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!]
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, his seventh, is bymy longtime friendNat Leach. Nat is a nineteenth-century scholar turned college administrator who has spent the last 8 years reading the books on his shelves in alphabetical order.He lives in Ontario.
Stills from “Mothlight” (Dir, Stan Brakhage, 1963)
Looking back on my “year in review” posts, it occurs to me that I seem to have reached a reading plateau over the past few years: I’m reading more than I was able to some years ago, but still less than I wish I could. [Ed. – But don’t we always read less than we wish we could???] In the end, though, looking at the list below, I am grateful for what I have been able to read, and for this opportunity to write about my rather eclectic reading program.
In total, I read 35 books last year, though as always, this includes some works of philosophy, theory and criticism that I have been working on gradually for some time. In fact, I read only 10 novels, including finishing two that I already wrote about last year, although I did read more short stories and plays than in recent years.
As for my alphabetical reading project (last year was Year 8 if anyone is still counting), I spent pretty much the whole year working on “M” and didn’t quite get through it. But since “M” is a pretty massive literary letter, I am fairly satisfied with that progress, which means that, alphabetically at least, I am just about at the halfway mark of my project. [Ed. – Amazing!]
I notice that many of the reflections below contain memories and associations with my student days; this is perhaps natural, given that the intent of my project is to clear my TBR shelves of the books that have been there for a long time. I am in many cases finally reading those books I wanted to read during the first half of my life, and hopefully in that way achieving some kind of closure on that chapter before moving ahead to the next project (which, not coincidentally, I have already started to plan). [Ed. – Teaser!]
But before I get ahead of myself, here is what I read in 2025:
Marias, Javier – “Bad Nature” (1996) Trans. Esther Allen
I had never read Marias before, but stumbled across this story in an old edition of Granta that I was reading. It is a somewhat bizarre counter-factual narrative about a translator who worked for Elvis while he was shooting a movie in Mexico. [Ed. — !] I read it as a fable about translation itself; the translator strives very hard to render Elvis’s words accurately, but, in a dangerous context, finds himself facing the consequences of those words because the listeners hear only him saying them, and thus, they become his utterances, and no longer Elvis’s. This seems an apt emblem of the plight of translators in general, foregrounding the impossibility of complete transparency in rendering one language through another. Appropriate, of course, that I read it in translation.
Marlowe, Christopher – The Jew of Malta (1589)
It was perhaps a strange choice to read this terribly antisemitic Elizabethan play, but, as it was the only Marlowe play I hadn’t read, the completist in me felt the need to read it. It’s interesting mostly in contrast with Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; while Shakespeare cultivates at least some level of sympathy for Shylock, Marlowe’s Barabas is a combination of an antisemitic stereotype and a Machiavellian schemer-villain common to Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Despite this, Marlowe interestingly makes clear that Barabas’s villainy is largely triggered by egregious injustices done to him by the Governor of Malta. Short on cash for the required tribute to pay off the Turkish empire not to invade the island, the Governor requires all Jews to pay half their wealth in tax. Those who refuse will have all their property confiscated. In fact, there is really nobody in the play who comes off particularly well (for example, there is a great deal of satire involving Catholic priests), but Barabas is clearly presented as the worst. [Ed. – Boo! Dislike!]
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia – One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) Trans. Gregory Rabassa
I’m not sure whether Dorian remembers, but when we were both humble MA students, we had to sit a rather ridiculous “Graduate Record Examination” in literature as part of our applications to PhD programs. [Ed. – He sure does.] One of the few things I remember about this was that it included a section where we had to match up famous opening lines with the books from which they came. Most of the answers could be deduced from context fairly easily (the one about mines in Derbyshire was obviously Sons and Lovers, just as Colonel Aureliano Buendia remembering his father taking him to see ice had to be One Hundred Years of Solitude) but it did seem concerning to me that I hadn’t actually read any of these books, which apparently a well-read graduate student should know. [Ed. – Or know how to pretend they know.] This led me to buy all the books included in this question, although the fact that I am still working on finishing them gives the lie to the “well-read” part. [Ed. – See previous interjection.] Anyway, this is another one off that list, and is by turns great fun, horribly tragic, and totally exhausting (trying to remember all of the familial relations between the characters). And this exhaustion is, I think, part of the point of Marquez’s magic realist style, which contrasts linear history with a cyclical vision of human nature and development. The fictional setting of Macondo goes through a historical pattern that echoes that of many South and Central American countries: colonization, revolution, civil war, Imperialist/capitalist exploitation, etc. Against this backdrop, the Buendia family changes along with the country, even as it continually repeats and revises the past (a process most clearly demonstrated by the countless family members named Aureliano and Jose Arcadio throughout the many generations covered by the book). History changes and progresses, and at the same time, folds back on itself. [Ed. – I would like to read this book again. It’s been 35 years.]
Marquis, Don – archy and mehitabel (1927)
I still remember the day when my Grade 12 English class was assigned a poetry project, and our teacher pulled out a stack of photocopies of American poems (with no context) and asked us to select one. I immediately gravitated towards one called “The Lesson of the Moth.” Written in all lower-case letters with no punctuation, it describes the speaker’s encounter with a moth trying to fly into an electric light. The speaker asks why moths have this self-destructive urge and is told that it is because they crave beauty and excitement: “it is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.” The speaker disagrees with this view, saying that he would “rather have half the beauty and twice the longevity” but also rather ruefully concludes “i wish there was something i wanted as badly as he wanted to fry himself.” This poem resonated strongly with my teenaged self, and only later did I discover that the context is that the speaker is archy, a cockroach who types poems on Don Marquis’ typewriter after hours (hence the lack of upper-case letters or punctuation: archy can’t hold down the shift key). [Ed. — !!!] The poems typically revolve around archy’s interactions with other insects and animals, particularly mehitabel the cat, an aging feline who believes she is the reincarnation of Cleopatra. I realize now that this poem may not be quite as profound as my 17-year-old self found it, but I still love it, and I still have a soft spot for archy. I am also glad that I found a three-in-one volume that also includes archys life of mehitabel and archy does his part, so I still have more of him to look forward to. I also note that it is sad that the creation of archy would not have been possible in this computer age—unless we are to believe that a cockroach could turn on a computer and open Word. But that would be just plain silly, right?
Massinger, Philip – A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625) and The Roman Actor (1626)
It must have been tough writing drama in the wake of some guy named Shakespeare. However well-crafted these plays may be, they invariably suffer by comparison. A New Way to Pay Old Debts is a comedy in which the avaricious Sir Giles Overreach [Ed. – Very subtle, the naming] is tricked by a would-be victim of his greed. It’s enjoyable, but a reader of Shakespeare’s plays can’t help but find the scheme by which the protagonists succeed to be quite simplistic. The Roman Actor is a tragedy of somewhat less merit, which begins with the conceit also explored in “The Mouse-Trap” scene from Hamlet, namely, that drama can be a surreptitious means to cultivate an awareness of guilt or wrongdoing in its audience. It doesn’t do a whole lot with this idea, though, and the play ends with fairly conventional devices depicting romantic jealousy and the downfall of a tyrant. And, frankly (spoiler alert!) [Ed. – No worries, Nat, you’ve read this for all of us, no one is gonna have anything spoiled], when the title character dies even before the final act, it’s hard to avoid the impression that the plot has not been fully thought through.
Maugham, Somerset – The Razor’s Edge (1944)
This book has the dubious distinction of being the book in this project that had been on my TBR pile for the longest time, having been first recommended to me by a friend in high school. [Ed. – That’s when I read it, and I think it’s the perfect time for it.] Fittingly, perhaps, it is a book that I think would land very differently for readers of different ages [Ed. – Aha!]; had I read this when I was younger, I certainly would have sympathized with Larry Darrell, a young man in search of greater meaning in his life than is being offered to him by capitalism and the American Dream. In my older age, though, I identified more with the perspective of Maugham’s narrator, a version of himself who provides a more critical view of Larry and his extended social set, including the compulsive socialite Elliot Templeman, and Larry’s erstwhile fiancée, Isabel Bradley, who has rejected him to retain her social position but still seems to harbour some regret. All in all, I enjoyed the book, although I can’t help but wonder whether the teenager who was so struck by “The Lesson of the Moth” might have found this book’s lessons much more profound than I did upon this reading.
Maupassant, Guy de – “L’Ermite” and “Mademoiselle Perle” (1886)
I have not read a whole lot of Maupassant, although back when I used to teach a course on the short story, I always included one by him. They tend to follow a similar pattern: the narrator/main character notices a seemingly mundane object or event, becomes curious about it, and upon further exploration, finds that it reveals an unexpected depth of insight into human nature, usually by way of a highly brutal or at least sorrowful experience. These stories fit that pattern very well. In “L’Ermite,” a traveller comes across an incredibly remote house on the southern coast of France, and decides to find out what could possibly possess someone to want to live there; he finds out more than he bargained for about the sordid past of the house’s owner. In “Mademoiselle Perle,” a chance incident at a celebration with family friends leads the narrator to uncover a tale of frustrated love. Both stories powerfully depict the normally hidden depths of human emotion that are caused to come to the surface as a result of these events.
Having read the novella/long short story (my bête noire is trying to tell the difference between these categories!) La Petite Roque (which is also fantastic and devastating, by the way), I am now making my way through the other stories in that volume, and am at about the halfway point in the book. [Ed. – More love for Maupassant, I say!]
Mauriac, Francois – Le Désert de l’Amour (1925)
I certainly got my French language reading in this year. This is another one that had been on my shelf for many years, having picked it up at Dorian’s recommendation when I was in grad school, and another one that probably would have landed very differently had I read it when I was younger, as the generational conflict between father and son (both suffering from feelings of unrequited love for the same woman) lies at the heart of this book. [Ed. – I did indeed read this at one point, but so long ago that I have no memory of it at all.] Mauriac reflects on questions of the continuity of the self, and on how people change – and do not change – over time. Despite being written in 1925, the book feels very cinematic, opening in a bar in present day Paris, filling in character histories through extended flashbacks, before concluding back in the present. In this way, we see the impact that the past has had on the development of Raymond Courrèges, whom we see both as a jaded thirty-five-year-old man (in the narrative present) and an irritable and awkward teenager (in the flashbacks), as we learn of the events that caused the latter to grow into the former. [Ed. – Feel like you are delicately, very Canadian-ly, saying “This book is no good.”]
McCarthy, Cormac – The Orchard Keeper (1965)
After that Grade 12 English class (in which we read exclusively American literature), I pretty much stayed away from American literature throughout the rest of my student days. Partly, this was because the only choice I had in my undergraduate program was between Canadian and American literature, and I chose Canadian every time. [Ed. – Imma tariff the fuck out of this post.] Partly, it stemmed from a perception that American literature was filled with toxic masculinity and grotesque celebrations of self-reliance (at least the texts that were being taught at that time often seemed to fit this description). As a result, I am aware that there are some significant gaps in my knowledge of American literature, and Cormac McCarthy was one of these. Although I did buy a three-novels-in-one volume of his work when I was in grad school, I still harboured a vague suspicion that he was not for me. I was surprised, then, by how quickly this book grabbed me. It has an almost dreamlike feel with its elaborate descriptive prose and with the nebulous quality created by its sparse use of proper nouns; most sections of the book are initially presented from the perspective of a “he” and readers have to figure out from the context which character is being referred to, often not getting the solid grounding of a proper noun until a few pages later. The effect of this is to blur the main characters whose lives are interwoven in this book – a bootlegger, a young boy and an old man, all living in rural Tennessee in the 1930s – and challenge the boundaries of identity that separate them. However, also like a dream, many loose ends remain, and I’m not entirely sure that it adds up to much in the end. Appreciating that this is McCarthy’s first novel, though, I look forward to exploring his later work; I still have Suttree and Blood Meridian in that three-novels-in-one volume.
Meredith, George – The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859)
In my final semester as an undergraduate, my friends and I, as a study break (or a study strategy, I’m not really sure), compiled a list of “Big Idiots in English Literature.” [Ed. – Strong David Lodge vibes!] At first designed for the Angel Clares and Othellos of the literary world, it soon became quite a voluminous list, as we determined that almost every character in every literary work we had studied over the course of four years had done something to merit inclusion. I mention this only to be clear that when I say that this book features some of the biggest literary idiots I have ever seen, I know whereof I speak. [Ed. – lol!] The plot in a nutshell: Sir Austin Feverel, a big idiot whose wife has run off with a poet, determines to educate his son, Richard, according to a system of his own devising in order to preserve him from the corrupting influence of women. This system of education in turn causes Richard to grow up into a big idiot who gets himself into a great deal of trouble, and runs away with practically the first girl he meets. Along the way, he is aided and abetted by a number of other big idiots, and he also ends up being a big idiot to his wife, who, despite being a version of the Victorian “angel in the house” commits some idiocies of her own.
