopening of a couple of cold cases involving ritualistic murders of two women following the more recent disappearance of another. The twist is that the cases are now being investigated by two women detectives, seemingly as an effort to sideline them. One might suspect the author of trying to be Sardinia’s answer to Sicily’s Andrea Camillieri, but Pulixi seems after something different: I was transfixed by his panorama of Sardinian culture, geography, and centuries-old mysteries – a great introduction to the island as well as the first novel in a series.
Other Italian gems: Behind Closed Doors: Her Father’s House and Other Stories of Sicily, by Maria Messina (Annie’s aunt) (1909-1928, trans. Elise Magistro), memorable tales of the rough lives of Sicilian village women in the early 20th century; Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara (1933, trans. William Weaver) featuring impoverished villagers wrestling defiantly with a Fascist landowner diverting their water for his own uses; a timely reread of Silone’s The School for Dictators (1939, trans. William Weaver), a quasi-novel/political treatise in which an American Presidential aspirant travels to Mussolini’s Italy to learn how to import fascism to the U.S.; Vincenzo Latronico’s bestseller Perfection (2022, trans. Sophie Hughes), a biting treatment of today’s digital nomads which, as a portrayal of work culture, brought to mind Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman; the first volume of self-described “leader of strange dolts” Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (The Big Sheep, 1378, trans. W. H. Waters), a Boccaccio impersonation with infectiously fun tales stitched together by the dopiest of framing stories: two young lovers meet each day, tell one another a story, then slink off after this literary foreplay; the metafictional delights of Giorgio Manganelli’s To Those Gods Beyond (1989, trans. Marvin McLaughlin), from which I learned that while fiction is a prison, one can always invent a horse to make one’s escape; and finally Daniele del Giudice’s A Fictional Inquiry (1983, trans. Anne Appel), which I discovered the day after dreaming about an earlier del Giudice novel I’d read years ago only to find this one later in the day in a bookshop. [Ed. — !] To my further astonishment, A Fictional Inquiry pursues Italian critic Roberto Bazlen in a clever exploration of how one might have an outsized influence on literature without ever having published a thing.
“American” Literature
After all these decades I finally got to another Wilder in addition to Thornton above: Laura Ingalls, in Little House on the Prairie (1935). [Ed. – Genuinely curious how you managed to miss them in childhood, Scott!] I admired Wilder’s knack for creating limpid scenes using only the briefest descriptive sentences, as when the family reaches the grassland and young Laura sees that “In a perfect circle, the sky curved down to the level land, and the wagon was in the circle’s exact middle.” For all the mockery generated by the related TV series, Little House struck me as practical and even “woke” to an extent that a lot of reactionary parents might miss (to the benefit of their bookworm children). [Ed. – Now read Eula Biss’s essay “No Man’s Land.”]
U.S.A., A Dramatic Review, by Paul Shyre and John Dos Passos (1960): I read John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy decades ago, completely oblivious to the existence of this stage adaptation that compresses 1,000 pages into a mere 75. This small marvel of theatrical writing nonetheless manages to convey the sound and sense of the trilogy, including newsreel footage in the performance, and features several striking scenes, in particular a magnificent monologue by Isabella Duncan.
Thanks to Alta magazine’s assessment of 25 great works of California fiction, I read two that were new to me. Mecca, by Susan Straight (2022) was an especially welcome discovery, its entwined stories linking diverse communities of Southern California around the nexus where Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties meet. The Alta piece also prompted me to take down from the shelf an unread copy of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), discovering only after finishing that it had inspired One Battle After Another. It’s easy to see why this narrative would resonate today; Vineland’s outlandish tale of a young woman coming to terms with her vanished mother, a radical activist from the 1960s, takes a long view of the competing tensions between American democracy and the forces of reaction taking aim at it. I also enjoyed Christopher Tradowsky’s Midnight in the Cinema Palace (2025), a solid contribution to literature about San Francisco in its glimpse into the culture of the Castro neighborhood in the 1990’s.
Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929): How had I missed the boat on this unexpected window into the world of Black women able to “pass” for white? Reading it made me feel a gaping hole in my knowledge of American literature had begun to be filled. Indispensable. Thanks, Dorian! [Ed. – Another satisfied customer!]
