Category Archives: lists

What I Read, May 2026

Posted on by under book review, close reading, lists, month in review, review

In May I puttered along, running my runs, doing my little jobs, seeing a movie or two. And drinking my coffees. I haven’t said this yet, it’s so hopelessly dad-coded, but in January I bought a Mokka pot and I’m not sure any object has ever given me such joy. Once I’ve fussily brewed my very small, very strong coffee I make it a rule to sit somewhere without music or phone or book and drink it mindfully. Ridiculous, right??? Anyway, I also read these books.

Edward Hopper, Le Bistro aka The Wine Shop, 1909

Artem Chapeye, The Weathering (2021) Trans. Daisy Gibbons (2026)

Written the year before Russia’s full-scale invasion, The Weathering references the occupation of the Donetsk, the gangsterism of the 1990s, and other events in recent Ukrainian history. But Chapeye’s engrossing novel mostly concerns an imagined future. A young couple escape their jobs in Kyiv for a well-earned holiday off-grid in the Carpathians. Weeks pass: first blissful, then ominous. Why haven’t they seen any locals? Why can’t they bring themselves to come off the mountain? And once they do, where the hell is everyone? In the seemingly abandoned capital, they are met by men with guns, guys from the neighborhood whose militia cosplaying soon turns deadly. As philosophical as it is action-packed, The Weathering asks what it means to live with violence: “How should you act when facing an armed man and still preserve your dignity? And the dignity of others? How?” Many of the novel’s pleasures stem from its being so Ukrainian, but those anguished questions pertain to us all.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)

I read this with an eye to assigning it to my future 11th graders. Well, I abandoned that idea quickly. Its sentences—so gorgeous, so thorny—too hard. Its sexual politics too complex. Now that I’m almost finished Another Country (more on that in next month’s installment) and planning to get through as much of his work as I can this summer, I see that widespread self-loathing is a part of Baldwin’s work more generally. I don’t mean his own self-loathing; I don’t know enough to diagnose him that way. I mean something like cultural self-loathing, the ways minorities are hated such that they internalize that hatred.

Once I gave up hoping it would be suitable for my classroom, I sunk into the novel, amazed at how it could be so lovely and so ugly. (It’s about David, an American in 1950s Paris, who falls into a passionate affair with Giovanni, an Italian immigrant. Neither man is willing to admit he is gay in the way present day readers might demand. David and Giovanni are able to be together only in the confines of Giovanni’s shabby rented room, less bower than foxhole. There’s one glorious scene in which the pair, going home together for the first time, walk along the Seine through early-morning Paris. (Giovanni works nights at a bar owned by a miserable queen.) Otherwise, though, the book is a litany of hatred, shame, and disgust. Its depictions of homosexuality are so regressive. And yet the book is so good. What gives? Thank god Garth Greenwell pointed me to his essay about just this problem. As you would expect from Greenwell, it’s as gorgeously written as Baldwin’s novel. And smart and helpful about what one can take from works of art that don’t align with our sensibilities the way we might want them to.

Sally Carson, The Prisoner (1936)

Sequel to Crooked Cross, which Persephone has reissued in the UK to general acclaim, and which Vintage will publish in the US this fall. Carson spent some time in Bavaria in the early 30s—exactly how much and whether it was more than a holiday I don’t know for sure—and used that experience to write a trilogy about an ordinary German family in the first months of Nazi rule. The Prisoner is the second book in the series; I went into it with excitement and trepidation, the latter after Rohan’s post got me wondering if whether I liked Crooked Cross as something more than a historical document. You can read my comment if you’re so inclined.

In comparison to Crooked Cross, The Prisoner is heavy weather. The first book ended dramatically; the second picks up just weeks after those events. It would be wrong to say nothing happens: the family moves to Munich, for example, to literally distance itself from the tragedy of the first book, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the strategy doesn’t work. But The Prisoner is more about emotional fallout than anything else. It’s an interior book, and Carson, not always the nimblest writer, relentlessly keeps her characters turning over their emotions. Sometimes I felt the influence of Lawrence, but without the latter’s regular ability to astonish and make language strange.