I should be clear that this is in no way a criticism of the book; the presence of big idiots does not compromise its literary value, but man, does it make the book painful to read at times. Meredith doesn’t get talked about as much as many of his Victorian contemporaries, perhaps because of his more modern perspective, perhaps because his big idiots are not so thoroughly and cathartically tragic in the way that, say, Hardy’s are. Having said that, the painfulness level of this book is pretty close to Hardy at his best, even if it is leavened with a wry cynicism that perhaps more anticipates Oscar Wilde. In the end, it’s one of those books that I enjoyed reading, but really enjoyed finishing (just to get away from the big idiots). [Ed. – I will never read this, but if I ever did it would be because of this review.]
George Stubbs, Gimcrack with John Pratt up on Newmarket Heath, ca. 1765
Miller, Andrew – Now We Shall Be Entirely Free (2018)
This is the book that divided me the most this year, and raised questions about my own reading expectations. On the one hand, I always looked forward to reading the next chapter of this book, and its narrative drive – about the pursuit of an English officer accused of atrocities in the Napoleonic wars – thoroughly gripped me. One night, I binge-read the last 50 pages of the book, which is something I have not done in a long time. On the other hand, many things kept irritating me about the book’s representation of its historical period. At first, it was little things that just didn’t seem to fit the setting of the book in 1809. I began to feel the need to research some of these perceived anachronisms, even as I wondered if they were only bothering me because, as a scholar of Romantic literature, I have spent a lot of time reading about this period, and am perhaps over-sensitive to these details. For example, one of the soldiers swears a great deal – fair enough, I’m sure people swore much more in the 19th century than they do in a Jane Austen novel – but the language used is consistently modern (e.g. “wankers,” which I have now learned only took on its modern meaning in the mid-twentieth century, and “the fuck?” for “what the fuck?” which I certainly had never heard used prior to the 21st century). [Ed. – I feel sure we said “the fuck” in the 90s. Have I misremembered this???] But my most pedantic objection is the fact that the characters discuss the poetry of John Clare. In 1809, Clare would have been only 16 years old, and he did not publish his first book of poetry until 1820. There are also casual references to the future, which seemed to serve no purpose other than winking knowingly at the reader; for example, at one point, a character makes an offhand observation about how this new idea they call “police” might really catch on in the future.
But while I plead guilty to pedantry, I realized that these anachronistic details were not really what was bothering me. Rather, I came to recognize that the source of my frustration was that the characters feel thoroughly modern in their thoughts and actions despite the period setting. The protagonist, an English gentleman who purchased a commission as an officer in the British army, is not in the least rooted in the ideology of that class, and virtually all the characters exhibit attitudes that are much more modern than any that would have been around in 1809 – for example, most of the characters’ attitudes towards sexuality are not simply liberal, but unthinkable for their class and time period.
All of this led me to ask questions, the first and foremost being “does any of this matter?” Should it really affect my enjoyment of the novel if it is not entirely historically accurate? For one thing, I can readily imagine that if Miller had written a draft that rendered 1809 with impeccable period detail – and I should mention, by the way, that he does seem to have done a great deal of research, as evidenced, for example, by a description of the conditions of child labour in the period that tallies very closely with contemporary accounts – his editors would likely have compelled him to revise it extensively anyway, given that most modern readers would not be able to follow many period details of language and custom.
So, perhaps what my objections amount to is the fact that the book belies its appearance as a “historical novel”; to my mind, it does not reflect on the period in which it is set in any meaningful way. Which leads to the next questions: “if it’s not a historical novel, is it something else?” and “could that something else be considered good and enjoyable in its own way?” There is indeed a lot to like about the book, especially, for me, its thrilling climax. So, in the end, I guess I would say that I liked it, but felt like it could have been something more than it was, while also acknowledging that this could be an unfair expectation on my part. [Ed. – Ok this fascinates me, as a huge fan of the book who now feels the need to revise his opinion. The inaccuracies are unfortunate, definitely, but your questions about what this book is in fact doing are what really hit home. It does seem a book marked by a modern idea of trauma, that’s for sure.]
Mitchell, W.O. – Roses Are Difficult Here (1990)
I must admit that I only picked up this book because of a reference to it in a Tragically Hip song (“Impossibilium”) but given my fondness for all things CanLit, I expected I would enjoy this novel about a small town in the Alberta foothills in the 1950’s that is turned upside down by the arrival of a sociologist conducting a study. And this book does have plenty of that Canadian small-town charm and humour, but, like Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, Roses Are Difficult Here was another book that kind of gnawed at me. In this case, the novel feels like it is based in a kind of anti-woke panic avant la lettre. [Ed. – That tracks with the little I know of Mitchell’s personality FWIW.] The sociologist is villainized for suggesting modern ideas, such as the implication that the town maybe ought to be less racist towards the nearby Indigenous community, and that the feeling of unity in which all the town’s inhabitants take pride is actually based on its exclusion of outsiders, such as the half-Indigenous garbage collector, Rory Napoleon. Having said that, the scene in which Rory stampedes his goats through the town in retribution for his treatment at the hands of the townsfolk is definitely the highlight of the book. But aside from giving Rory a chance to air his grievances at a town meeting, the book clearly sides with the townsfolk, and, written in 1990, it seems nostalgic for a past where nobody complained about casual racism and sexism. [Ed. – Strong white guy vibes.]
And since I have already demonstrated my penchant for pedantry, I might as well lean into it: Mitchell begins a chapter set in the autumn of 1957 using the following passage full of historical detail:
The Russians had just shocked the world with the announcement of their successful satellite… The previous June, the Liberal government had been defeated by the conservatives after fifteen unbroken years in power; Canada had lost the world hockey championship to Sweden; the Milwaukee Braves had taken the World Series…
I concede Sputnik and the Braves, but Sweden did not defeat Canada in hockey even though they did win the championship – Canada and the U.S. boycotted the event being held in the U.S.S.R. that year in protest of the Soviet occupation of Hungary. And the Liberals had been in power since 1935 prior to the 1957 election, which actually makes it more like 22 consecutive years. OK, thank you, I just had to get that out. [Ed. – I’m glad you did! And that “Does no one edit these books???” was already a thing in 1990. Also, that sample paragraph is terrible!]
Modiano, Patrick – The Search Warrant (1997) Trans. Joanna Kilmartin
There seems to be an unwritten rule that every Holocaust-themed book translated into English must have its title altered unrecognizably from the original. Usually, the impulse is towards a title that moralizes or sensationalizes the narrative, but in this case it’s just baffling. Originally published as Dora Bruder, this book does not include a literal search warrant, although it is admittedly concerned with other kinds of official documentation used to give a legal veneer to otherwise unjustifiable deportations. And on the other hand, the title could only with difficulty be twisted to refer by analogy to Modiano’s own search for evidence of the titular 15-year-old Jewish girl who ran away from home during the Nazi occupation of Paris and was later deported to Auschwitz. In any case, the book is a fascinating exploration of memory and the way the traces of the past persist into the present, as Modiano weaves in his own experiences of Paris with what he has been able to learn about Dora’s experiences, and, more importantly, with what is not known, and will never be known about them. [Ed. – Modiano is not my guy, but you might be happy to know that at some point—maybe after the Nobel win?—the publisher reissued it under its original title.]
Piñero, Claudia – Elena Knows (2007)
Every year, I scale back my ambitions for Women in Translation month in August, and this year, I finally came up with a plan that I could complete before the end of August: one relatively short book (spoiler alert: it was so good, I couldn’t put it down and ended up finishing it within two weeks). I’d first heard about this book on, I believe, the first ever podcast of One Bright Book (those folks are great, huh?) and was sold on it. [Ed. – Now that you mention it, they are kind of great.] Nor did it disappoint; while the premise may not exactly sound like a page-turner (woman with Parkinson’s resolves to investigate her daughter’s murder), it is in fact a brilliant and devastating book. It’s a premise that compels readers to pause and take notice of mundane activities that most of us take for granted, increasingly drawing us into Elena’s perspective as she tries to find answers. I won’t risk spoilers by saying any more, but this is quite possibly the best book I read this year, and as someone who has a track record for not getting on with books written in this century, that is high praise indeed. [Ed. – This is one of those books that I like more and more as I think about it. You’ve made me want to re-read it!]
Barbara Hepworth, Kneeling Figure (1932)
Looking ahead to 2026
What’s next for me? Well, after M comes N, then O (both mercifully light letters, by the way)… but, as I mentioned last year, this reading project was really front-loaded in the first half of the alphabet, so even though I have almost reached the alphabetical mid-point of my project, I am actually over 2/3 of the way through. In fact, were it not for two very significant undertakings at the end of the “P” shelf (hint: Proust and Pynchon), I might be tempted to consider myself nearly home and dry. With about 75 books remaining, optimistically, I might imagine finishing this project within 2-3 years (keeping in mind that this was conceived as a 5-year project, and it won’t be finished in 10, so any optimism is pretty clearly misplaced).
But as I said at the top, I’ve already started to think about my next utterly ridiculous reading project, and, in fact, probably spent far too much of my valuable reading time this year planning it out and acquiring the necessary books. [Ed. – Nat, that is important and necessary work, especially the acquiring books part.] It may require a bit too much space to explain my plan fully here, but it will involve 250 novels, and I may still need some recommendations to fill out this number, so perhaps if Dorian hasn’t yet had enough of my nonsense, he will let me write another guest post about it later in the year. [Ed. – He 100% will.] In the meantime, Brian Moore and Toni Morrison are the only authors standing in the way of my getting to the second half of the alphabet. [Ed. – Ooh such good authors! Thanks for another wonderful piece, Nat!]
I came down from the high of my first months as a former professor. Not because I longed for my old job (though I do miss being around students and in the classroom), but because I had to face the uncertainty of how to keep body and soul together going forward. I kept hustling, buckled down to my various gigs, including, this month, a number of hours at a local bookstore. It felt so good to be back in that environment again. That excitement buoyed me as the days grew short; psychologically, I kept my head above water, which has not always been the case in Decembers past. And I read a few books, some of them excellent.
Andrew Wyeth, Dusk (1978)
Sarah Campion, Makeshift (1940)
Now this is interesting. A novel from the early part of WWII set in desperate early Weimar Germany; racially-divided South Africa; and puritan New Zealand, about a German Jewish woman who escapes the Nazis in body but not in mind, written by a non-Jewish British writer. Campion (the pen name of Mary Rose Alpers; no relation, as I briefly hoped, to Jane Campion) spent most of the 1930s teaching English in Berlin, where many of her students were Jews. She was forced out of the country in 1937 when she refused to identify those students—part of a long life of progressive political activism, including later protesting the Vietnam War.
Charlotte Herz, her protagonist—smart, funny, neurotic, judgmental, flinty when she needs to be—is not an easy character to like. (The novel is bracingly uninterested in this idea.) Charlotte does some things—one thing in particular—that are pretty terrible, but also maybe the things that needed to be done to survive. She casts aspersions on most of the people she meets. She is an ungrateful exile. These facts, combined with the disconnect between author and character, have led some to dismiss the book as appropriative. One such reader is Sarah Shieff, who wrote the afterword to this new reissue. I have to say, as a Jew, I don’t find this to be the case. In fact, I have beef with Shieff, who misreads the book badly, in my opinion, showing herself to be unable to distinguish Herz’s voicing of antisemitic views from her belief in them. And having read a lot about German Jews in the 1920s and 30s I found Makeshift thoroughly compelling and plausible, including its first-person voice. That said, the writer Campion most reminds me of is also non-Jewish, another woman who had a lot to say about the treatment of minorities in the British Empire: Doris Lessing. Campion shares Lessing’s frankness about female sexual desire and how psychologically damaging it was to express in a period when male domination was even more overt than today.
Brad Bigelow, of the Neglected Books account on Bluesky, rescued Makeshift from near-total oblivion (I think there were only a handful of copies left in the world when he found it), and has published it in his invaluable Recovered Books series. I’m grateful to him for sending me a copy. May it not sink without a trace this time around.
Rosalyn Drexler, To Smithereens (1972)
“I shout, ‘I’d do anything for you, you Glamazon!’ And she says, ‘Anything? Well then, suck my pussy.’ And I’d have to do it, because she’s the champ, the winner, the goddess, the diva who makes me dive.”
Do you want to read this 1970s novel about women wrestlers and the men who love them, written by the painter, sculptor, playwright, novelist, nightclub singer, and yes, wrestler Rosalyn Drexler, gloriously resurrected by the new reprint press Hagfish Books? Hell yeah you do!
