Springtime all right. Sometimes too hot, but then suddenly too cold. The fruit trees did their best, but the New Climate was too much for them, and they weren’t as glorious as they might have been. A friend visited from Germany and we drank many cappuccinos. I experienced the St Louis church hall Lenten fish fry: a beautiful thing. I read these books.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

The subject of episode 43 of One Bright Book.

I hadn’t read this since graduate school; I guess I’d say it’s my least favourite Woolf. (Keeping in mind I’ve yet to read The Years or Night and Day.) She clearly had a lot of fun with it, and good on her. Her idea of fun is not mine, is all. The jokes about how writers have been a pain across the centuries are well and good, and the pastiches of former literary styles impressive, but I just don’t care much for writing about writing. Still, as I said in our conversation, I was glad to have read it again. There are some marvelous moments—I especially loved the opening Elizabethan sequence: the impromptu fair on the frozen Thames is unforgettable—and it’s interesting to see Woolf’s fascination with the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity play out in another register from her most famous works.

Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Quest (1997)

Final book in a fantasy trilogy that probably felt more innovative at the time than now, but which absolutely holds up. (I read volumes 1 and 2 last fall, when I couldn’t be bothered to blog.) The books get progressively longer, especially this one, which is almost 900 pages of pretty small print. I gather their length has been held against them, and I guess this last book, especially, could have been shortened, but I was absorbed, especially because female characters become much more important in this last volume. I recommend these highly, especially to readers like me, who used to read a lot in the genre but moved away for a while, or to those curious to give the genre a try—the first book is only about 300 pages, so you aren’t making a huge initial commitment; plus the covers of the reissues won’t scare or embarrass the fantasy-averse.

As to what they’re about, I direct you to Elle’s unimprovable post. Her points about Hobb’s representation of disability and the long-term effects of physical and psychological abuse are especially good.

A couple of final thought for those who have already read these: Nighteyes is the best—imagine a whole novel centered on him! The idea of Old Blood is one I would have liked to see further developed. Maybe that happens in one of her other trilogies? And, finally, Molly and Burrich: I approve!

Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do (2017)

Bui trained herself to draw comics in order to create this graphic memoir, which took her twelve years to finish—and that’s not including the time it took her to compile the oral histories on which it’s based. The book traces her parents’ lives in Vietnam under French colonization, during the Vietnam War, and their departure, with their children, including Bui herself, who was three years old at the time, as “Boat People” on the way to an eventual new life in the US. The back-and-forth structure—Bui toggles between interviewing her parents in the present (a project given further poignancy by the birth of her own child) and depicting their past experiences—is taken from Maus, as she freely admits. The similarities between the books are uncanny, especially in their shared depiction of cross-generational trauma. Yet for whatever reason, The Best We Could Do has left little mark in my memory. I don’t regret reading it, but I thought Thien Pham’s Family Style, which covers similar territory, has a more powerful visual style.

Yosha Gunasekera, The Midnight Taxi (2026)

Novel about two South Asian women in NYC, one a taxi driver and the other a public defender, who band together when a fare turns up dead in the first woman’s cab. Fine premise, but weak writing and poor plotting make this thin gruel.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)

I’m the last person to read this, which means you already know it’s great. And you’ve heard what others have rightly said about it: Butler predicted our present all too well. (The book is set mostly in 2027.) The collapse of public services, the shrinking of the United States into a set of semi-autonomous armed conclaves, the violence and despair that comes from extreme income inequality, the terrible release of powerful opiates, the climate change: it all hits. President Donner and his oligarchic-fascism is uncannily reminiscent of Trump and his coterie.

N. K. Jemisin must have been inspired when writing her Broken Earth trilogy by Butler’s creation of a condition she calls “hyper-empathy” or “sharing,” a double-edged experience that shapes the lives of some of the characters, including the protagonist. Parable of the Sower is a violent, desperate book, but not despairing. It ends with another quintessentially American phenomenon: the founding of a utopian community.

As soon as I finished, I started on Parable of the Talents, which I was also enjoying, but then I unaccountably stopped, because I’m like that.

Vivek Shanbhag, Sakina’s Kiss (2021) Trans. Srinath Perur (2023)

You know how every family has its catchphrases? Things like nonsense words (your kid’s adorable mispronunciations.) Or lines from a tv show (ours is “Bags must be properly folded!”—real ones know.) As he did in his brilliant debut, Ghachar Ghochar, Vivek Shanbhag puts this kind of language at the heart of his new book. The two examples in Sakina’s Kiss couldn’t be more different. One is cute: a father’s magical incantation to his child. The other is tragic: a misunderstood phrase with terrible consequences. But gradually they reveal themselves to be versions of the same thing. After all, they come from the mouth of the same character, the novel’s narrator, a middlingly successful professional in the tech hub of Bengaluru. This man, we learn, is a master at using language to conceal truth. And Shanbhag is even more adept at helping us to see things his narrator cannot. He crams as much incident—violence, rebellion, stolen inheritances—into his two hundred pages as a 19^th century doorstopper. Don’t miss this one.