The best part of the book comes near the end when a subplot from the previous novel returns in surprising, eventful, and heartbreaking form. Here Carson dramatizes both the appeal and the horror of Nazism in a manner that feels fresh because it’s written from the moment, without hindsight to govern the presentation of events. There’s no ominous foreshadowing—Dachau exists, but Sobibor is as yet unimagined—and few of the clichés that structure our depictions of Nazi rule. I won’t say Carson is more accurate historically than a writer today would be. In some ways, she is more blinded, less aware of the scope of things. She has the freedom and helplessness of anyone writing about their own moment.

It would be wrong to say that I loved this book. And yet I powered through it in a long weekend, and I’ll be first in line when the third volume is reissued. I suspect that one will be more like the first.

Mahmud El Sayed, The Republic of Memory (2026)

Engrossing multigenerational starship novel from British Egyptian writer El Sayed, clearly a talent to watch. Halfway through its 400-year-long journey to a new world, the city-ship Safina sails on amid rising discontent from its citizens, even as the ship’s “ancestors”—scientists and military leaders from Earth frozen until they can guide the settlement of the new world—slumber on in one of the lower decks. A revolt thirty years into the voyage disabled the ship’s AI and replaced its autocratic government with a republic. Generations later, the promise of that revolution has stalled. Upward mobility is a thing of the past, the ship’s resources can barely satisfy the increased population, and the attempt to replace ethnic and religious differences with language has been foiled by a self-interested translator caste.

After a dangerous power outage, a long-awaited revolution (modelled in part on the Arab Spring) promises to change everything. But while the ship limped along on minimal power, the decision was made to awaken the ancestors. And they want to quell the uprising. This book has it all: terrific world-building, well-developed ensemble cast, and even an invented language. The only problem is that we’ll have to wait a year to find out what happens in the last part of this promised duology.

Tim Sullivan, The Dentist (2020)

A bad book I couldn’t stop reading.

The protagonist, DS Cross, is autistic: his neuroatypicality makes him both an excellent detective and a trying colleague. He spends a lot of time deciphering the equivocations, half-lies, and body language that comprise so much of daily life for neurotypical folks. The book doesn’t make fun of or fetishize Cross, but it also acknowledges that his condition can exasperate those who know him and bewilder those who don’t. It seems, in other words, even handed. I had assumed that Sullivan must be autistic himself, but turns out he’s not. And that changed my feelings about the book. I wouldn’t call it exploitative, but I also don’t understand why Sullivan felt emboldened to write from this perspective. Surely there are autistic writers who could tell a story like this themselves.

Before writing the Cross novels—apparently a big hit in the UK—Sullivan wrote and directed films and television. (Surely a series is in development.) The prose is accordingly serviceable and pacey. At least it’s not overwritten. The mystery was solid enough, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the plots get better further into the series. (Each installment is named after the profession of the victim.) The supporting characters are good, especially Cross’s father, a retired engineer who helped build the Concord. His willingness to take his son in stride is heartwarming, and I imagine Sullivan might do a lot with the character.

I dunno, I got the second book from the library. We’ll see if I read it.

Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep (1927)

Read this with the group organized by Sean Breathes Books. (Six books into what has turned into a project to discuss all of her books, we now have a name, The Edith Wharthogs, and a spiffy logo, designed by James.) Regular readers will recall that I was underwhelmed by her memoir, A Backward Glance, our previous text, but our latest was a tremendous surprise. I hadn’t heard of it until Smith & Taylor included it in their first batch of reissues. In the afterword, Brendon Taylor rightly calls this a more compelling Gatsby. (I’m talking through my hat a bit, not having read Fitzgerald in over 30 years, but boy I sure will be familiar with his most famous novel soon: it’s a set text at my new job.) Wharton’s novel is uncannily attuned to our present moment: it features addiction, self-actualization, influencer culture, and the joyless pursuit of rest.