The most compelling American fiction I read last year was, um, British: Cahokia Jazz, by Francis Spufford (2023). Spufford’s stunning conception is the star in this speculative allo-historical thriller in which First Nations people govern a semi-autonomous U.S. state located around the city of Cahokia, today ruins of what was once the largest city in North America, but in Spufford’s vision an important 20th-century metropolis eclipsing the tiny village of St. Louis across the river. The book brilliantly uses a popular genre to explore race, religion, and the construction of history, and adds to an expanding list of great works about the United States not written by U.S. authors. Thanks again, Dorian! Iksho Itala! [Ed. – A pleasure!]
Odds and Ends
Aside from scattered poems, Raymond Radiguet’s two novels, Le Bal de Comte Orgel and Le Diable au corps, comprise his entire literary output. But what an output! His death at 20 drew thousands to his funeral; his patron, Jean Cocteau, was said to be inconsolable for years. These two tales, each involving a transgressive love affair between an adolescent boy and a married woman, burn with life, wit, insight, and defiant assertion of youth. Le Diable au corps, with its betrayed husband a French soldier, so affronted French nationalists after World War I that even a film version of it appearing decades later was met with indignation.
Someone here last year mentioned Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, so I picked it up and read this class-conscious dissection of an affair with admiration of her keen ability to needle in under people’s rationalizations and excuses and – like her occasionally self-mutilating narrator Frances – get under the skin and draw blood. [Ed. – Good description!]
The Prague Coup (2018), by Jean-Luc Fromenthal and Miles Hyman (trans. Lara Vergnaud), the only graphic novel on my list, recounts the story of Graham Greene’s trip to Vienna in 1948, ostensibly to consult on Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. Fromenthal unveils the story of Greene’s involvement in intelligence work and reframes The Third Man in its intelligence context as in part a coded message from Greene to double-agent Kim Philby. Bonus: the end pages sent me down a deep rabbit hole to learn about fascinating figure Elizabeth Montagu, Greene’s guide in Vienna, and to the remarkable film Four Men in a Jeep, shot in a Vienna still under rotating command by the U.S., U.K., France and the Soviet Union. [Ed. – This sounds great! First time I’m hearing of it.]
Perhaps my most moving re-read of last year was of Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, this time in the magnificent Peter Carson translation (Carson died a mere two days after finishing it).
Vivian Maier, Jul, 1953
Odder Odds and Ends
I’m not sure where I draw the line between books I consider odd and those I don’t. I read the first book of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (2020, trans. Barbara J. Haveland), about a woman trapped in a single day that endlessly repeats, and did not think to put it in this category. But Quebecoise writer Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba’s feminist eco-thriller Sauvagines (2022, available in English translation as Feral) swept me up into discomfiting aspects of an otherwise straightforward tale of a young woman serving a season as game warden in remote Kamouraska and finding herself squared off against a vicious, likely murderous, poacher. [Ed. – Ordering now!]
The Gardener Who Saw God, by Edward James (1937), stuck out no doubt because its author did. This too-hefty work by one of the patrons of Surrealism, a British lord who ended up in the jungles of Michoacan where he built his own surreal folly garden, Las Pozas [Ed. – This sentence has already contained many improbable things—where will it go next?], may not be stellar as literature, but it contains at least two major attractions: a fictionally-tweaked glimpse into the early world of Surrealism (Magritte, Dalí and others were guests at James’s estate), and a stunning spiritual conversion scene with the force of a Blake painting. I learned of the novel’s existence from Eve Babitz, perhaps one reason the book proved nearly impossible to find.
More solidly in the oddities category, Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) had trailed me since university, when those who had read it seemed dismissive. My expectations were not high, but I ended up deliriously checking off the oddities of this bizarre, messy tale of a ship stowaway’s adventures. One lengthy passage takes place entirely in the dark of a ship’s hold (I kept trying to imagine it on a stage). There is a magnificent description of water that evokes all the magic water can evoke. But with its frequent alterations of black and white seeming to anticipate Melville’s Moby Dick and a disturbing set of scenes pitting the ship’s crew against “savages,” the novel’s treatment of race makes it one of the strangest literary artifacts of American slavery and racial phobia.