Daniel Elkind, Dr Chizhevsky’s Chandelier: The Decline of the USSR and other Heresies of the Twentieth Century (2025)
My friend James, owner of the mighty Leviathan Books here in St Louis, lent me his copy of this Sebaldesque mediation on some of, in the author’s words, “the undesirables” of 20th century history. It’s a short book, sometimes funny, always engrossing. Yet ultimately a little thin. Maybe I read it too quickly, but sitting here now, just a few weeks later, I can’t remember what Elkind concludes about his cast of characters. The strongest parts of the book are the autobiographical sections on his coming of age as a newly arrived immigrant to the US after the collapse of the Soviet Union and, especially, his memories of his parents and grandparents. Like so many in his generation who grew up in the aftermath of the disappearance of a seemingly unshakable social, political, and cultural world—will this be my daughter???—Elkind has a keen sense for history’s inescapable contingency. There are always so many paths not taken.
Alexander Chizhevsky, by the way, was born in what is now Poland in the Russian Empire and died in the USSR. A biophysicist, he founded a discipline he called “heliobiology,” the study of the effect of the sun’s cycles on plant life and human activity alike. For example, he linked the ebb and flow of battle that he experienced on the Eastern Front in WWI to solar flares. Much later, in 1940, Stalin got wind of this theory (never a good thing) and demanded Chizhevsky recant (it being inimical to Marxist-Leninist theories of history). When Chizhevksy refused, he was sent to the gulag and, after eight terrible years, to a “rehabilitation” program in Kazakhstan. His “chandelier” is an ionizer—a tool still in use, even though no one can agree whether it promotes health.
Undesirables, it seems, stick around in unexpected ways—especially when they have someone like Elkind to memorialize them.
Joan Silber, Secrets of Happiness (2021)
Came home from the library; sat down to read the first page or two, as one does; next looked up to find that an hour had passed; realized I would have to set other reading aside until I finished, which I did the next morning. Like most of Silber’s recent work, Secrets of Happiness uses ring structure: each chapter follows a character referenced, however fleetingly, in the previous. It begins with a middle-aged woman who learns that her husband has children with a woman he met on his travels in Asia and that he’s helped bring them all to the US. She kicks him out, files for divorce, travels overseas, sends cryptic messages to her grown children, who reluctantly meet their half-siblings. Lots of drama, but no melodrama. Laurie Colwin vibes. I liked this a lot.
Martin Lemelman, Mendel’s Daughter: A Memoir (2006)
Illustration of the author’s mother’s experiences during the Nazi occupation of eastern Poland (today Ukraine), compiled from a video testimony he had her make when she suffered a broken foot in the late 1980s and needed to be occupied. It’s hard to compete with Art Spiegelman’s MAUS, and Lemelman doesn’t try. He keeps his interactions with his mother to a minimum, and draws in a beautiful, almost gentle pen and ink style that is decidedly not cartoonish or abstract. Despite these differences, Mendel’s Daughter had to have been overshadowed by the earlier book, since I hadn’t heard of it until recently, and I’ve read a lot of Holocaust graphic novels. That is a shame, because it’s absolutely worth reading. The story of how Gusta Lemelman (née Schaechter) survived the war is, as so often in such stories, remarkable, harrowing, miraculous. Together with three of her siblings, Gusta hid in “graves,” deep pits dug into the forests near their hometown of Germakivka. Of great interest is her description of prewar life, especially the mingling of Jews and non-Jews, and how this diversity both fell apart but also persisted during the Nazi occupation, as some of the locals were instrumental in keeping Gusta and her siblings alive during their time in hiding.
Joan Silber, Household Words (1980)
Wrote about this here. A blend of Vivian Gornick and Elaine Kraf. Satisfying and interesting. I want to write about Silber at length. (Like, for money and with the help of an editor.) Anyone interested? Where should I pitch?
Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz, Berlin Shuffle (1937/2019) Trans. Philip Boehm (2025)
If you haven’t read Boschwitz’s Passenger, start there. If you have, then you’ll also enjoy this, his first novel. I had more to say about it here. Tl; dr: solid end-of-Weimar novel, if at times unsure quite what it wants to do. Considering the conditions under which it was written, an accomplishment.
Mason Coile, Exiles (2025)
A locked-room mystery set on Mars, Exiles has the pacing of a thriller and the uncanniness of a horror novel alongside the fascination with otherness that characterizes sff. The first three humans to make it to Mars arrive to find their mission compromised from the start. The bots who have been sent ahead to build a research station have taken human names, genders, and personalities. Plus, they changed the door entry codes. Oh, and one of them is missing, and might have destroyed the station’s lab. Unless someone—or something—creepier did it… Coile’s absorbing novella proves that humans might be able to leave Earth, but they can never escape themselves.
Nicola Griffith, Stay (2002)
Earlier last year, I read The Blue Place (1998), the first of Griffith’s Aud Torvingen crime trilogy, recently reissued in attractive new editions. Aud (rhymes with “crowd”) was born in Norway, grew up at various embassy posts with her ice queen diplomat mother, and now lives in Atlanta. She was a cop for a while, but now she’s independently wealthy (seems good, why don’t more people do this?) and a sometime PI. Lee Child himself said that if Reacher had a sister, she’d by Aud. She is indeed utterly competent, both in creating (she renovates houses, builds furniture, cooks like a pro) and destroying (she beats up a lot of bad guys and enjoys it).
The Blue Place is terrific, despite its heartbreaking ending. Stay finds Aud licking her wounds in the mountains of North Carolina, able to get out of her head only because an old friend begs her to find his missing girlfriend. Aud reluctantly heads to New York, on what she assumes will be a day-long mission. And she does in fact find the girlfriend. But turns out there’s more at stake, which leads Aud on a chase that ends, much to my surprise, in Arkansas. The scenes there are pretty well handled. (I doubt Griffith has spent much time there.) Stay is baggier than its predecessor, and a final plot development suggests a new turn for the third and final book, the library copy of which is sitting on the desk beside me. As best I can tell, disability will factor in that book (Griffith has MS and is a prominent disability rights activist). I didn’t even mention that Aud is queer, a fact central to the series. Today she would probably overtly identify as neurodivergent, too. All of which makes me curious to see what will happen to Aud.
These books seem to have made no impact on first release, as judged by the fact that each book was published by a different press. It would be nice if these reissues brought more them more readers.
Vasily Surikov, Minusinsk steppe (1873)
Ken Liu, All That We See or Seem (2025)
Got this from the library after seeing it on some sort of best sff list. Maybe one by Lisa Tuttle? Could that be right? Anyway, this is the beginning of a new series about a hacker named Julia Z, whose back story is interesting. Her mother, an immigrant from China, was a famous activist determined to hold America to its ideals. But her parenting was a disaster—imagine a razor-focused Mrs. Jellyby—leading her daughter, our protagonist, into the hands of an anarchist group with its own ideas of keeping America accountable. That’s where Julia learned her tech prowess—but also experienced bitter disappointment when the group’s idea of retributive justice turns out to be a sham. At the beginning of All That We See or Seem, she’s been in hiding for a long time, until a lawyer digs her out and begs her to find his wife, a famous “oneirofex” or dream weaver who has gone missing. As best I understand it, these artists use AI to tap into and personalize mass longings to create updated 60s-type “happenings” that cater to people’s hunger to be together in person while still being isolated.
I didn’t know there was a genre called “tech-thriller” but all the reviews I looked at online use it, so I guess that’s a thing. Seems like readers are divided on the book—fair bit of love but also a lot of hate—which doesn’t surprise me, given the book’s inconsistencies, and supports my view that this is an interesting and flawed work. Liu apparently is or has been a lawyer and a software engineer in addition to a writer and translator, and these experiences are brought to bear in the confidence of the story’s tech and legal aspects. Too bad that much of this material—reflections on identity politics, political resistance, surveillance culture, and the ethics of AI—are awkwardly dumped into the text. Even more obviously than most sf, this is a book about America today, and I’m not convinced a novel was the best way for Liu to say what he wanted to say. Still, I’ll give the next one a try. I hope that someone has sent a copy to David Cronenberg: he could do a lot with this material.
Paul Cornell, Witches of Lychford (2015)
Novella about a flyspeck English village that, unknown to most of its inhabitants, sits at the fault-lines of the ordinary world and magical realms, both good and evil. Even if the good people of Lychford knew the truth, they probably wouldn’t pay attention anyway, preoccupied as they are with a big decision. Should they allow a Walmart-type supermarket to open in town? Opinions are split; feelings run high. No matter what side they take, though, everyone admits there’s something about the guy the company has sent to convince the locals. He’s kind of… demonic. The joke being, of course, that he really is. Only an unlikely trio—a grumpy old woman who is in fact a witch; the new priest, posted to her childhood home, where no one knows that she’s lost her faith; and the priest’s former best friend, an atheist who has started a shop selling wiccan paraphernalia—can save the day.
Cornell has written several sequels, and I get the feeling the series might amount to something. And yet I haven’t checked them out of the library yet. Has anyone read these? Should I carry on?
Georges Simenon, The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin (1931) Trans. Siân Reynolds (2014)
Two kids in provincial Belgium—one spoiled and rich, one poor and susceptible—scheme to knock over the bar where they spend evenings pretending they’re adults and trying to make it with a female employee, the dancer of the title. But when they break in after closing time, they find a body on the floor. They freak out, do all the wrong things, eventually get arrested. But surely they’re not guilty. Right? And where is Maigret? This is the one where he doesn’t show up until about 2/3 of the way through, and the way Simenon pulls it off is ingenuous.
Miklós Bánffy, They Were Counted [The Transylvanian Trilogy: Volume I] (1934) Trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (1999)
In my past life I lived on an estate at the foot of the Carpathians, shooting, attending balls, shaking my head at hotheaded fellows who love nothing more than a duel, checking in at the casino when in town during the winter season, watching the woman of my dreams ice-skating with a hated rival, tending to my peasants (sometimes assiduously, sometimes with dereliction), etc., etc. For this reason, I couldn’t get enough of Banffy’s novel, the first part of a trilogy that has been giving me the most reading pleasure I’ve had in a long while.
Although Bánffy wrote the books in the 1930s and 40s, in increasingly perilous financial and bodily straits, he set them in the first decade of the 20th century, the end days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (I’m taking part in a year-long reading of Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and it is almost comical how different in style and ideology these texts are, even as both consider, one with regret, one with irony, the dissolution of the same state.)
There are many books about this time and place. In my experience, most focus on the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy. One of the many interests of this book, then, is that it shows English-language readers a lesser-known world. Yet it is similar to other late 19th century novels. Like War and Peace, They Were Counted toggles between the personal and the political. The two main characters are cousins. One, having recently been elected to parliament, takes on the difficult task of reforming the family estates (bringing new scientific theories to the harvesting of timber, founding an agricultural cooperative), in part to distract himself from his seemingly hopeless love affair with a married woman. The other, a promising composer, slides into dissipation when he is unable to marry the woman of his dreams (another cousin—which sounds weird, but tbh pretty much all of the characters are related in some way). Some readers seem to find the details about the Hungarian parliament’s bitter, uneasy relationship to Vienna dull, but those people probably don’t like the historical excurses in Tolstoy either. As best I can tell—and I ought to know, given my past life, but, you know, details get hazy with the transmigration of a soul—Transylvania was at once the hinterland of Hungary and its beating, symbolic heart. Losing it to Romania in the Treaty of Trianon was a loss Hungarians never got over. Anyway, the novel is much interested in what it means to be part of a ruling elite that is both dominant (over the Romanian-speaking majority) and subordinate (to the Austrians) and part of a large, precarious multiethnic political entity. Its politics are as hard to pin down as you might expect from that description. (Imagine if the Anglo-Irish were part of the European Union, maybe.)
Did I mention there are also a lot of balls, duels, hunts, and love affairs in this book? SO GOOD.
BTW, this is neither here nor there, but I am reading these in the Everyman Library editions, which are lovely and even have that charming though in my opinion fairly useless sewn ribbon, but which include the most useless map I’ve ever encountered. Regular readers know that I love a map, and wish for them in every novel, regardless of subject matter. But this one includes none of the estates that form most of the locations and almost none of the towns. So frustrating!
There are many ways in which America under T***p II echoes 1930s Germany, but more and more I think that the self-immolation of Austro-Hungary is the better comparison. Which is to say that you can read these books (or at least this one: I’m not finished volume 2 yet) to get perspective on the present—and to escape it altogether.
Monastery in Radna, Transylvania circa 1900
How about you? Where did you live in a past life? And have you read any of these books?
“You really are a character,” Annie Marantz said. Annie was a wiry woman, barely five feet tall; at thirty, she was only four years older than Rhoda, but she was sinewy all over; she looked as though someone had chewed on her like an orange.