Pauline Manford, the character at the heart of this investigation of life in the previous century’s Twenties, has a lot on her plate, so much that her day is scheduled in fifteen-minute increments. There’s her philanthropic and charitable work. (No matter if the causes are at odds: she chairs both a league in support of birth control and a society for the furtherance of motherhood.) There’s her support of—some would say victimization at the hands of—a rotating series of gurus, healers, and self-proclaimed wise men who help her lose weight, worry less, and find inner fulfillment. And there’s her family: two husbands (current: accomplished lawyer; former: neurasthenic invalid) and two children (Jim, son by first marriage, doggedly pursuing a career in the law that he doesn’t much care for; Nona, daughter by the second, something of a younger, female Newland Archer, amused at the society in which she has been raised but more dedicated to its mores than she might like, having renounced her chance at happiness in allegiance to ideals she doesn’t believe in). The husbands and siblings all get along, especially now that their collective concern is focused on Jim’s wife, Lita, as ruthlessly devoted to pleasure and rejecting societal expectations as she is beautiful. Lita matter-of-factly wants to leave Jim (and poor Baby, never named and largely ignored) to be in the movies. And the movies want her. A producer (Jewish, grasping, natch), terrifically named Klawhammer, has his eye on her. How could Pauline and the family ever survive such shame? Can they keep Lita and Jim together? More troublingly, what designs does Arthur Manford have on his step-daughter-in-law? How many nervous breakdowns will feature before the end of the book?

A busy novel, as you can see. (A mere 230 pages in the Smith & Taylor edition.) And a tremendously entertaining and thoughtful one. The title comes from a much-touted new anesthetic given to mothers in the delivery room. But it refers more generally to the fugue state of modern life: those regular hits of excitement that are as necessary to our ability to make it through the day as they are enervating. For me, it’s as though Wharton had described, already a century ago, that helpless fugue state I fall into when I just can’t stop scrolling.

In case you can’t tell, I loved this book. It’s filled with Wharton’s terrific prose too. Let me end by sharing the opening:

Miss Bruss, the perfect secretary, received Nona Manford at the door of her mother’s boudoir (“the office,” Mrs. Manford’s children called it) with a gesture of the kindliest denial.

There’s a sentence doing some work! So much information yet so little action. Three characters are introduced (four, really, though we don’t yet know how many children Mrs. Manford has). Two qualifying clauses impede our syntactical progress even as they grant us a lot of information. Will Miss Bruss’s (the brusqueness hinted at in her name is forced on her by her employer) epithet prove to be accurate or ironic? Where does the description of the qualifying phrase come from? Is “the perfect secretary” an instance of omniscience or of free indirect discourse? Speaking of irony, do we hear grudging admiration along with the gentle dismissal of their mother’s work in that description of boudoir as office? What would “a gesture of kindliest denial” look like? However we picture it, we’ll encounter it a lot in the novel: resolve softened by good manners, but no less steely for that.

This is a beginning that has me raring to keep reading. Hope it entices you as well.

Garry Disher, Mischance Creek (2025)

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy Disher’s Hirsch books, about a cop in rural far western Australia. By his own admission, Hirsch is as much social worker as policeman, and most of the time he’s checking in on people, some of whom go days, even weeks without seeing anyone outside their household.