Perhaps the oddest book I’ve ever encountered [Ed. — !], David Lindsey’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920) begins in sordid circumstances on Earth and moves to other such circumstances on Terra, a planet orbiting the binary system of Arcturus. In a confusing sort of pilgrimage, its louche main character sets out across the planet in search of illumination (think: the quest in Mount Analogue meets the ghastliness of M. P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud), encountering surprising planetscapes, a plethora of strange beings, several impossible colors to which Lindsey gives names, and even a population of creatures who use gender-neutral pronouns. The violence of the book, however, came as a shock; I could not help but think of it as an oblique reaction to World War I. [Ed. – Readers, this is the kind of content you don’t get just anywhere.]
Good Trouble
Several works resonated more directly with the challenges of our times and served to ground and put into perspective whatever else I read.
Vasily Grossman’s Everything Flows(unfinished, last worked on in 1964, trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler), concerning Stalin’s purges and the incarceration of millions, may be less powerful than his two-volume World War II magnum opus, Stalingrad and Life and Fate, but incisively depicts the paranoid totalitarian state that resulted in informers and victims, seen through the lens of one such victim upon his release after 30 years in the gulag.
Étienne de la Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontière (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude – 1548), a brief disquisition on why human beings voluntarily surrender agency to accept the tyrants who oppress them, seemed as timely as ever. Moreover, it contains some of the most lucid prose I have read in French, especially impressive given that de la Boétie, bosom friend of Michel de Montaigne, wrote it between the ages of 16 and 18.
Finally, Crooked Cross (1934) by British writer Sally Carson, who lived in Germany during the beginning of the Third Reich, unfurls as though in real time. Carson zooms in on the Kluger family of Kranach, an alpine village above Munich, the novel playing out like a granular study of how quickly and corrosively Nazi fanaticism took hold: the novel takes place entirely within the six months following Hitler’s assumption of power. Popular upon its publication, the book vanished until the recent discovery of a single extant copy. Thanks to Persephone Books, Carson’s novel contrasting acquiescence and resistance to totalitarianism has been revived – and at the right moment. [Ed. – I have dallied so long in putting up this post that Persephone’s reissue of the sequel is now available…]
August Sander, Small-Town Women (ca. 1913)
Thank you for reading, safe passage and felicitous literary adventures to all in 2026. [Ed. – Thank you, Scott! So many riches here.]
Regular readers will know that for the last several years I’ve solicited Year in Reading reflections from friends and trusted readers. As we’re well into February, I’ve scaled the project back considerably this time, but quality takes quantity every time… Today’s installment,his fifth, is by James Morrison, reader extraordinaire. James lives and works in Adelaide, on unceded Kaurna territory.
Charlie Stone, Behemoth from ‘The Master & Margarita’ (1999)
Working out which books to write about for these discussions is always fraught—there are easily another twenty great books I could have raved about, but neither you nor I are made of infinite time. I’ve tried to narrow things down to a few broad categories, but even then a few books would not be restrained by such, so they’re tacked on at the end.
In a couple of other people’s year-end reading round-ups on Bluesky, they talked not about what they’d read, but why they’d read it—what had prompted them to buy or pick up the books they ended up reading. It was strangely interesting, at least to a big horrible nerd like me, so I’m including that here for my own choices. Feel free to pass over it with glazed eyes. [Ed. – No way! I think people love that stuff. I know I do.]
RAMUZ
My most compelling new-to-me writer discovery of the year was Swiss novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947). The three of his books that I read all have the same basic premise—Something Horrible Happening in the High Alps—but go off in very different directions. Great Fear on the Mountain (translated by Bill Johnston) was what got me hooked first: a historical novel where a group of men set off to take the village’s flock up through a mountain pass to find feed, and then everything goes to hell. It has all the rhythms of an 1980s horror movie, but is beautifully written and was first published in 1926. Derborence [When the Devils Came Down] (translated by Laura Spinney) features an avalanche and its spooky survivor, while Into the Sun (translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan) is an impressionistic, atmospheric early climate change novel. As the Earth slowly falls into the sun, the snows melt, the mountain lakes boil, and society collapses into violence and despair.
For some reason 2025 became a year in which I started, and sometimes finished, a number of big fat epics. [Ed. — Always big and fat, the epics.] Look at me, aren’t I tough?