This passage from the beginning of Joan Silber’s debut novel, Household Words (1980), struck me as the kind of thing you don’t see much anymore. Feels like novels rooted in descriptions of the world, and told in third-person past tense (glorious past tense, how I miss it) have become rare, even old-fashioned. Of course, Silber might have had that sense herself: after all, she titled her first novel, as the jacket copy of the first edition puts it, after the magazine published by Charles Dickens.
Rosalyn Drexler, Night Visitors (1988)
Silber, as I am starting to learn, having fallen into a deep dive of her works, is an unshowy and excellent writer. Look at what she does in these two sentences. She knows how to use a semi-colon, for one thing. The three clauses of the second sentence move briskly from description to judgment: “Annie was a wiry woman, barely five feet tall; at thirty, she was only four years older than Rhoda, but she was sinewy all over; she looked as though someone had chewed on her like an orange.” To be wiry is not necessarily to be small, but Silber implies that this is the case by mentioning Annie’s height, a seemingly unnecessary qualifier of the first independent clause. “Wiry” sometimes connotes toughness, but at this point in the sentence, we don’t yet have any indication that the adjective is meant to elucidate personality rather than merely describe physical appearance.
The second clause refines our thinking, though. From size we move to age (indirectly learning Rhoda’s). I kind of love the little storm of numbers in this sentence. Annie is thirty: not old by our lights today but older then than now. And older than Rhoda. But what matters to Silber is how the years show themselves on the body. Annie is “sinewy all over”: tough, indigestible. “Sinewy” made me return to “wiry,” forced me to think about the difference between these near synonyms. In this case, it seems worse to be sinewy than wiry. We’re not talking about Annie’s muscles. This isn’t a description of her fortitude. We’re talking about someone whose vitality has been squeezed out. Annie is pulp. She seems to have taken a licking from life already. This is all made clear in the third clause, the simile that compares the woman to a chewed-on orange. Juicy oranges don’t need much chewing. They go down easy. But when they dry out and their pith thickens, they’re harder to enjoy. I picture Annie with a bad tan: probably a fanciful association sparked by the colour orange.
Annie is a recurrent character, but not an especially important one. Even here she serves mostly to help us see Rhoda more clearly. Let’s not forget what Annie says before she’s described: “You really are a character.” It’s not just Annie who thinks so. The novel thinks about Rhoda this way. While Annie seems to speak half-admiringly, half-condescendingly, something like “Oh, Rhoda, you are just not like any of the women in our circle, and frankly that makes me a little uneasy,” the text offers the claim as a simple statement of fact. Rhoda really is a character—the character. We follow her through twenty eventful years, focusing on her experiences and responses, even as we never get fully inside her head. And yet the novel is being more than matter of fact here. Not just describing, but prescribing. It’s saying that Rhoda is worthy of being a character, of being the main character. Coming at the end of several decades of flourishing Jewish American literature, much of it written by men and famously invested in that point of view, Silber gives us something new. After Herzog and Augie March and Zuckerman and Alexander Portnoy Silber offers Rhoda Taber, a housewife living through the first stages of postwar American Jewish assimilation and suburban living.
Rhoda, who speaks Yiddish with her father and English with her social set and thoroughly Americanized daughters, is fascinatingly contradictory. She leaves her job as a schoolteacher when she has children, but her time as a teacher of French shapes her whole life, symbolizing her difference. [Careful, spoiler incoming!] After her husband’s untimely death, she returns to work, even though she doesn’t need the money. Nor does she remarry, even though friends fall over themselves to set her up, and even though she meets a man she enters a longish relationship with. She won’t sleep with him, though, because he’s not desirable to her. Not physically, but emotionally. She thinks of him as uncouth, even violent when she witnesses him doing business.
But this doesn’t mean Rhoda rejects conventions. She’s not like her friend Harriet, an unmarried no-fucks-to-give woman who encourages Rhoda to take art classes with her, even though she has no illusions about her abilities. (“Let’s face it,” Harriet says flatly, about her efforts to sculpt a dog, “it looks like a turd.”) Harriet and Rhoda vacation in the Catskills. Is Harriet gay? We never get the chance to find out. Despite her homophobia (she worries about her older daughter’s friendships in unpleasant ways) Rhoda feels queer to me. Don’t get me wrong, she’s conformist. But only superficially. In the things that matter, she’s out of step with everyone around her. Rhoda has an ugly side, for sure. She responds with disgust to the rumor that her neighbor has been having it off with a delivery boy: not because of the age discrepancy (though we don’t know how old he is) or the class difference, but because she cannot countenance the woman’s sexual desire. She struggles with her daughters, never abusing them outright, but picking fights or welcoming the fights they pick, despairing at the older one’s inability or unwillingness to follow Rhoda’s own life path and contemptuous of the younger’s need to make others like her. At the same time, she admires their independence, their unwillingness to be forced, by men in particular, into situations they don’t want to be in. The book I thought of most as I read Household Words was Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, another important Jewish book od the1980s. Silber’s novel feels like the fictional version of Gornick’s memoir of postwar American Jewish female rebellion, but in this case written from the mother’s side.
In the end, it’s not family life or economic success or cultural assimilation that Rhoda struggles most with but her own body: she spends the last years of the 1950s, and thus the last sections of the book, increasingly ill and at the mercy of the medical establishment. We leave her as she is leaving everything she knows. It’s a stark ending—and fitting. Rhoda Taber is not a nice woman. Nor a shrewish or disagreeable one. An interesting one. A real character.
At the beginning of A House of Dynamite, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, now in theaters and on Netflix, an intercontinental ballistic missile shows up on the radar screens of a tracking station in Alaska. Is it a test? A malfunction? If, as it soon becomes clear, it’s real, who launched it? These questions are picked up by the team at the White House that monitors threats to the country. Soon the military command, the Department of Defense, FEMA, and other agencies are involved. They have less than twenty minutes to shoot the missile down before the ten million people in and around Chicago are incinerated. When the ground-based interceptors fail, a decision falls to the President (Idris Elba, known to the audience only as a voice until the last third of the film). Should he order a retaliatory strike (and if so, against whom)? Perhaps unsurprisingly, given its love of expertise, the film presents the President as a mediocrity doing his best but outmatched by the enormity of the situation.
Andy Warhol, Atomic Bomb (1965)
The movie drives hard and fast. It’s suspenseful and frightening. But its real interest is in something seemingly much less exciting: expertise. On one level, A House of Dynamite is a paean to experts, people with specialized knowledge that guides informed yet decisive action. In the current moment our American oligarchic and fascistic kleptocracy, the days of the experts often seems to be over, a victim of a long-running war against education, perpetrated by privileged people who have benefitted from it. How thrilling, then, to see Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), Deputy National Security Advisor Jake Bearington (Gabriel Basso), or even General Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts, he of recent Criterion Closet fame: “take your dissonance like a man) assert the value of reasoned protocol. Following procedure never seemed so exciting.
On another level, though, the film shows nothing but the failure of expertise. Characters struggle to communicate with each other, often in the most banal ways: someone important is out of the office; phone calls break up; conflicting video conferencing systems can’t be patched together. And they fail to see eye-to-eye. As their confidence in the country’s preparedness fades with every minute, they argue over the merits of a counterstrike. Will it stop further attacks? Or bring about the end of the world?
How does the film’s form relate to this content? To what extent is it an example of expertise? It’s certainly professional. A House of Dynamite moves quickly, even neatly, shifting between locations and institutions without ever leaving the audience confused. This clarity is the more impressive in that Bigelow has split the film into three chapters. Each tells the same story, but highlights different characters. There are a lot of off-screen voices in this film—people on conference calls, crackling out of microphones. We get the pleasure of putting faces to those names as we revisit earlier scenes from different perspectives.
Despite its looping, non-linear telling—a counterpoint to the relentless ticking of the clocks down to zero and annihilation—A House of Dynamite is efficient to a fault, offering minimum requisite humanizing beats to its characters. These moments often involve children. Captain Walker takes her son’s plastic dinosaur to work after he solemnly presents it to her on her way out the door; later she winces when slipping on her heels after passing through security outside her office before pausing, stork-like, to dig out the offending figurine which has must have fallen into a shoe when both were in her bag. A fighter pilot stationed in the Pacific stuffs the teddy bear he’s bought for his kid into his locker, only to fail to notice that it slides to the floor when his attention is distracted by the alarm that indicates a sudden mission. This tendency to use children as signifiers of the personal reaches its height when the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) kills himself after realizing that he will be unable to save his daughter, who lives in Chicago.
These decisions are mawkish (though the man’s last call with his daughter is affecting: he understandably sees no reason to tell her she is likely to die within minutes). But that’s not the problem. The problem is how calculating the film is in humanizing its characters, how minimal and cliché its sense of what the human means. I found this especially disheartening in a movie that claims to abhor the destruction of human life.
In terms of its form, well, there’s professional, and then there’s polished. In trying to depict what stands to be lost in the event of the unthinkable, A House of Dynamite is as instrumental as the failed way of thinking that reduces weighty decisions to options in an if-then chart. Hard to imagine a less shaggy movie. (No “few small beers” here.) I was left wishing for some loose ends.
That might seem crazy given that probably soon-to-be notorious open ending. We never learn what the President decides to do. Or if Chicago is obliterated (though it sure seems likely). Or We if the repeated claim that “sometimes these weapons malfunction or don’t detonate” is wishful thinking. Sitting in the theater, I felt a brief flare of frustration. But how is a film like this supposed to end? After all, it argues that building a house full of dynamite and then deciding to keep living in it is insane. To that end, the missile must remain anonymous, its source forever unknown. The Russians deny it. The Chinese deny it. The North Koreans are unreachable. Ana Park (Greta Lee), the expert on that country, lays out a convincing scenario in which the North Koreans might be motivated to launch a suicide attack. But nobody knows. The film argues that it doesn’t matter. The possibility of unmotivated mass destruction is simply built into a world with nuclear weapons.
This choice on the film’s part, however, means that politics is off the table. Despite a good scene in which the Deputy National Security Advisor has a tense, heartfelt, but ultimately inconclusive phone call with a Russian counterpart, geopolitical maneuvering or negotiating are rendered inoperative by the bomb’s anonymity. The attempt to game out—in less than twenty minutes—possible consequences of preemptively launching a return strike, or of choosing not to, turns into abstraction, a kind of amplified trolley problem that the film doesn’t have the chops or stomach to develop. (Clearly, though, the tough-minded hawk, sitting in a bunker somewhere in the South Pacific, isn’t to be trusted. He puts eight sugars in his enormous travel mug of coffee.) I’m not sure what Bigelow had in mind by putting the North Korea expert, who fields calls from frightened officials on her day off, at a reenactment of the Battle of Gettysburg with her pre-teen son. Is the idea that the Civil War was as senseless as a nuclear attack? Or, on the contrary, that however terrible that war, it was at least a fight with dignity, valor, etc.? Or that any terrible event will eventually be subsumed into nostalgia and/or the politics of commemoration?
I said before that this is a frightening movie. It induces feelings of panic, helplessness, sorrow, and rage. And that, more than any mourning of the utopia of expertise, makes A House of Dynamite a movie for America in 2025.
But only in the worst, paralyzing way. Admittedly, paralysis constitutes much of what I at least experience most often these days. But that’s not the only way we can respond just now. And not the one that we need to emphasize if we are going to change the mess we’re in rather than just experience it. What would this film be like if it valued thinking more than the compartmentalization of calm professionalism and abject terror?
What if Bigelow or her writer Noah Oppenheim had read Elaine Scarry’s Thinking in an Emergency (2011)? There Scarry argues that America has dangerously normalized the idea of emergency as exception, and therefore as something that requires citizens to set aside democratic participation for unchecked executive action. She offers examples from around the world where careful but decentralized emergency preparedness results in mutual aid among citizens, not force from the State.
Still from A House of Dynamite (2025). Lotta phones, lotta screens.
The protocols devised in the US to respond to nuclear attack—the nuclear codes; the handbook with its menu of increasingly drastic responses; the double-checking of identities; the sequestering of the chain of command, hell, the very idea of a chain of command—are designed to protect a few when the many die a terrible death. The film’s last scene shows buses of officials designated as indispensable arriving at a bunker in the Pennsylvania countryside. (It’s clear that what matters is position, not person: thus the inclusion in the film of a FEMA employee based in Chicago (Moses Ingram), responsible for disaster response; the woman has only been in the job a short time; her colleagues are actively hostile when they realize that she, not they, will be sent to supposed safety.) We get no sense of what will happen to those individuals should that bomb in fact land. The protocols of response to a nuclear attack, like the film that shows them to us, is governed by ruthlessness. The only challenge to that brute instrumentality—and the only thing that could count as a loose end in the movie—is that Park, the North Korea expert, stumbles off the bus with her son. It’s a hint of human possibility in this fascinating but inhuman film..