This installment begins with him doing the rounds of his annual firearms audit. Everyone in this district has a gun or two. Are they locked up? Are the bullets stored separately? These questions are important, but they’re also a pretext for a more pressing one: How are you doing? (Are you going to use that gun on someone else or yourself?) The answers are mostly a resounding no. A brutal drought has pushed farmers and ranchers to the brink. Starving sheep are being shot en masse. Banks are repossessing farms. People are angrier with each other than ever, eager to vent grievances. These bad feelings are the kind of thing that led to the resounding failure of the Australian Indigenous Voices referendum, referenced more than once. Nominally, Mischance Creek centers on a cold case (the deaths of a husband and wife, found separately in the bush, where they liked to go rockhounding; seven years later their adult daughter thinks she has found new evidence.) But that’s not especially important. Disher succeeds, as usual, in keeping many balls in the air: some of these plot elements are satisfyingly minor. I appreciate his refusal to tie everything to the main case the way most crime writers do.

But really the book is about the question of how good liberals can respond to contemporary authoritarianism. The previous book in the series, concerning the aftermath of Covid restrictions, was the weakest so far because it seemed completely at a loss in this regard. Mischance Creek does better, not because it has a solution, but because it’s at least aware of the cluelessness of the institutions it’s centered on (not least the institution of the procedural). In the past, Disher skated past the chasm between cops and social workers (sometimes their roles overlap, but fundamentally their philosophies are totally different). Now he’s got a larger problem: a lot of characters—and people in the world this book represents—don’t believe in either of the roles, or the philosophies for that matter.

Mischance Creek taught me about the sovereign citizen movement, which I didn’t realize was a thing. (We’d have a lot more of that kind of thing in the US if “sovereign citizens” hadn’t coopted the government and other institutions of the state.) “Sovereign citizens” blithely deny that they are members of a larger politic (they aren’t Australians, say); they answer to no one but themselves. Hard to see how this doesn’t eventually lead to fascism. Hirsch and his colleagues in the district, along with the teachers and doctors who make up the social system of this vast, remote area, are, in Disher’s view, tragic figures, emblematic of a lost world—but, and this is what Disher doesn’t seem to get, that very world did nothing to stop its loss.

Philip Clarkson Elliott, Shelocta, PA, 1943

Good month! Aside from the Sullivan, I have no regrets. What about you? How was your reading month?

What I Read, April 2026

Posted on by under book review, lists, month in review, review, Uncategorized

I really buried the lede in my description of March. Forgot to mention the most important thing. I got a job! I’ll be teaching 8th and 11th grade English at an independent school just ten minutes from home. (This seems to be St Louis-speak for what I always knew as “a private school.”) I’m excited for the opportunity—though also quite anxious, never having taught anyone younger than a college freshman.

I spent April beavering away at various jobs: consulting, editing, working my shifts at the bookstore, and, this month, working with two theater productions. I served as the dramaturgue for the New Jewish Theater’s excellent production of Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic and participated in a panel on Upstream Theater’s delightful production, in Phillip Boehm’s translation and adaption, of Jura Soyfer’s End of the World Cabaret. Maybe you know as little about Soyfer as I did. Check out the link to his Wikipedia entry. A fascinating but all-too-short life. It was genuinely thrilling to watch a production from its very first table reading to final performance. Theater people are truly amazing! And St Louis seems to be a great theater town.

I was busy and didn’t read as much as usual, but here’s what I did make time for.

Max Ginsburg, The Friends (1981)

Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (1982)

The subject of Episode 44 of One Bright Book.

Rebecca chose this novel-in-linked-stories about seven women living in a tenement building in an unnamed American city, and I’m glad she did. It has all the things. Struggle, resilience, community as sustenance and as suffocation. Joy, despair, sex, death. The use of real estate and domestic spaces to tell the story of 20th Century American racial uplift. Tellingly, doesn’t feel dated. Would pair well with Ann Petry’s The Street, though Brewster is slightly less committed to realism. Reminded me too of Bryan Washington’s story “Alif,” which is also about a neighbourhood where everyone is all up in each other’s business. This book was around a fair bit in my 1990s bookselling days, but I’d never read it or indeed anything by Naylor. I’m glad I did, and I plan to read more.