Miklós Bánffy, The Transylvanian Trilogy/The Writing on the Wall (translated by Katalin Banffy-Jelen and Patrick Thursfield): I had actually read this massive Hungarian modern classic before, some quarter-century ago, but remembered very little other than it was hugely enjoyable. If anything it was even better this time around, now that I am older and theoretically wiser. Aristocratic Hungarians in Transylvania scheme and gamble and party and fuck, fighting for their rights as a minority in the Habsburg Empire while simultaneously being unable (for the most part) to see how they are simultaneously repressing and neglecting the Transylvanians whose land they rule. And all the politicking and manoeuvring takes place as the Great War draws closer, ready to sweep their whole world away. It’s like a vastly more incident-packed counterpoint, set at the other end of the Empire, to one of my other favourite books, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. [Ed. – James and I as always on the same wavelength…]
Why: Over recent years I’ve been going back to a number of books I remember as brilliant, to see if they actually are. For the most part, fortunately, they have been.
Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (translated by Barbara J. Haveland, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell): Happy to say I fell for the hype and read the three books of this septology so far available in English. It’s a closely observed and beautifully written variation on the “Groundhog Day” premise of being stuck reliving the same day endlessly, but adding more and more wrinkles and complexities as the looping time passes. Fortunately this seems to be doing extremely well in English, so there’s every chance that, assuming Balle finishes the series, we’ll get to see all of it in translation. If she doesn’t, you’ll see me frothing blood in a tempest of rage.
Why: Though not original, the premise is fascinating, and I fell for the hype.
Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage: I read the first four books of this 13-volume modernist masterpiece, and while each book individually was excellent, the cumulative effect of this subtle, witty and awkward fictionalised autobiography is even more impressive. I hope to read the rest of this massive thing in 2026.
Why: I’ve wanted to read this for decades, but Virago’s treatment of their Modern Classics heritage being what it is, it’s never been possible to get all four volumes of the collected edition. Fortunately, Brad Bigelow of Neglected Books published his own edition, and I finally got my disgusting paws on it.
Len Deighton, the Bernard Sampson series: In terms of pure, sardonic, exciting and bleak reading pleasure, it’s hard to go past this trilogy of trilogies about the much put-upon spy Sampson, his extremely complicated wife, and his infuriating superiors. I still have the last three books to go, so that’s another treat in store for 2026, assuming any of us live. [Ed. – James. A little less truth-telling, please. As to these books, I’ve only read the first three so far, but they are terrific.]
Why: I’d only ever read a couple of Deightons in the past, and they were excellent, so why it took me until now to realise just how good he is and just how pleasingly extensive his back catalogue is must stand as a testament to my general dimwittedness.
C. J. Cherryh, The Morgaine Saga: Extremely futuristic science-fiction masquerading as swords-and-magic fantasy, this trilogy of novels (there’s a fourth, published much later, which I have yet to get) is so richly imagined, and so cleverly paced and written, that it makes you despair about how crap most of its genre competition remains. Outcast prince, magical witch queen, brutal politics, war, extremely difficult moral choices, aliens; the whole shebang.
Why: Every now and then I get the urge to read some fantasy to recapture the kick it used to carry when I was a teenager. Sadly I am no longer a teenager with a teenager’s standards, and almost every time I give up on whatever overpraised nonsense I’ve been tricked into reading. This was one of the rare exceptions.
Homer, The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson): Only a single (big fat) book this time, but one I haven’t read in 20 years, and the newish Wilson translation was calling to me. And it’s great! I’d forgotten just how oddly structured the book is (the famously interminable journey home of the hero taking up a relatively small part of the story), and how mental some of the developments. And apparently, she’s going to retranslate it and publish a whole new version? [Ed. – Seriously???] Seems like sheer madness to me, but I guess that’s what working in academia does to someone. [Ed. — Laughs bitterly]
KILL ALL NAZIS
Why: All the worst people seemed to be enraged by Wilson’s translation, and her gender, so I could not resist. [Ed. – Yeah, those guys suck.]
Charlotte Mano, From the Mythologies series (2021)
All Nazis must fuck off and die. Here are some books about what they were like, and how they were dealt with, first time round…
Marie Chaix, The Laurels of Lake Constance (translated by Harry Mathews): Astonishingly good in English, and the French original is apparently even better? How can this be? An autobiographical novel from the point of view of the daughter of an enthusiastic French Nazi and traitor before and during WW2. Unsensationalised, elliptical, and marvellous.