Here is my introduction to Episode 38 of the podcast I co-host with Rebecca Hussey and Frances Evangelista, One Bright Book.
Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta, Preparation for a Bullfight (1903)
Our book today is Miaow, written in 1888 by the great Spanish 19th-century realist Benito Pérez Galdós and recently published by NYRB Classics in a lively new translation by Margaret Jull Costa.
Galdós, whose long and productive life lasted from 1843 – 1920, was born in the Canary Islands, which perhaps gave him an outsider’s perspective on the Madrid society he scrutinized in more than 80 novels.
Miaow has a cast of, well, maybe not thousands but a lot of characters. Ramón Villaamil has served the state his whole life, but he’s lost his job in the tax office due to changing political fortunes just two months short of qualifying for his pension. He solicits possible patrons and haunts his old office, not just to get a job but also to escape his household, where he lives in an uneasy truce with his wife, Doña Pura, their adult daughter, Abelarda, and his sister-in-law Milagros. Completing the ménage is Luis, the son of a second daughter who died young. Luis’s father is a man named Victor, a bad penny who has never been in the picture, indeed whose name is never spoken in the home. The novel kicks into gear when Victor turns up and inveigles his way into the household, eventually sowing great unhappiness. (Victor is a breathtakingly bad guy—I hope we’ll talk about this.)
These are all interesting characters—so why isn’t the book named after any of them? That would be the usual 19th-century thing. (Jane Eyre, Daniel Deronda, Eline Vere, Anna Karenina,l etc., etc.) Why does it have such an odd title? Who or what does “miaow” refer to, anyway? Well, lots of things. It’s the nickname given by the local wags to the women of the Villaamil household, after their supposedly feline features. I think it’s important, though, that the book isn’t called The Miaows. For the title also extends to Ramón, the paterfamilias—not because of how he looks but of what he believes. MIAOW is an acronym for his mantra that Spain can only be saved by Morality, Income Tax, Additional Import Tariffs, Overhaul of the National Debt, and Work. So already “miaow” references both physiognomy and economy. But there’s more. In addition to being a noun, miaow is also a verb, a sound, an onomatopoeia, and a sarcastic, acidic, or bitchy commentary, as when we call someone out for being catty: Mee-ow! It’s this last meaning I thought of most as I considered the harsh disdain so often expressed by the characters toward each other and the gentle satire of the narrative voice toward all of them.
Once we see that “miaow” is something like a mood or attitude or state of mind, we’re able to recognize how unusually Galdós uses characterization. In my description of the book a minute ago, I made it sound like a family story. But it’s not, quite. The critic Fredric Jameson, who really loved Galdós and thought his unfamiliarity in the English-reading world a real travesty, says that Galdós offers “a deterioration of protagonicity,” an admittedly unlovely phrase that he glosses as “the movement of the putative heroes and heroines to the background, whose foreground is increasingly dominated by minor or secondary characters.” As a Marxist, Jameson attributes this not just to Galdós’s predilection or “genius” but to his position as a person living in late 19th century Spain and its strangely non-modern political landscape following the failed “Glorious Revolution” of 1867 (they deposed the monarchy and then brought it back, sort of). To depict the social reality of his society, Galdós had to “strike[ ] an uneasy compromise between the atomized individualism of more fully bourgeois societies with their nuclear families, and the more archaic traces of the older feudal class and castes.” To me, this explains why Galdós feels like an uncanny version or simulacrum of canonical realists like Balzac or Zola, with whom Galdós shares an interest in recurring characters and the desire to explore an entire society. Miaow reminded me of Père Goriot or La Bête Humaine. But also not. Jameson notes that Galdós’s novels are not organized around families, even extended families, but rather around households, an ambiguous term that includes servants, neighbours, and other families who circulate in and out of the story. (In Miaow, Doña Pura is always hosting friends, acquaintances, people who may or may not respect or like; Ramón is always trying to hide from them.) The household thus includes the Mendizábals, a couple who live downstairs and take pity on the much-neglected Luis; the Cabreras, the sister and brother-in-law of that cad Victor, who want to adopt Luis; as well as a whole series of characters at Don Ramón’s former office, some of whom are, to me at least, hard to keep track of, but to whom the novel devotes so much attention, in their various sympathy to or ridicule of Don Ramón, that it doesn’t make sense to just call them “minor.”
All of which is to say that Miaow, though not especially long (it’s like 300 pages) is very busy. To that end I was struck by a word that appears in the first sentence and reappears near the end. Here’s how the novel begins: “At four o’clock in the afternoon, the kids from the school on Plazuela del Limón erupted out of the classroom, making the very devil of a racket.” 250 pages later, a disconsolate, embittered Don Ramón observes a flood of civil servants clattering out of the workplaces at the tax office on payday: “The stairs were almost overwhelmed by this human torrent, which made a tremendous racket as it flowed on down, the sound of heavy footsteps mingling with all the cheerful, sparkling, payday chatter.”
The repetition of racket reminds us that bureaucrats are just overgrown schoolboys. Here we see Galdós’s satirical side. (And by the way, surely the opening scene of the schoolchildren, who, as they pile into the streets, tease little Luis with the nickname of his aunts and grandmother, miaow, miaow, miaow, refers to the opening of Madame Bovary, where a different set of schoolboys taunt a nice enough if also hapless pupil.) But more importantly the repetition of racket speaks to its modus operandi., maybe what we’d now call its vibe. This book too makes a tremendous racket, in the best possible way, with clever dogs, opera singers, officious bureaucrats, raw army recruits, shopkeepers, and a score of others contributing their two cents. Mee-ow indeed.
Have any of you read this book? Or anything else by Galdós? What do you think?
A recent episode of The Mookse and the Gripes podcast got me thinking. Hosts Trevor and Paul were joined by John Williams of the Washington Post (mensches one and all). John had proposed a fascinating topic: starter libraries. The idea was to imagine your response to someone who asked you for ten titles they absolutely had to have in their collection. Probably this person is someone new to literature, a teenager or a student, but maybe they are someone who used to read more than they do now and are looking to get back to that part of their life. What would you recommend?
The important part of the assignment, as I understand it, is that the person is asking you. They know you well enough (parasocially or otherwise) to trust your taste. They respect you enough to be curious about anything you recommend. But they’re not asking for your ten favourite books. Presumably you like the titles on your list. But you’re not just offering them out of personal predilection. You think of them as representative for aspects of literature that matter to you.
Personal but not only personal, might be one way of putting it. Or, in the words of the episode’s subtitle, your choices could be thought of as a shelf full of promises.
Do listen to the episode, it’s terrific. Great lists, fascinating insights into the recommenders. And sure to get you thinking about your own answer. That’s what happened to me: I set aside the laundry I was folding and jotted some notes on my phone, which I’ve now expanded into this list, complete with categories (and alternate choices, because ten books is not many books).
Candida Höfer, Bibliothèque Nationale de France Paris XXI 1998
Books to grow into but also to love when you’re young:
George Eliot, Middlemarch
The only novel in English for adults, Virginia Woolf famously said. Not sure what she meant, but doesn’t it sound good? Having reread it recently, I think you need to be middle aged (and thus an adult… hmm well never mind) to get the most from this story of English provincial life around 1830. But having first read it in college, I can also attest that Middlemarch hits for young people. As with any rich text, what you pay attention to and who you sympathize with shifts each time you read it.
Eliot is known for moral seriousness (maybe that’s why as stylistically different a writer as D. H. Lawrence was a fan), but Middlemarch is also surprisingly funny. Mostly, it’s supremely moving. It covers so much of life, and asks the big questions. What makes a good life? How can we live with purpose? How can we think of ourselves in relation to everyone else? Where do we fit into the web of life?
[Alternate choice: Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace. Never read it until about five years ago, but feel confident it dazzles as much at 20 as at 50. You want novelistic sweep? This one’s as big as Russia… Freemasons and wolf hunts and returns from the dead and slow-burning love affairs lasting across the decades: everything, really.]
Books that master close third-person perspective
Nella Larsen, Passing
Set in Harlem and Chicago in the late 1920s among a set of well-to-do light-skinned Black women who can pass as white, Passing is a great novel of queer frenemies. It hews closely to the perspective of a single character, Irene, whose orderly life as the mother of two boys and wife to a (dissatisfied) doctor falls apart when she runs into a childhood friend, the brave and dangerous Clare. Unless we attend to how events are only offered through Irene’s perspective, we are likely to miss how much the book asks us to question the judgments it only seems to offer.
[Alternate choice: Henry James, What Maisie Knew. In book after book, James wrote about people behaving badly. Yet even among this vast canvas of cruelty, this novel stands out: the people doing the harm are parents who use their young child to hurt each other and, of course, the child. In the preface to the New York Edition James explained that he chose to narrate the book in third person but to limit the perspective to Maisie’s often baffled but also wondering sense of the world in order to offer readers the extra pathos of being able to understand what she could not. It’s quite a trick.]
Books about the Holocaust
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man
If someone is asking me what books they simply must own, they’re absolutely gonna get one about the Holocaust. Hell, I could make them a whole list. But knowing that not everyone shares my fascination, I’ll stick to one of the earliest and most famous instances of Holocaust literature. (Levi composed part of it already while in the camps.) Like all memoirs, If This is a Man (known in the US under the travesty title Survival in Auschwitz) details its author’s particular experience—which took the form it did by his having had “the great good fortune” to have been deported only in 1944, when the turning tide of the war and subsequent internal battle among top Nazis meant that more deportees were selected for slave labour. That phrasing gives you a sense of Levi’s matter-of-fact irony. But something that distinguishes If This Is a Man is Levi’s decision to use “we” even more than “I”: he aims to give a sense of the structure and meaning of the collective victim experience, at least within a subcamp of Auschwitz.
[Alternate choice: Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories. Too little known among English speakers, but, happily, available in a terrific translation by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose, Fink’s heartbreaking stories depict part of the Holocaust most people don’t know about: the mass murder performed by the Einsatzgruppen in Galicia in the summer and fall of 1941. Fink couldn’t find a publisher for these stories until the 1980s; they were deemed of no interest. Another devastating failure on the part of literary opinion. Fink has been called the Chekhov of the Holocaust. Grotesque as this sounds, it’s accurate. Quiet and heartbreaking.]
Members of YIVO New York examine crates of books rescued from the Vilna Ghetto
Books about how to read books:
Roland Barthes, S/Z
Barthes spent a year reading Balzac’s story “Sarrasine” with some students. (Oh to have been in that seminar!) That labour resulted in this extraordinary book, organized around line-by-line readings of the source text, not, as critics usually do, to figure out what it means, but rather how it means. To do so, Barthes offers five “codes”—fundamental elements of realist fiction, of which “Sarrasine” is considered only as a representative example—that readers unconsciously rely on (typically by having imbibed many examples of the genre) in making the text intelligible. The codes are things like references to historical events, people, and places, or attributes and actions that cohere into what we call characters and, in the case of realist literature, think of as if they were people. Barthes Intersperses his step-by-step redescription of the Balzac story with theoretical meditations on the operation of the codes, which readers can extrapolate to other texts.
S/Z is tough. I probably taught it five or six times before I felt I had a real handle on it. But as Barthes says, it’s valuable to be able to distinguish between real and superficial ideas of difference. We might think that the best way to know about books is to read a lot of them. But if we do so without thinking about what underlies their intelligibility (i.e. what we need to be able to read them), then we are mere consumers, doomed to reading the same thing over and over. Only by reading one text over and over can real difference, that is the difference within the text, show itself—which in turn will make our other reading more meaningful. All of which is to say, the effort of tackling Barthes’s analysis offers big rewards.
[No alternate choice. S/Z for everyone.]
Books with pictures:
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
Comics, graphic novels, whatever you want to call them are important to me, and I think any reader needs at least one example in their library. Such a rich form, so many gorgeous and moving texts to choose from. As with my Holocaust choice, I resisted the temptation to go niche here. Bechdel’s memoir of her relationship with her closeted, self-destructive, talented father deserves its fame. Probably more than any book I regularly taught, Fun Home elicited the strongest positive reactions in the widest range of students. Family disfunction runs deep. A great book about how books can connect people who can’t otherwise open up to each other—and how they can further separate them too. Funny, ominous, bittersweet.
[Alternate choice: Nick Drnaso, Sabrina. Dark, powerful. Reading it gave me a bit of the ick. And yet its subject matter just seems more relevant. I guess this is about the manosphere, except no one was using that hideous term at the time.]