Francis Spufford, Nonesuch (2026)

Iris Hawkins wants to be rich. Not for the comfort that money can buy, though that’s nice too. But because she wants “to be part of the way the world works… to be in the room where decisions are taken… to make things happen… to see the angles.” She wants men to have to see her and not be able to ignore her.

At first this is difficult because she’s a secretary at a financial firm in the City in 1939. But with the advent of the war she’s able to take on more responsibility. Men are deployed. Her boss has checked out from worry about his son, a POW of the Germans. He distractedly acquiesces to her plan to short the market, a plan that pays dividends. She even impresses John Maynard Keynes when she unknowingly meets him at a country house party.

It’s impressive that Iris can do all this, because the rest of her life is more than a little busy. A one-night stand with an engineer in the still-fledgling industry of television turns serious, not least when the man’s father, a charming, helpless old coot in thrall to the study of the occult, turns out to know what he’s talking about. Iris is soon being pursued by magical creatures and in a race with another young woman, the aristocratic golden child of the British fascist movement, to unlock angels that have been entombed in London sculptures. Oh yeah, she also needs to foil a plot to assassinate Churchill and replace him the pro-German Lord Halifax.

This is all as busy as it sounds, and frankly I can’t work out how Spufford wants to connect the secret systems of finance and the occult. Maybe this will become clearer before long. Turns out that Nonesuch is the first of the duology. On Bluesky, Spufford said the second book is due next summer. Better be because Nonesuch ends on a real cliffhanger!

Christoffer Carlsson, The Living and the Dead (2023) Trans. Rachel Wilson-Broyles (2025)

Crime novel set in the same region of western Sweden and featuring some of the same characters as Blaze Me a Sun, which I enjoyed a couple of years ago. Less interesting than its predecessor, unfortunately. Similar structure (a crime in the past, hitherto unsolved, leads to a new crime in the present), similar themes (young people become middle-aged people who find their lives haven’t had as much in store for them as they expected). All done just a little less compellingly. Diverting enough—the audio got me through a long drive—but nothing special.

Tana French, The Keeper (2026)

Wrote about this here. An ongoing conversation with Elle has me wondering if it’s more pro-vigilante than I had credited. I loved the book, though: what does this say about me?

Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices (1980)

The second selection for Leviathan’s Women of a Certain Age book club. Another rousing discussion of another terrific book. Hadn’t read it in more than ten years: happily, a joy to revisit. We considered the novel’s structure, its cast of characters, the difficulty of discerning a protagonist, the relation of these obliquities to the historical period in which it is set, namely, the period in 1940 from Dunkirk to the beginnings of the Blitz when the war, as far as Britain was concerned, was both all-consuming and distant. We thought about the novel as a portrait of an institution—someone mentioned Shirley Hazzard’s book about the UN as a comparison—in this case, the BBC, and the flattening of any distinction between the employees’ personal and professional lives. The higher-ups, in particular, basically live in Broadcast House, but eventually the building’s theater, previously used for orchestral recordings, is turned into a dormitory for all employees. Convenient and safe, but also frustrating in that the room’s excellent acoustics make every snore, sigh, or groan crisply audible. This is an example of Fitzgerald’s inimical tone, which veers suddenly from humor to heartbreak. The ever-present possibility of death turns monomania from a joke to a noble enterprise: I’m thinking of the example Dr. Vogel, a German émigré and expert in recorded sound, whose perfectionist tendencies see him record several hours’ worth of church doors squeaking, only a few seconds of which will feature in a planned “Sounds of Britain” program. We might find Vogel’s obsession annoying or even irresponsible in the face of larger dangers. But we are bound to feel differently when he is killed by a piece of flying drainpipe in the aftermath of a raid, as he is patiently explaining to an air raid warden on behalf of a stranger that English law allowed the man to enter his bombed-out building twice, once to get his mattress and once to take any other personal effects. Suddenly pedantry seems less persnickety and more the foundation of the rule of law.

Dozens of moments like this fill the pages of this terrific short book.