Why: It looked both pretty and interesting in the bookshop, and that’s all I needed to see.
Uwe Wittstock, Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature (translated by Daniel Bowles): A day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, account of the lives, desperation, plots and betrayals of the huge array of German and Austrian writers and artists who fled the Nazis to France, only to have France fall soon afterwards. Lucid and utterly fascinating.
Why: Wittstock’s previous book, February 1933: The Winter of Literature, did the same thing for the month the Nazis came to power, so there was no way I was not going to read this follow-up when it appeared.
Grete Weil, Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat (translated by John Barrett): An obsession with a lost friend taken by the Gestapo in Amsterdam spills into the post-war life of a man now living in Germany. He marries the man’s sister in a confused, guilt-fuelled attempt to try to bring him back to life. Complications ensue, as you might expect. Rich and compact, and highly recommended. [Ed. – More on Weil here…]
Why: If I see a book in the Verba Mundi series, I buy it. It’s an eclectic but extremely well-selected library of translated literature from all over the world.
Lorenza Mazzetti, The Sky is Falling (translated by Livia Franchini): Another fictionalised memoir, about a pair of sisters sent to stay with Jewish relatives in Tuscany—relatives then slaughtered by the Germans in 1944 (Mazzetti always believed they were killed for the Nazi-perceived crime of being related to Albert Einstein). The beautifully observed child’s viewpoint contrasts with the horrors of the confused world she inhabits, and the book’s brevity gives it the intense kick of all the best novellas. [Ed. – Fascinating! Ordering now…]
Why: This was the first book released by a new feminist publisher, Another Gaze Editions, whose output focuses on the work of women filmmakers like Mazzetti. It’s a hell of a promising way to kick things off.
Niaz Uddin, Airplane Home in Hillsboro, Oregon'(2017?)
HOPELESS FUTURES
Jane Rawson, Human/Nature: Rawson is a fine and unusual Australian novelist whose first book was a manual on climate change survival. In this non-fiction return she takes a simultaneously despairing and bleakly funny look at the horrible state of things, what it all means, and where it’s all leading. None of it’s good, but at least it’s wonderfully written. We still have good prose, if nothing else.
Why: I love the author and would buy anything she wrote.
Jack Womack, Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Somehow I missed this in 1993 when it first came out, more fool me. In the convincing form of a young girl’s diary over several months in (then) near-future New York as everything falls apart under gun-wielding late-stage capitalism, it’s amazing how much this gets right, yet it’s also a strangely analogue vision of the future. It also posits a series of successful US presidential assassinations, and sadly the real world seems unable to provide any of those.
Why: It’s now an established science-fiction classic and I needed to read it.
Bradley Somer, Extinction: A ranger tries to protect the last living bear in North America from poachers. Gripping and downbeat and all-too believable. [Ed. – Why are these all so depressing???? *re-reads section heading* Oh.]
Why: Impulse remainder purchase that panned out extremely well.
Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne, ‘The Serpent-People’ from ‘Découverte Australe par un Homme Volant, ou Le Dédale Français’ (1781)
PARENTS AND OUR MYRIAD FAILURES
Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds: Astonishingly good debut in the collective first person, told by a group of unmonitored children at a family party as they get bored, muck around, encounter something wrong in the garden, and go searching for one of their number who vanishes. Spooky, funny, original stuff. I couldn’t recommend this book more highly, to be honest.
Why: The cover of the UK edition, with a picture of roped-together monochrome children lost in a field of fluorescent green, was enough to convince me. [Ed. – I wish more people talked about how book covers influence their buying.]
Violette Leduc, Asphyxia (translated by Derek Coltman): A well-named book if ever there was one, this dense little novella details the suffocated life of a young girl with an unloving mother in rural pre-War France. But, flinty matriarchs aside, it’s also a richly drawn world of natural wonders and discoveries.
Why: I only discovered Leduc in the last few years, and she was such an extraordinary writer. This was published as part of a very small collection of French classics by female writers by Gallic Books.