Books of ideas [fiction]
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Sometimes I want a book that dramatizes the back and forth of thinking. In The Magic Mountain, Mann literalizes this by surrounding his protagonist, the well-meaning, hearty Hans Castorp, with some of the most indefatigable talkers ever to appear in a novel. The whole intellectual landscape of pre-WWI Europe is here (liberal humanist, communist, militarist, hedonist, you name it), and everyone battles for Hans’s soul, even as the former engineer mostly wants to desire a woman from afar, a woman who reminds him of a boy from his schooldays…
The other great thing about this book is how well it depicts Davos and environs. I’m a sucker for mountains and mountains in books. Bring on the snow!
[Alternate choice: Proust. Honestly, if you can only put one book in your starter library, choose this one. I assume it’s already there, but if not then get stuck into this deeply philosophical book, which has so much to say about perception, time, cruelty, and control over others.]
Books of ideas [nonfiction]
W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Every American should read it. But non-Americans should too. The idea of double-consciousness—the way a minority must measure themselves by the tape of the majority, as DuBois so memorably puts it in his first pages—explains so much of our contemporary sense of identity.
In addition to its ideas, Souls is a fascinatingly hybrid book, presumably stranger in 1903 than today. Each chapter is prefaced by a bar of music, often from the sorrow songs. Most chapters are essayistic, but some are fictional. Each is written in resonant cadence. Hasn’t dated much. Alas.
[Alternate choice: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Explains how Nazism and Stalinism came to be so accepted and do so much harm. Especially interesting for (1) its “boomerang” theory of imperial violence, in which what the metropole does in the colony comes back to bite it at home, and (2) its argument that modern antisemitism arose from the waning of Empire and the rise of nationalism. Hasn’t dated much. Alas.]
Monomaniac books
The strand from writers like Kafka, Knut Hamsun, or Robert Walser to someone like Lydia Davis, via the high point of Thomas Bernhard, has been enormously influential in the Anglo-American sphere. At this point, annoyingly so. (And weird, too, given that none of the most important precursors wrote in English.) But I get it because literature excels at tracing the vagaries of a mind, especially one spinning through reversals, paradoxes, and hobby-horses. A starter library should have an example of this sort of thing, and Bernhard might be the best. When the only thing that stands between a psyche adrift or worse is the chance that someone might respond to its voice—that’s when you’re in Bernhard territory. I’ve chosen The Voice Imitator because the title says it all. Read these 104 short texts to get a sense of Bernhard’s bitter, misanthropic, and, oddly, funny vibe.
[Alternate choice: I just named like five other writers!]
Funny books
P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters
As implied in what I said about Bernhard, voice-driven books don’t have to be grim. They can make us laugh, whether from the gap between what the narrator claims and what we know, or the sheer verve of their style. The fun only increases when those narrators get embroiled in elegant plots. Wodehouse is the master of this terrirtory and everyone’s library is the better for including him. (I feel like he’s fading a bit from memory? Sad.) You can jump in anywhere—my entry point was the distinctly not-famous-but oh-so-representatively-titled Eggs, Beans, and Crumpets which baffled and delighted me at age 12—but if you’re at a loss start with this wonderful episode in the Jeeves and Bertie series, which Tim Waltz would enjoy, since it’s an early example of the “I condemn the fascists by unflinchingly stating how weird they are” school of responding to authoritarianism. (As Bertie says, appalled by the realization that the Saviours of Britain are simply grown men marching in black shorts: “how perfectly foul!”)
[Alternate choice: for an American version of this phenomenon, reach for Charles Portis, especially the marvelous True Grit.]
Books about crime
Dolores Hitchens, Sleep with Strangers & Sleep with Slander
Since at least Oedipus Rex, literature has used crime to understand fundamental concerns like identity, political organization, and moral value. Crime fiction can be smart, is what I’m saying. And it can also carry us away by inciting our desire to have enigmas explained. (Interestingly, it often makes us realize how much more compelling it is to ask a question than to answer it.) Like any genre, then, crime fiction satisfies at both the intellectual and emotional level. Having stayed with well-known titles so far, I’m diving deep for this last category. Not enough readers, even lovers of crime fiction, have read the mid-century American writer Dolores Hitchens. She wrote a lot of books under a lot of names. But only two about a PI named Jim Spader. Which is sad—but also good because they’re even more special. These make for pretty despairing reading, even for noir. So be warned. But you won’t regret seeking them out.
[Alternate choice: Hundreds! Thousands! Sticking with mid-century American women writers, I’ll plump for Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man. Don’t read anything about it beforehand!]
I tried not to think too long in coming up with my choices. Next month or next year I’d choose differently. And I’m aware of some big lapses. No poetry?? No plays?? No Torah?? (Everyone should read the Five Books of Moses.) But that’s ok. Gives you all the more room to think about how you’d create a starter library of your own. What would be on your shelf of promises?
If you’re reading this, you are faithful indeed. And I am grateful. Long silence here, I know. As my adopted country tumbles into authoritarianism, things have also been changing, though more positively, chez EMJ.
Igor Razdrogin, Book Bazar (1975)
My wife, daughter, and I are moving to St Louis in a month’s time! We’ve spent quite a bit of time there these past few years, and we like it a lot. We’ll have a little more space in our new home (which, combined with some collective efforts to tame my unruly library, might mean that our house will at least briefly not be overflowing with books), and, best of all, we’ll be living in a walkable neighbourhood with sidewalks, which is something we’ve been missing these past 18 years in Little Rock.
The other big transition concerns my career. I’m leaving my job at Hendrix, of course, but I’m also leaving academia in general. People keep asking how I’m feeling about this and I keep saying: Terrific! I was pretty burned out and starting to get a little Old Man Yells at Clouds about All the Changes that affected the classroom experience: the pervasiveness of AI and LLMs (something no one, as far as I know, ever asked for), and, more distressingly, the difficulty even the best-prepared students are having reading sustained works of literature, by which I mean, an entire book, no matter how straightforward the prose. This isn’t about their intelligence, or even their phones. It’s about the strictures placed on secondary school teachers. As instruction moves ever more toward preparing for testing centered on multiple choice reading comprehension questions about utterly decontextualized chunks of texts, teachers aren’t assigning much reading, which means students simply don’t have much practice at it.
(I also have a pet theory that for all its flaws Harry Potter (to be clear: it sucks) helped Millennials think of reading as both exciting and habitual, and Gen Z hasn’t had anything like that. The Harry Potter to Jane Austen to English Major pipeline kept our department afloat for a lot of years. These days, students dislike both Rowling and Austen…)
I still love many things about teaching, and it’s possible I’ll miss it so much that I’ll return to it in some fashion. (I’m never getting another job like this one, though. Those don’t exist anymore.) But for now, I feel relief, and curiosity—along with a lot of trepidation—about the chance to try something new. For now, it feels a bit unreal. Because the academic year is cyclical—summer is always a time of collapse and, if lucky, regeneration—I don’t yet feel as a though I’ve made much of a change. Talk to me in the fall, or next spring, or five years from now.
Luckily—and this is another reason for the silence around here—I’ve been working as a consultant for the Educator Programs arm of the William Levine Family Institute of Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. The people I work with are absolutely fabulous: smart, funny, kind, devoted to their work without having delusions of grandeur about it. It’s eye-opening—and fun—to work as part of a team, after decades of the isolation of academic life. I’ve helped them create resources for K – 12 English Language Arts classrooms, and have taken great satisfaction in the work.
I’ll need full-time work sooner rather than later, though, so if you have any ideas or leads, hit me up! Like, what are some jobs people do? What do y’all do all day? I need advice!
What I’m saying is, I had a lot going on these last months. But I did manage to keep reading. Maybe not as much as usual, but whenever I could make time. I get that it’s ridiculous to offer a 2024 reflection halfway through 2025, but FWIW here are the things that stuck with me last year.
So much to love in this novel about an alternate 1920s in which a sizeable indigenous population thrives in a nation called Deseret centered on the bustling city of Cahokia. Spufford weaves his world-building throughout a procedural, in which our hero, a cop who moonlights as a jazz pianist, investigates a murder with vast political implications, to the point of threatening Deseret’s independence.
Cahokia Jazz is the most referenced title in the Year in 2024 Reading pieces I posted earlier this year, which means either that everybody loves this book, or that people like me love this book. Anyway, given my upcoming move to Missouri, it won’t surprise you to hear that the scene that most sticks in my mind is when Barrow pursues a lead in a village at the end of the Cahokia streetcar line, a fly-swept place he can’t wait to leave. Its name? St Louis…
I look forward to visiting the ruins of the actual Cahokia, once the biggest city north of Mexico City.
Katrina Carrasco, The Best Bad Things (2019)
Fabulous and underrated crime novel set in 1880s Port Townsend, where the most valuable commodity passing through the busy port is opium smuggled in from north of the border. Alma Rosales, who once worked for the now-shuttered Woman’s Bureau of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, has left San Francisco for Washington Territory to work for the seductive, brilliant, coolly calculating Delphine Beaumond, who runs most of the drug smuggling on the west coast.
When product goes missing, Delphine puts Alma on the case. Alma goes undercover as a dockworker—not a problem, because Alma is also Jack Camp, a slight yet wiry man who can hold their liquor and likes ladies and men equally. Did I mention that Alma and Delphine are lovers? Or that Jack starts a torrid affair with the man they’re investigating? Or that they’re also still working as a Pinkerton agent—in a desperate attempt to get their old job back?
Cue double-, triple-, even quadruple-crossing; witty repartee; and some pretty hot sex. Most crime novels are let down by their endings, but this one… let me tell you, friends, I literally gasped. A brilliant debut. I want everyone to read it.
Émile Zola, La Bête Humaine (1890, translated by Roger Pearson) and The Assommoir (1877) Trans Brian Nelson (2021)
Even by Zola’s lofty standards, these two are bangers. Push comes to shove, I guess I’d choose Bête over Assommoir, just because I love the crime story trappings, but the latter might be the more impressive accomplishment, especially if you could read it in French to see what Zola does with the argot of his lumpenprotelariat characters. They’re equally—which is to say, tremendously—depressing, but also viciously alive. Zola’s naturalist doom is regularly leavened by his prose, which zips from one brilliant set-piece to another. I’m talking about stuff like the bruising fight between two laundresses in front of an audience of delighted, shouting onlookers in the opening scene of The Assommoir, or the berserk vision of a driverless train, filled with drunk soldiers in full war frenzy heading to their doom at the hands of the Prussians, in the last pages of La Bête Humaine. Feels like a good time to study Zola’s fascinated descriptions of all things irrational.
Hernán Diaz, In the Distance (2017)
Quasi-Western in which the protagonist—a hulking, nearly mute Swede named Håkan whose only goal is to find the brother he was separated from on the voyage to the New World, and whose body and psyche seem to be able to take any amount of suffering—travels east, south, and north as much as west. This is a brainy book: Diaz riffs on Frankenstein, and probably a lot of other stuff I missed. But its allegories are always concrete. In this novel of a man stubbornly going against the westward direction of Manifest Destiny, I most remember the section in which, after suffering a terrible loss, Håkan literally burrows into the ground, eventually building a maze-like underground shelter where he lives in ambivalent isolation for years.
I read Diaz’s Trust last year too: also great. Probably not telling you anything you don’t know. But if like me you are late to Diaz, move him up your list. Smart guy and beautiful writer.
Leah Hagar Cohen, To & Fro (2024)
Last year I served as a judge for the US Republic of Consciousness Prize, which honors literature published by small presses. Yes, I tossed aside some duds and waded through many competent but unexceptional novels, but I also discovered some terrific stuff I wouldn’t have otherwise read. My favourite was this delightful and thoughtful literary experiment, a novel written in two halves that can be read in either order. You can start with “To” and flip the book over halfway through to read “Fro,” or do the reverse. You could call this a Jewish Alice in Wonderland (I love how deeply and unapologetically Jewish the book is: it takes such pleasure in asking questions), but that wouldn’t give you the sense of how the book is both realist and fantastic, a genre-bender that sometimes reads like a middle-grade book and sometimes like a historical “what if” novel, if those were written by someone whose lodestar was Maimonides. Magic!
Thanks to Lori Feathers, the genius behind this award, and to my fellow judges, who always brought it. Serving on this panel was time well spent.
A book of arrivals and departures, whether longed-for, dreaded, or uncertain. It feels both constricted and expansive: a neat trick. Bowen often gets called Jamesian. That is true not in style but only in a shared preoccupation with cruelty. Hard to say which fictional universe is meaner. Another thing I liked about The House in Paris is that it offers further evidence for my theory that British modernism is just another name for Gothic literature about children.