I didn’t plan to read two Blitz novels in such short order, and I don’t have anything smart to say about the differences. I can only note that when memory becomes history—as it has in the 45 years between the publication of these two novels—then literary modes other than realism seem reasonable in a way they might not have before.

Robert Jackson Bennett, City of Stairs (2014)

First novel in Bennett’s first fantasy trilogy, which I bought because it’s been reissued in a spiffy new edition. I’d have never looked twice at the old one. I’m shallow that way. Which would have been bad, since the premise is good. Bulikov (vaguely Russian or Eastern European) was once the continent of gods. Magic ruled the day. The place was wealthy and powerful. It colonized the rest of the world, all the places the gods did not favour. That was especially true of the island of Saypur, whose people suffered greatly at Bulikov’s hands. But then everything changed. New technology allowed little Saypur (vaguely Islamic or Mughal Indian) to kill and/or sequester the gods and now once-mighty Bulikov is an impoverished vassal state of the highly militarized Saypur. When a famous Saypuri academic, a specialist in the old gods, is found murdered in Bulikov’s former capital, a city whose geography has been rearranged by the technology that killed the gods (an event known as The Blink), a Saypuri diplomat is sent to investigate. It’s not long before she, along with her very cool sidekick, finds that those murdered gods might not be so dead.

City of Stairs is often great (premise, world-building, characterization) and sometimes not great (too long, slow start). But I got so into it that even before I finished I’d bought the other two. I moved on to the second book right away, but before long I got stuck. It has a bad case of “middle novel” syndrome. I’ll get back to it, though.

There is a thing about Bennett, whose Ana and Din books I so much enjoyed earlier this year, that I should mention because some of you might find it disqualifying. The guy has a mania for the solecism “hence why”: it’s appeared at least once in each of the three books I’ve read, and it’s like fingernails of the chalkboard. What are the editors even doing???

Daniel Greene, Naked Maja, 2009

Not much of a reading month, really. All that theater stuff kept me pretty busy. Fear not, May brought a better assortment.

What I Read, March 2026

Posted on by under book review, lists, month in review, review

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.

William George Scott, Flowers and a Jug, 1946

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 19th century doorstopper. Don’t miss this one.

Kim Fay, Kate and Frida (2025)

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

Gwendoline Riley, The Palm House (2026)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernhard Dörries, Breakfast Still Life, 1927

Back soon with tales from April’s reading.

What I Read, February 2026

Posted on by under book review, lists, month in review, review, self-promotion

February in St Louis was warmish but not dismayingly so. We could still pretend winter is a thing. Lots of good running weather. I beavered away at my various gigs. I probably saw some movies but now I can’t remember. I should start writing those down. My review of Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers was published in The Wall Street Journal. Canada lost both gold medal Olympic hockey games, and that really hurt. I also read some books.

Leo Lesser Ury, Cafe König at Night, 1925

Qntm, There is no Antimemetics Division (2025)

We live in a world of memes. Internet jokes, catch phrases, bits of culture that spread with the persistence of an earworm. But what if there were such things as antimemes? Ideas, cultish beliefs, even malevolent forces that circulate with similar force except that they have the power of being forgotten, such that we are unable to recall their effect on us. And what if a governmental organization had been set up to protect us from these antimemes, which seek to crush us with their own dark virality?

That’s the premise of this brilliant novel, which broke my brain in all the best ways. The scientists and operatives in the Antimemtic Division routinely forget everything they’ve done, requiring elaborate protocols and dangerous actions to make sure that the world is kept safe from REDACTED and REDACTED. Author qntm, pronounced “quantum,” the pen name of British writer Sam Hughes, concludes that the human ability to forget anything is both what keeps us going and our greatest vulnerability.

Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption (2024)

Ana and Din are back! This time they venture into the most forbidding and dangerous place in the Empire: the Shroud. In this floating station off the coast (part oil derrick, part Pequod), a handful of Alchemists process leviathan corpses, harvesting the raw material from which all-powerful bodily modifications stem. In addition to avoiding the dreaded “middle volume sag” and offering another satisfying tale of detection, A Drop of Corruption picks up the hints in the first volume about stakes larger than this one case, which will presumably be developed in the third book in the series, due later this year.

Lea Ypi, Indignity: A Life Reimagined (2025)

It starts with a photo.

A young couple enjoy the snow and sunshine of the Italian Dolomites. They look at the camera with quite different expressions. He seems wary: eyes narrowed, perhaps against the glare, two furrows etched on his forehead; she, nestled in a fur, smiles broadly. It’s early 1941. These newlyweds are on their honeymoon. How could they be enjoying themselves while the war rages and the Balkans, including Albania, where they have made their home, has been plunged into factionalism? And why hadn’t Yea Lpi, professor of philosophy and the subjects’ granddaughter, ever seen this picture before? As the photo circulates online, people make all sorts of claims. Her grandmother was a communist spy; she was a fascist collaborator. Is any of this true?

The photo turns out to be a red herring—Ypi doesn’t even reproduce it in the book, save in highly cropped form on the (beautiful) cover of the US edition. (It’s easy to find online, though.) Instead, her book reconstructs her grandmother Leman’s life, from her childhood in an Albanian family long devoted to the Ottoman Empire in Greek Salonica, through her decision, as a young woman of 18, to move to Tirana, where she found a career and, briefly, a husband, a man recently returned from studying law in Paris where he knew, though did not particularly like, another expatriate, a young striver named Enver Hoxha. Ypi’s grandfather’s decency and reformist leftist tendencies put him at odds with the postwar Communist government. He was branded an enemy of the state and imprisoned for 15 years, during which time Leman and their young son (Ypi’s father) were forced to work at manual labour far from their home in the capital

Central to the story are the documents in Leman’s secret service file at the formidably named Authority for Information Concerning Documentation of the Former State Security Service. As always, documents turn out to be fundamentally inconclusive, especially when a late revelation prompts Ypi to wonder if anything in them is at all trustworthy. It doesn’t help that Ypi is researching her grandmother (as opposed to her grandfather or any other male relative). As a fellow scholar puts it, women and archives don’t go together: when woman appear at all, it is almost always with their husband’s name. Better, the man tells Ypi, to write a novel.

Which Ypi has done, sort of. Her treatment of Leman’s life is novelistic: filled with thoughts and feelings she could have had no access to, even though Leman was a beloved figure in her upbringing in Communist Albania in the 1980s and 90s. Most impressive is her glorious evocation of the multicultural world of early 20th century Thrace, tragically destroyed by successive waves of ethnic cleansing, from forced population transfers between Greece and Turkey in the wake of WWI to the Nazi eradication of Jewish Salonica.

Beneath this personal and political history is a philosophical investigation. From its epigraphs, citing Kant and Schiller, to its closing pages, the book considers the idea of dignity and its titular opposite. Dignity is the drive to “rule over adversity with moral force,” a tendency that Ypi argues, following Schiller, is fundamentally human. Dignity is what allows a person to decide to suffer, rather than instinctively to seek to free themselves from pain. And people most suffer, Ypi concludes, when they want to acknowledge both that the meaning of their lives both incorporates and exceeds the larger identities of family and nation and gender and religion of which they are part. (Ypi is a modern day Kanitian.) In this way, Ypi has given us a way to think not just about her grandmother but all the ordinary people who live through history, as she puts it, the first time as tragedy and the second time as even greater tragedy.

Ray Nayler, Palaces of the Crows (2026)

After enjoying Where the Axe is Buried last month, I was excited to get my hands on an advanced copy of Nayler’s forthcoming novel. And when I learned it was set in the forests of Lithuania (or perhaps Belarus) in WWII I was even more intrigued. Why had the sff writer Nayler chosen to write historical fiction? The answer is that he has found another way to investigate the animating question of his fiction: what kinds of relationships can exist between human and non-human animal societies? His first book considered octopuses. His second, elephants and mastodons. Here it’s crows.