Adrian Nathan West, My Father’s Diet: A wonderful book that takes some well-known signifiers of modern American fiction (hollowed-out suburbs, emptying malls, masculinity in crisis, etc etc) and does new and strange things with them. A depressed son learns his father has, out of nowhere, become an obsessive bodybuilder, determined to win the Body You Choose competition. The characters are never caricatures, and it’s extremely funny despite the quiet desperation of it all.
Why: One of the many excellent books put out by And Other Stories, and this is from before they went for their current ugly typographic covers. [Ed. – James! I love those covers!]
GRAPHIC NOVELS
Lee Lai, Stone Fruit and Cannon: Australian (but now based in Canada) artist Lai’s two graphic novels are both minor masterpieces, and genuinely full novels in complexity and subtlety. Sad and perceptive dissections of failing relationships, parenthood, faltering elders, exploitative friendship, and being part of the Chinese diaspora.
Why: This review in Meanjin, an 85-year-old Australian literary magazine currently being put to death by the witless timid bureaucrats who cower in terror of angry letters from the Zionist lobby and who are ruining pretty much all the arts in Australia at the moment.
Emily Carroll, A Guest in the House: A seriously Gothic tale of madness, downtrodden femininity and hapless stepmotherhood, drawn with Carroll’s usual visual flair and attention to detail.
Why: I’ve raved about Carroll before, and love all her work. Somehow, to my annoyance, I didn’t even know this book, published in 2023, existed until I saw a copy a couple of months ago. My spies failed me. [Ed. – Maybe they were busy failing to assassinate US Presidents.]
VOYAGER 2 – Europa (1979)
UNCATEGORIS[ED/ABLE]
Mariette Navarro, Ultramarine (translated by Eve Hill-Agnus): Wonderfully unsettling novel about a woman captaining a cargo ship with a male crew. In the middle of the Atlantic they stop for everyone to have an illicit swim—and when everyone climbs back on board there’s one extra person.
Why: The Deep Vellum edition (already a recommendation) has a great cover with a vast cube of ocean on it, and I am only weak flesh.
Li Qingzhao, The Magpie at Night (translated by Wendy Chen): A beautiful collection of the complete surviving poetry by one of China’s greats, from the Twelfth Century. I mean, get a load of her perfect description of a lazy, drunken evening, from ‘As in a Dream’:
Remember that day
spent on the stream,
watching the sunset glaze
the pavilion.
So drunk, we could not find
our way back.
It was late when we had enough.
We turned the boat around
and were caught, accidentally, in the deep
tangle of lotus roots.
Rowing through, rowing through –
startling, from the banks,
herons.
Why: Having only read a couple of her poems in anthologies, it was a pleasure to find her complete works available in English.
J.M. Coetzee & Mariana Dimópulos, Speaking in Tongues: If you’re at all interested in translated literature, and in the process of translation itself, this is a very rewarding book. Two novelists and literary translators discuss what translation is, what it does, how it works, and a peculiar but intriguing project they undertook (and which was foiled by commercially minded publishers) to make the translated Spanish text of one of Coetzee’s novellas the “original” version of the book.
Why: If the topic is this interesting and the two writers involved this good, what sort of a fool would I be to not read it, I ask you?
[Ed. — A fool indeed. As is anyone who reads this and doesn’t head to their local bookstore or library ASAP on the hunt for some of these recs. Thanks, James!]
Regular readers will know that for the last several years I’ve solicited Year in Reading reflections from friends and trusted readers. As we’re well into February, I’ve scaled the project back considerably this time, but I’ve got some good stuff coming your way over the next few days. Today’s installment,her fifth, is by Hope Coulter, my friend and former colleague. Hope is a writer in Little Rock.
Robert Gober, Bag of Donuts, 1989
Like Dorian, I retired from Hendrix College last May. One of the joys of retirement has been more time to read. With more free hours in the day and no class prep I’ve been able to read gluttonously, leisurely-ly, reminding me of how I read as a child in our long low house on the bayou—stretched out for hours at a time with a book, changing position whenever a propping arm got tired. Once, I remember, I was performing the cliché of reading late into the night with a flashlight under the covers (I’m not sure where I even got this idea) when my father walked in and flipped on the light. “What in the world are you doing? We don’t mind if you stay up and read, but for heaven’s sake don’t strain your eyes.” [Ed. – Good Dad.] My body is bigger and creakier now, but the sense of abandon, of decadent pleasure in reading, is much the same.