Kim Fay, Kate and Frida (2025)

Another from the “James recommends books to me” file. In the 1990s, two women become best friends when one, living the American in Paris gap year dream, writes to a bookstore back home requesting a copy of Martha Gelhorn’s The Face of War. The other suggests she might also like Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, and so begins an epistolary relationship filled with recommendations of books, music, and food. The pair form a mutual hype club, encouraging each other re: work and love lives. At first I found Fay’s writing too earnest and twee, even for me, and almost stopped reading. But I kept on because I remember those days fondly, and next thing you know I was up after midnight finishing the thing. Every time the book threatens to go wrong—one character finagles her way to Sarajevo during the siege with a woefully underprepared idea of becoming a stringer—it surprises by handling the moment more interestingly than you’d expect. Not an all-timer, but a charmer, especially for my fellow Gen Xers.

Gwendoline Riley, The Palm House (2026)

When I paged through the opening of the copy that NYRB kindly sent me, as I like to do, I soon found myself engrossed and before you know it I’d read pretty much the whole thing. (It’s a quick read.) I wouldn’t mind reading it again; I’ve a hunch it would repay that attention. I loved that this is an oblique, slightly peculiar novel that, happily, is about stuff, not least the London housing market, without ever aiming to report on “the state of the nation.”

It’s mostly about the narrator’s friendship with the editor of a highbrow publication for which she has freelanced in the past. The editor has been pushed out, replaced by a bro who talks big but knows nothing (his “philosophy” is to move fast and break things) and indeed does not last long in this new job. The former editor claims to be taking it in stride, but really he’s not. He and the narrator have drinks and meals and walk along the river. They never sleep with each other or fall in love or anything. It’s a real friendship. They are careful with each other. Close but not too close. Riley does this thing where she presents successive pieces of dialogue as separate when they are actually from the same character, and it has a pleasingly slippery effect. I dunno, it’s good.

Miklós Bánffy, They Were Divided [The Transylvanian Trilogy: Volume III] (1940) Trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (2000)

Most of the time I’m so haunted by the enormity of everything I want to read that I race through books, often starting another one the minute I’ve finished. (I’m aware this is no way to live, thank you very much.) But once in a while I get so immersed in the world of a book that I’m sad rather than glad about the shrinking number of pages. Such was the case with the third volume of Bánffy’s trilogy.

Things become even more sour and unhappy in this final volume—and why not: the reader has known from the beginning that WWI is coming to destroy the marvelous, terrible Hapsburg Empire. But by the end of They Were Divided, even the characters know it, though of course they do not yet know what that will mean. (It ends as our hero, the would-be progressive landowner Bálint Abády, drives to the mustering point for his regiment.) The sadness within the book became tangled with my own feelings as a reader. I started most mornings over the past months reading my daily pages of Bánffy, and that will be a reading memory I cherish for years.

One last thought, neither here nor there: I don’t think I’ve read a novel from this time and place in which Jews feature so infrequently. Striking!

Irene N Watts and Kathryn E. Shoemaker, Good-bye Marianne (2008)

Illustrated adaptation of Watts’s middle grade novel of the same name. The latter is the first in a trilogy modeled on the author’s own experiences: loving childhood in Berlin in a middle-class German Jewish home; increasing persecution, most painfully being expelled from school in the days after Kristallnacht; a fortunate but difficult escape on a Kindertransport, leading to a new life in England and, later, Canada. I plan to track the novels down at some point, not least because I’m curious how they compare to Judith Kerr’s similar novels.

At the heart of the book is Marianne’s friendship, in the weeks between being forced out of school and leaving the country, with a non-Jewish boy who is visiting his aunt, the landlady of the building in which Marianne lives with her mother. (Her father has had to go into hiding.) Ernest is good fun. Like Marianne, he loves Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, and inventing games inspired by its scenarios. He’s always up for exploring the city. But he belongs to the Hitler Youth and is matter of fact about Jewish inferiority. He says something hateful—but also has the wherewithal to consider what that means. Shoemaker’s lovely pencil drawings soften the harshness of the story, without every downplaying anything, making this book suitable for readers from 5^th grade on up.

Funny story: my wife spells her name the same way as the character, and when she saw this on the dining table she said, “Anything you want to tell me???”

Back soon with tales from April’s reading.