Martin MacInnes, In Ascension (2023)
Here we have two sisters. One becomes a scientist who explores the depths of the ocean floor and the vastness of space (she develops nutrition-dense and fast-growing algae for interstellar travel); the other sets aside her career as an international lawyer to find out what happened to the first. I can’t remember everything that happened in the book, but I do remember being enthralled from start to finish. (This is another long book that never felt slow.) The final scene, set in the remotest place on earth, Ascension Island, foregrounds another kind of foreign place: our memories. “A family”, MacInnes writes, showcasing his epigrammatic mode, “is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia.” MacInnes’s big question, asked as much of a sibling relationship as of humanity’s ability to inhabit the stars, is whether the only way to get beyond the destructiveness of the human species is to destroy the individual self Beejay Silcox, one of my favourite critics, gets it right when she calls the book “a primer to marvel.”
Sally Michel Avery, Father and Daughter, 1963
Thoughts on the rest
Ones I keep thinking about: Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season (2024): I still haven’t prepped a go-bag—how foolish is that? Catherine Leroux’s The Future (2020, translated by Susan Ouriou): What if the French had never lost Detroit? What if climate change and resultant socioeconomic crises meant that most of the trappings of a functioning state had fallen away? And what if bands of roving children built hardscrabble lives in overgrown parks? Peter Heller’s The Last Ranger (2023): Conventional but satisfying novel about a ranger in Yellowstone, filled with scenes in which the hero drinks early morning coffee on the porch of his cabin: Heller knows the landscape and describes it beautifully. (Given what the chuckleheads at DOGE did, this title resonates differently now…) Jill Ciment’s Consent (2024): Revelatory memoir in which the author reassesses her decades-long marriage to her now deceased husband, with whom she took a painting class when she was 17 and he was 47. Can the relationship really have been good given that they met when she was a child?
Best study of xenophobia, told in an atmosphere of creeping dread: Georges Simenon’s The Little Man from Archangel (1956, translated by Sian Reynolds).
A Russian Jew, brought to rural France as a child, French in every way, has his life turned upside down because of a casual remark. Chilling. Best Simenon I’ve read.
Best case of “it’s not you, it’s me”: Nisi Shawl’s Everfair (2016)
Steampunk set in an alternate late 19th century in which the Fabians buy tracts of land from King Leopold to protect refugees fleeting the horrors of Belgium’s rule in the Congo. At first, this new nation—Everfair—prospers. European benefactors and missionaries work with Africans to create trade networks based on clean airship technology. They develop intelligence networks to navigate the region’s politics. They promote or at least allow social experiments concerning family structure, marriage, and sexual politics. But the internal tensions become too much, and the utopia falls apart. Even as I’m writing this I’m thinking, Honestly this sounds pretty good, maybe I’ve misjudged the book. And at the level of idea it’s intriguing. The execution, though: that’s the problem. The prose is leaden, the relation between action and exposition awkward. Maybe the book actually needed to be longer? A strange thing to say since I felt like it was never going to end. This book is a darling to many (Jo Walton loves it, for example). Probably just the wrong time for me. Can’t imagine giving it another try, though.
Best (and most) coffee: Mark Haber’s Lesser Ruins (2024).
Things are not going well for the narrator of this Bernhardian novel, ever since his wife died and he lost his job. That’s a tough spot. And he tries to do the right thing, sometimes. He reaches out to his son, whose passion for house music means he will dilate on the perfect set list for as long as his father will hold the phone near his ear. Like so many of us (me, anyway), he struggles to surmount the gap between idea and execution, endlessly trying to write something good. You’d think we might like the guy. But… He’s a terrible snob. He lambastes his students, neglecting his work to the point of installing an espresso machine under the desk in classroom. (That an instructor at a community college would have a dedicated classroom is the book’s only false note.) His unfinished, maybe unfinshable, book on Montaigne is probably not really going to be all that. So he ain’t easy to like.
All of this is beside the point, though, because this novel is about the way sentences can mimic the swerves and circles of a mind endlessly thinking. One of the things our narrator thinks about most is coffee. He drinks a lot of coffee. Long sections concern the various roasts, the preparation, the anticipation, the enjoyment. I’m not a coffee snob on his level, but I found nothing to ironize or criticize in the man’s love for the perfectly pulled shot. Lesser Ruins is great for other reasons, too (it’s Haber’s best IMO), but if you like coffee at all, you gotta read this.
Most ingenious conceit: Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock (1946)
A drudge at a magazine publisher modelled on Time-Life is tasked with finding—for purposes of eliminating—a witness to a crime. Only thing is, he is that witness…
Dark and boozy. This is the good stuff.
Best crime fiction: Carrasco, obviously. Also obviously, the latest Tana French. (At least I can say I was alive while Tana French was writing novels that will be read in a hundred years…) The latest Garry Disher, Sanctuary (2023), is a satisfying standalone about theft and friendship. I read a couple of Gary Phillips’s books about a Black Korean-war vet turned crime-scene photographer: good stuff. (I learned a lot about Watts.) Start with One-Shot Harry (2022). Years ago I devoured Scandinavian crime novels: seemed like the most exciting thing in the genre. Bloom’s been off that rose for a while, but Cristoffer Carlsson’s Blaze Me a Sun(2021, translated by Rachel Wilson-Broyles) took me back. Marcie R. Rendon’s Where They Last Saw Her (2024) is her first book set in the present, and much as I love the Cash Blackbear series, probably her best. How nice to read a book about an indigenous woman who has a good man in her life. I regularly think about the scenes of women jogging through the snowy Minnesota woods.
Best sff: In addition to MacInnes and Tesh, I most enjoyed Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013), Shelley Parker-Chan’s She Who Became the Sun (2021), and various works by Guy Gavriel Kay, who continues to be a source of reliable pleasure, even if no one would call his books cutting edge. (So humane, though! I need that right now.) Alas, I am not yet a dedicated enough sff reader to have figured out how to overcome the “stalling out in a series because I didn’t get to the next one right away and then forgetting what happened” problem.
Best poetry: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (1992). Ok, the only poetry collection I read, but I liked it enough to assign it this past semester and the students loved it. Teaching it made me both appreciate it more and notice its limitations (it hoes rather a narrow furrow). I ought to read some of her later stuff: I bet it’s even better.
Best book of the kind I could imagine myself writing and yet am mostly allergic to reading: A tie between Jakuta Alikavazovic’s Like a Sky Inside (published 2021 and translated by Daniel Levin Becker) and Chris Bachelder & Jennifer Habel’s Dayswork (2023).
The whole quasi-essay, quasi-memoir with novelistic elements thrown in for good measure—mostly that stuff leaves me cold. But these two won my heart. Alikavozovic describes a night she spent in the Louvre, a place that she often visited with her father, a ne’er-do-well from the former Yugoslavia. After each excursion, her father would ask, How would you go about stealing the Mona Lisa? This question, and the reflections on her father’s life of petty crime and her own experience growing up in a culture and language that he never perfected, lies at the heart of this beautiful little book.
Bachelder and Habel have done something remarkable: written a book together, about themselves as a couple, that feels written in a single voice. The text centers on the Habel character’s fascination with Herman Melville: it’s about his life, and their lives, and what it means to write a life, with copious references to the man they call The Biographer, Herschel Parker, who seems to have been really something. And by that I mean kind of a dogged genius, but also a pain in the ass.
You can see I am deep into the “my favourite artworks are the ones created while I was a child and too young to experience at the time” years. I read new things too, though, and the best of these was Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (2024), which I finished in a cabin at the Grand Canyon during a thunderstorm that had the rain pounding on the metal roof. The book is as memorable as the setting of my reading: an experiment in time travel, in which a 19th century Arctic explorer is brought to a near-future UK and given to a handler from the titular government agency whose background happens to be Cambodian. In addition to its speculative elements, and a terrific love story, the novel considers differing cultural responses to trauma. More Bradley soon, please!
Henri Matisse, Woman Reading in a Violet Dress, 1898
Short story collection: Only read one, but it was a good one. I liked all the stories in Jamel Brinkley’s Witness (2023), but “At Barstow Station” is an all-timer. Even a class full of students who did not care much for reading agreed.
Most unexpected page-turner: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (2020, translated by Martin Aitken) blends his signature interest in mundane middle-class life with some weird shit (a blazing star that no one can explain, a ritual murder, shenanigans at a mental institution). I raced through it and bee-lined for the bookstore to but the next one (in an expensive and gigantic hardcover edition), only to ignore it for the rest of the year. Honestly, the hardcover might be the problem. Most of the time I’m a “give me the paperback” guy. Anyway, will read the others in this series.
Most fun: The audiobook of Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers(2023), read with obvious affection by Eunice Wong, made me laugh aloud. As I feared, the strains of keeping the conceit going already show in the second book, which I listened to a couple of months ago. But I’ll stick with Vera a while longer; she’s a treat.
Best sequel: Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Turning Leaves (2023) is a big advance over its predecessor, Moon of the Crusted Snow. A rare case of a longer book being better. It’s ten years since the mysterious event down south that sent the grid down. The small indigenous community at the heart of the first book has been thriving, but its inhabitants realize they have reached the limit of the resources in their immediate area. After painful debate, they send a search party to find out if anyone else is out there—specifically, anyone indigenous. Exciting, well-drawn, and smart about the cost of giving up part of your identity to gain the benefits of joining something. (a community, a culture) larger.
Grimmest ending: Edith Wharton’s Summer (1917), really a hell of a book. Even if you haven’t read Wharton before you know things aren’t going to end well. But I at least did not anticipate them to end quite that dispiritingly. Thanks to Shawn Mooney and the rest of the Wharton gang for the invitation to read.
Hurts so good: Elliott Chaze, Black Wings Has My Angel (1953)
Liked at the time, but has now faded from memory:
Jean Giono’s Fragments of a Paradise (1944/48 and newly translated by Paul Éprile); Suzumi Suzuki’s Gifted (2022, translated by Allison Markham Powell); Ariane Koch’s Overstaying (2021, translated by Damion Searls);and Jón Kalman Stefansson’s Your Absence is Darkness (2020, translated by Philip Roughton). Don’t get me wrong: these are all good books (especially the Giono). I don’t regret reading any of them. Just not top-notch, for me.
Meh:
These did nothing for me, and even left me a little grumpy. Ari Richter’s Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma & Inheritance (2024): you’d think I’d be the perfect reader for this, but honestly I did not think this book was very smart. Dorothy West’s The Wedding(1995): I get it, she was old when she wrote this. Plus, the existence of a Black elite on Martha’s Vineyard was news to me: interesting stuff. But this felt wispy, and not in that good Belle and Sebastian way. Two crime novels by Arnaldur Indridason: sometimes you just want to turn pages and remember your Iceland vacation but at the same time you know you’ll never get these hours back.
Most ambivalent toward:
Tried to explain why I felt this way about Lily Tuck’s The Rest is Memory in The Washington Post.
It wouldn’t be an end-of-year list from me without some thoughts on Holocaust-related books, which I’ve divided into categories:
History: Dan Stone’s The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (2023). All due respect to Doris Bergen, this is the best single-volume history of the event I know, and it’s pretty short too. I went long on it for On the Seawall. Honorable mentions: Linda Kinstler’s Come to this Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends(2022), and Rebecca Donner’s All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days (2021). The latter admittedly not a Holocaust book, but rather a resistance to the Third Reich book. Pretty damn good tho.
Comic: Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters [Vol 1] (2017). What an accomplishment! Your heart will hurt but you won’t be able to stop turning the pages. Ten-year-old Karen Reyes lives in Chicago in the late 1960s. She adores her brother, who is sometimes a gentle artistic soul but sometimes a man pushed to violence by racism and poverty, almost as much as she loves monsters. (She draws herself as a werewolf.) She’s fallen in love with her best friend, Missy, who now shuns her at school while being drawn to her in private. Her mother is diagnosed with cancer, leaving the family’s fortunes ever more precarious. When Karen’s upstairs neighbour, Anka Silverberg, a married Holocaust survivor with whom her brother had been having an affair, is found dead under mysterious circumstances, Karen takes it upon herself to investigate. She stumbles on some cassette tapes, in which the woman tells her life story, a lurid and painful one: Anka was brought up in a brothel by her abusive mother, a sex worker, and then sold into a child prostitution ring from which she is “rescued” by a client who later abandons her when she gets too old for him. After the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise to power of the Nazis, Anka is persecuted for her Jewishness and eventually deported to the camps. How she survived, how she made her way to America, and what led to her death—these questions are presumably answered in volume 2, which was released last fall. Volume 1 is 400 pages, with plenty of tiny lettering. It would be an effort to read it even without its distressing subject matter. But it’s damn good and deserves more attention than it’s got. Ferris uses dense cross-hatching to give her images texture: I don’t how else to say it other than the images seem tense. Amazingly the book is drawn almost entirely with Bic ballpoints. The whole story of its creation, which took six years, is remarkable, starting with Ferris’s partial paralysis after contracting West Nile disease.