In 2025 a third of the books I read happened to be memoirs, and of these, as I followed my nose and my algorithms, one-third were by chefs, restaurateurs, or gastronomes [Ed. – gastrognomes, you say???]. My favorites are as good a way as any to start off this list.
Best food-related memoirs:
Most Likely To Make You Hungry, Make You Laugh, and Make You Want To Cook: Stanley Tucci, Taste: My Life Through Food and What I Ate in One Year (and related thoughts) – Pure delight. I love this guy. He’s unpretentious, exuberant, and funny.
Most Likely To Make You Wince: Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything – Frank, well-written, painful and witty by turns. An inside scoop on the restaurant business.
Most Likely To Make You Drop Everything and Move to Southern France: Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence, Twenty-Five Years in Provence, Toujours Provence [Ed. – Blasts from the 90s past!]
Best non-foodie memoir:
Amy Liptrot, The Outrun – The narrator leaves her dissipated twenties in London and returns to Orkney, in far northern Scotland, to find her footing. Interesting setting, well written.
Best novels:
Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny – For many years Desai’s previous book, The Inheritance of Loss (2006), has been my favorite novel; I’ve waited with much anticipation to see what she would do next. The wait was not short. But Loneliness, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is so worth every bit of time Desai took to conceive and compose it. It’s a big, complicated book about art and identity and love and family and borders. Along with the big themes, she remains fantastic at rendering small moments: passing observations and exchanges so apt and droll you want to keep them at your fingertips.
In fact, this book has many of the same qualities that shone in Inheritance: sly humor, exasperating minor characters who unexpectedly endear themselves to you, and tensions between isolation and community, truth and cant, haves and have-nots. But over two decades those polarities have become more extreme and their effects more pernicious. Desai’s sensibility has grown more weary and embittered (hasn’t everyone’s?) [Ed. – yes], and to encompass all it sets out to, this new novel is necessarily larger, messier, more brooding and less ebullient.
Kevin Barry, The Heart in Winter – Irish love story meets American Western. [Ed. – Good description, good book.]
Niall Williams, This Is Happiness and The Time of the Child – Wonderful reads, with an Irish lilt to the prose that only deepens enjoyment. These are connected and I recommend starting with This Is Happiness.
Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and a Thief – A nail-biter set in the all-too-believable near future; the writing is strong and fresh. For instance: I happen to be aware that there are lots of saccharine quotations out there about hope (even by Dickinson!—“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers…”—ugh). [Ed. – Surprising fighting words!] Majumdar’s take on hope is gloriously unsweet:
Hope for the future was no shy bloom but a blood-maddened creature, fanged and toothed, with its own knowledge of history’s hostilities and the cages of the present. Hope wasn’t soft or tender. It was mean. It snarled. It fought. It deceived. On this day, hope lived in the delivery of gold to a man who might be a scammer, and, perhaps, hope lived also in opening the doors to a thief.
Another great line:
He [the interloper] smelled of the soap Dadu [the protagonist’s father] had used, palming old sliver to new bar, decade after decade.
“Palming old sliver to new bar, decade after decade”—I know Dadu from that line, as well as if I smelled his soap scent. [Ed. – Indeed! And “palming,” which I only usually hear in reference to cards, makes it sound like he’s doing something a bit disreputable.]
Runners-up: Another near-sweep for the Irish!
John Boyne, Mutiny: A Novel of the Bounty [Ed. – Allowing this only because it’s you, Hope. We don’t like the Striped PJ man around here.]
Cólm Toibín, Nora Webster
Mary Costello, Academy Street
Weike Wang, Rental House
Most Unusual Best Novels:
Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte – I thought I didn’t like vampire novels. Yawn. But this novel serves them up veiled in themes of colonialism and environmental exploitation, while also working well as a love story and as plain old horror. [Ed. – Horror one of the most vital genres right now!]
Samantha Harvey, Orbital – Great premise for a novel, and so many stunning descriptions—but too many plotlines are left flying at the end.