Holocaust-adjacent text: Svetlana Alexievich”s Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II(1985, translated by Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky) impressed me with the pathos of its subject matter (children, many orphaned either permanently or temporarily when Germany invaded the USSR in 1941) and the success of its method (her now well-known quasi-anthropological style, in which witnesses speak for themselves, with seemingly little input or shaping from Alexievich herself, other than the ordering and structuring, not to mention the selecting of excerpts from what are presumably much longer testimonies: which is to say, thoroughly shaped…)
Book I Never Expected to Spend This Much Time With:
Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars (1989), the classic middle-grade novel about the (anomalous) experience of Danish Jews during the Holocaust. I created a lot of materials about this book for teachers. Yes, it has certain limitations, but I’m honestly impressed by how much richness I’ve found in this text. It seems to be fading a bit from the classroom—but not anymore, if I can help it!
Edouard Vuillard, Madame Losse Hessel in Vuillard’s Studio (1915)
There you have it. I don’t know what my life is going to look like going forward—but I hope at least in the short term to have more time for this poor little blog. Thanks as always for reading! I would love to hear your thoughts on anything I wrote about here.
Friends, I am here to apologize to Matt Keeley, who wrote this great piece for me many months ago and has waited patiently (or maybe fumed silently) for me to publish it. I have no good excuse: I got busy and forgot. Terrible. Anyway, this really is a case of better late than never.
Matt is a freelance writer living in Boston.
Ilse Bing, East River with Boat, New York (1936)
Being a reader and working with books can, oddly enough, feel like mutually exclusive propositions. I spent most of 2024 underemployed, but what work I had before starting a new full-time job in October was mainly book-related. I copyedited and wrote pitches for a Dutch literary agency; I did brief manuscript reports for a literary scouting firm; I did occasional reviews for Reactor, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. I spent so much time on “professional” reading, including dozens of titles that I would normally have no interest in, that my personal reading suffered.
E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime was not the book I expected it to be: one somehow doesn’t expect a book this strange to sell a million copies, end up on movie screens, and inspire a Broadway musical. This is an almost essayistic historical novel, with an intrusive and opinionated narrator, major characters who go titled (Father, Mother, Younger Brother) but unnamed, and plot lines that don’t tangle so much as split. Henry Ford and JP Morgan discuss reincarnation in front a stolen Egyptian mummy; Emma Goldman befriends a notorious “kept woman;” in the epilogue, we learn that one character gets killed in the Mexican Civil War, that another sinks with the Lusitania, and that a third creates the Little Rascals franchise. It’s a deeply weird book. [Ed. – Colour me intrigued…]
The movie, incidentally, is quite good, with James Cagney’s final performance, an uncredited appearance by a young Samuel L. Jackson, and Norman Mailer as an ill-fated libidinous architect. I wonder how many New York literati of the 1980s especially enjoyed watching his death scene? [Ed. – Probably still satisfying today.]
Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life is an unusual biography that repurposes the words of the great antiquarian and his contemporaries to create a sort of hypothetical autobiography. There’s much that remains unknown about Aubrey’s life, and Scurr would rather leave open a gap than speculate. That means, for example, that we get more about the stones of Avebury than we do about Aubrey’s romantic life, more tossed-off preference than deeply felt emotion. This is an eccentric book about an eccentric man; most readers won’t much like it, but a few, like me, will love it. [Ed. – In the immortal slogan of Halifax’s Alexander Keith’s brewery: “Those who like it, like it a lot.”]
Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker is Renata Adler’s score-settling memoir about the departure of William Shawn, the arrival of Robert Gottlieb, and the eventual appearance of Tina Brown. At one point, Adler compares Adam Gopnik to Anthony Powell’s Widmerpool. If you recognize the names in the last few sentences, you’ll likely enjoy this book, even if you don’t entirely trust it. Otherwise, you’d best avoid.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is the dirtiest book I’ve read in ages. [Ed. — !] It seemed to come out of nowhere: I’d never heard of book or author until an editor asked me to review it. I invoked Philip Roth in my review, and I stand by that comparison:
Its heights, or depths, of exuberant filth reminded me of Philip Roth in Portnoy’s Complaint or Sabbath’s Theater. Like Roth, Tulathimutte knows desire can be as ludicrous as it is urgent; like Roth, he likes a good dirty joke.
Other highlights of 2024’s reading include:
Peter Straub’s Koko, a serial killer story with fine writing, memorable characters, and all too much exoticizing of the mysterious Orient [Ed. – It’s so mysterious tho]
Six of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels — I really need to get back to the romans durs soon, but there’s something comforting about Maigret even when the plots are, in fact, quite harrowing
Amit Chaudhuri’s A Strange and Sublime Address, his first novel, as elegantly written and absorbingly plotless as later books like Friend of My Youth and Sojourn [Ed. – Read this last year as well: good stuff]
Paolo Bacigalupi’s Navola, the sequel to which cannot come soon enough. (Dorian — There’s a strong Guy Gavriel Kay influence here. I think you’d like) [Ed. – I appreciated this tip enough to check it out of the library—it indeed looks quite my thing—but not, apparently, enough to read it yet…]
M.T. Anderson’s Nicked, a fantastical medieval heist novel and queer romance [Ed. – Octavian Nothing was fantastic.]
Adam Roberts’s Lake of Darkness, a science fiction novel about Satan, post-scarcity, and what happens when you let AI do all your thinking
Howard Norman’s My Darling Detective, a thoroughly charming tale hampered only by the author’s difficulties with continuity and his editor’s failing to notice the innumerable discrepancies and inconsistencies. Read for the vibes, not the details. [Ed. – Yikes!]
Two that got away
One sad effect of all my book work was that I struggled to finish long and complicated books. I got maybe eighty pages into Oakley Hall’s classic Western Warlock before I gave up. The prose so fine, the type so small, the pages so numerous: I enjoyed and admired the book, but it took two weeks to traverse less than a hundred pages. [Ed. – Ha! Nicely put! It’s not easy, that one. Took me a while to fall under its spell.] I felt myself losing the thread, and put the book back on the shelf for a less fraught day.
Something similar happened with Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, which I’ve had on my shelves since 2007. In a burst of optimism, I’d bought three Murdoch paperbacks when I was a college student studying abroad in Dublin. I quickly read A Severed Head and hated it, and so The Sea, the Sea and The Black Prince sat unread for more than a decade. I knew, however, the problem was more with Matt than with Murdoch, so every year I vainly promised myself I’d give Murdoch another shot. When I finally took the plunge last June, I was thrilled to find that The Black Prince was smart, funny, and satirical, bursting with memorable images and sparkling with ideas. Except, once again, I found myself losing the thread and regretfully set the book aside.
I ended up reading The Bell, another Murdoch, in January of 2025. Perhaps I’ll get through The Black Prince later this year? [Ed. – Because it took me so damn long to get this up, maybe he has!]
John Constable, Cloud Study
Last year’s books, this year
Finally, there are a few 2024 books that I bought and fully intended to read, but haven’t quite gotten around to. First is Percival Everett’s James, a novel which sold a million copies and made nearly as many end-of-year lists. I’ve enjoyed Everett’s past novels and I’m sure I’ll tear through this one when I get around to it. Incidentally: I wonder when Everett’s next book will be? He usually seems to write about a book a year; I wonder if they’re holding off publication until James sales begin to taper off?
Next is Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. I pitched it for review, but the pitch was declined. [Ed. – Boo!] I’m reading it now and am impressed: It’s simultaneously a murder mystery, a literary novel, and an alternate history. Spufford dedicates the book to “Prof. Kroeber’s daughter;” I wonder if Prof. Kroeber makes an appearance in the book. The period is right, Kroeber was an anthropologist interested in Native Americans, and there are lots of Native American characters in the book. [Ed. – SO good!]
Last is Ed Park’s Same Bed Different Dreams, which looks to be a polyphonic metafictional conspiratorial genre bender. I’ll probably turn to this once I finish Cahokia Jazz. [Ed. – Also good, with plenty of hockey. Thanks, Matt! Sorry again for dropping the ball!]
Here is my introduction to Episode 35 of the podcast I co-host with Rebecca Hussey and Frances Evangelista, One Bright Book.
Ben Sahm, “Child Labor” 1940 – 42. Part of the four-part mural The Meaning of Social Security (1940 – 42) Cohen Federal Building, Washington, D.C.
Our book today is Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!, first published in 1913.
O Pioneers! was Cather’s second novel, and her first big success. It’s a short book, episodic in structure, centered on Alexandra Bergson, a Swedish immigrant who lives on a struggling farm in southern Nebraska with her ailing father, her stoic mother, and her three brothers. On his deathbed, the father entrusts the farm to Alexandra, not only as the eldest child, but also and more importantly as the only one likely to make a success of it. By blending confidence, daring, and hard work, Alexandra does just that, becoming a successful landowner and a linchpin of the community of European immigrants forging new lives around the town of Hanover. Many of these new Americans are Scandinavian—some of the old timers still only speak Swedish—but others are French or Czech.
The title comes from one of Walt Whitman’s hymns to the glory of the American experiment. As its plural noun suggests, the novel is something of a group portrait. The first half centers on economic struggle and the fantasy of bending landscape and climate to human wishes. The second half foregrounds two love stories: the muted relationship between Alexandra and a childhood friend, Carl, who has gone away to seek his fortune and returns to visit years later., and the passionate, doomed affair between Emil, Alexandra’s youngest brother, and Marie, a married woman who lives on the neighboring farm.
This ending is already prefigured in the beginning, when Cather writes: “The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.” I might not have paid much attention to that sentence were it not for the circumstances in which I came across it. I happened to read the early chapters of O Pioneers! in the Little Rock Social Security office, where I had business earlier this week.
It turns out all kinds of people come to the Social Security office. I sat alongside new immigrants and elderly couples, family members with their adult disabled children and new parents with babies in tow. The room we occupied had the slightly sterile quality of many bureaucratic offices, yet it felt more functional than alienating. Most everyone’s attention was fixed on a large board which told us supplicants which window to visit when our number flashed up. But that didn’t stop us from doing other things too. People chatted with the people sitting next to them, and with the security officers who, despite the sign declaring that they were not to be bothered with official questions, easily and casually dispensed advice. They played on their phones, shuffled nervously through their paperwork, shushed their children, even read 20th century American novels.
I wished that the people who believe government is evil, maybe people like our current President and Vice President, whose photos glared malevolently from the wall of the hallway outside the waiting room, could see the place in action. Is it somewhere you would want to spend a lot of time? Certainly not. But is it a demoralizing vortex of inefficiency aimed at squandering the hard-won gains of “real” Americans? Absolutely not. It’s a place filled with people doing their best, a place dedicated to helping others, no matter how tattered the American social net might be.
I wondered what Willa Cather would think of that room. I thought of the communal spirit expressed by the Nebraska farmers who populate the pages of O Pioneers!, most of them either first or second generation Americans. I thought of the marginalized characters Alexandra protects—a man named Ivar prone to fits and unwilling to wear shoes but good with horses who she keeps on to her brothers’ dismay, a Swedish widow who loves to visit Alexandra’s farm because the younger woman listens to her stories and doesn’t demand that the old woman speak English. Would Cather be willing to shift the onus of care from individual to collective? Would she agree that a dignified life belonged to all citizens regardless of their beliefs or abilities, and that this opportunity should be given by the people to each other through the government rather than through the mercy of an individual? I remembered a counter tendency to Alexandra’s charity and large-mindedness, namely a tendency to judge behaviors deemed deviant or non-normative, as when Alexandra scours her body in the bath after indulging in sexual fantasy or denounces Emil and Marie’s illicit relationship.
Most of all, I looked at the faces in the room, many, perhaps most of which, were not white. I thought about who counts among the pioneers of the title, and which kinds of Americans did not seem to be imagined by the book. (Having finished the book, I’m especially struck by its absolute silence about indigenous people, who are not even present as frightening tales from the time before the frontier was settled.)
I hoped, and this is fanciful I know, that, despite the changes between then and now, Willa Cather would enjoy sitting in that room, would view its goings on with interest, would be curious about if not necessarily approving of the America present among its plastic chairs and scuffed linoleum flooring.
Robert Adams, “North of Keota, Colorado”
I’ll never know, of course, but I will know what my co-hosts thought of it, which is something I am even more curious about.
Friends, what did you make of O Pioneers! ?
Listen to the episode for their answers: but feel free to chime in below. We’re all friends here.
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 