Best Classic That Stands Up to Time:
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop – Bestowing superlatives in literature is kind of silly, ever more so as time goes by. Still, if I were forced to name the Greatest American Novelist, I would say Willa Cather. In this novel Father Jean Latour, a French-born priest, gets appointed to serve a vast area of New Mexico just after its annexation. His life in Santa Fe provides the central narrative, and on this armature Cather strings a number of side stories that she took in during her long visits to the area—some harrowing, some strange, stories of depravity or folly or pity, but all told with her characteristic quietness and exactitude. A lesser writer might have expanded one or two of these to fashion a more conventional main plot, say the story of the lost El Greco, or Father Latour’s lifelong dream of building the Santa Fe Cathedral. But Cather avoids imposing such a goal-driven form. The more organic structure that she chooses instead keeps our attention on the place and its inhabitants, emerging gradually into solidity. [Ed. – Such an enticing description!]
One of the book’s brilliant strokes is its prelude on a terrace in Rome, where over dinner three Cardinals and a Bishop are hashing out the jurisdiction of these territories so remote they might as well be on another planet. After this the novel returns to Europe only in brief flashes. Yet these bits of Old World context, in a novel about the relentless development of the American West, are somehow key to its power.
Louise Catherine Breslau, Young Girl Reading by a Window, 1912
Series That Never Disappoint:
Robert Galbraith,* Cormoran Strike series | new in 2025: The Hallmarked Man
Michael Connelly, Harry Bosch and Renée Ballard series | new series in 2025 set on Catalina Island: Nightshade
These series are my jam: character-driven investigator mysteries possessed of zest and depth. Authentic settings, dialogue that people would actually say, multiple unfolding plots.
*Yes, Galbraith is aka J. K. Rowling, and yes, she is toxic on the subject of trans rights. I’m shocked by how a writer with her insight and empathy into human character can be so hateful toward an entire subjugated group of people… yet I continue to love her books. Read Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer if you judge me for this or if you too struggle with this conundrum. [Ed. – I don’t judge you, but I had to give up these books, which I very much enjoyed because she really seems a terrible person, and TERFs suck. I would like to read the Dederer, though.]
Best Potato Chip Fiction:
This is my husband’s term for books that may not be the highest order of literature, but they’re well done and so satisfying to read that you just keep ingesting them like potato chips that you can’t stop eating.
Lian Dolan, Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding – I’ve gone on to read a few more of Dolan’s books, but this one is my favorite, with little gems of observation such as:
Alexa was one of those women who had aged in place, meaning that Abigail could still see the eighties undergrad and the focused career gal and the bold single mom in her sixty-something face. Some people disappeared into their later years’ appearance, no trace of their young days left, thanks to injectables and surgery. But not Alexa. She was all she had been.
Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared, Don’t Let Him In, etc. [Ed. – I have been eyeing these…]
Best Nonfiction:
Lynne Olson, Madame Fourcade’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler
Elizabeth Letts, The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America
Liza Mundy, The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA
Jordan LaHaye Fontenot, Home of the Happy: Murder on a Cajun Prairie
Most Depressing Nonfiction:
Kirk Johnson, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century – Just typing the title, I get depressed all over again. [Ed. – Well, you made me look this up and now I’m intrigued. We really need a moratorium on these nonfiction book subtitles, though.]
Nonfiction Most Guaranteed to Make You Grip the Arms of Your Chair and Be Relieved They’re Not the Gunwales of a Boat:
Hampton Sides, The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook
Children’s Notables:
For a middle-grade novel I’m writing, I’ve been reading some classics of that genre. Here are three that I read or reread last year that wowed me.
William Pène duBois, The Twenty-one Balloons – I loved this inventive book as a kid, and turns out I still do.
Marguerite de Angeli, The Door in the Wall – How did I miss this one during my middle-grade years? Maybe I thought I didn’t like medieval settings: they’re so often gussied up with stale trappings of fantasy. But here the world-building feels solid and genuine. Good read.
Ann Petry, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad – Before reading this I knew only the broad outlines of Tubman’s life, and the fuller story blew me away. It’s billed as a young adult book, but nothing about it felt juvenile. Highly recommend. [Ed. – Fascinating! I did not know Petry wrote for children, too. I will pick this up.]
Wayne Thiebaud, Food Bowls, 2005
Thanks for reading; I welcome your comments on any of the above! And thank you, Dorian, for keeping this wonderful blog and for giving me a turn in your bully pulpit. [Ed. – Ha, nowhere near influential enough for that! Thanks for this piece, Hope!]
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 