Four teenagers—one Jewish, one Roma, one a Pole who has enlisted in the Red Army to help his family survive their forced exile in Siberia, and one a mute boy whose origins are uncertain—find each other in the chaos of the German advance into the Soviet Union in summer 1941. The Jewish girl, Neriya, whose family has always, in the years before he war, left their home in Vilnius each summer to vacation in a country village, and whose doctor parents have encouraged her to read Darwin and von Uexhüll, has over the years befriended a crow she names Buster. Buster is smart, even for a crow. He remembers Neriya from year to year, and masters the various games and puzzles she sets for him. He introduces her to other crows, each of whom has their own personalities. When she hides from the Germans in the forest, the birds appear at times of trouble, helping her and the other teens survive. For although the forest is vast, it is peopled with all sorts of threats: partisans, Germans, Russians who have gone AWOL, and others who, like our protagonists, are simply trying to survive. These other people are dangerous—though not as much as the terrible winters. The teens need all the help they can get.

The crows have created an avian city in the heart of the forest—more than a city, a real society, in which they look out for the most vulnerable members, much more than humans do. Chapters set during the war are interspersed with others from the 1970s, when the teens, now adults, each of whom has navigated life in the USSR in a different way, return to the forest. How can they protect the descendants of the crows who once protected them? Palace of the Crows might wrongfoot or disappoint some of Nayler’s earlier readers, especially those expecting a book a set in the future, but those who persist will see that this book, too, is about how we tell the stories of who we are, both within and between species. I hope Nayler keeps up his current writing pace!

Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure (1989)

Stella Bradshaw is a working-class teenager in Liverpool in 1950. Her dream is to be in the theater, so she’s pleased in her closemouthed way when she is hired as an assistant stage manager in a regional playhouse. As the troupe prepares for a production of Peter Pan (the novel’s title comes from that play’s description of what death is sure to be), Stella becomes embroiled in its complicated relationships. She falls for the director, oblivious to what is obvious to readers: he’s gay. What at least this reader was oblivious to—surprising, because I’d seen the film, though admittedly not since it was in theaters in the late 90s—was the novel’s turn from comedy to tragedy. That ending! (And, yes, it’s all explained on the first page, Toni Morrison-style, but I’m slow.) Excellent stuff. Could have taken the Booker from A. S. Byatt if you ask me.

I’ll be reading this again soon: it’s the June title for the Leviathan book club. If you’re in St Louis, please join!

Miklós Bánffy, They Were Found Wanting [The Transylvanian Trilogy: Volume II] (1937) Trans. Patrick Thursfield and Katalin Bánffy-Jelen (2000)

See my thoughts on volume I. This continued to be excellent. Plenty of heartbreak, though. Things not going great for Laszlo.

Barbara Pym, The Sweet Dove Died (1977)

A moment ago, I mentioned a forthcoming meeting of the Leviathan book club. Pym’s late, great novel was our first selection. And what a terrific choice that turned out to be! I was thrilled to lead a discussion with such a smart and energetic group. I’d actually read this last August (one of those months I never got around to writing about) when NYRB released its beautiful edition. My first Pym, and from what I gather not the most representative, but absolutely terrific. I would say it even improved on re-reading. A woman coming up on 50—cool, elegant, manipulative, as Jacqui puts it in her review—meets an antique dealer and his 24-year-old nephew, who he’s training in the business. The antique dealer imagines a future with the woman, but she has designs (of what sort is never quite clear, even to herself) on the younger man. People behave badly—but, also, everyone has their reasons. The title, from Keats, is about the anguish—or is it the thrill?—of loving something to death. I would call The Sweet Dove Died Jamesian in the sense of being a study in cruelty. And an object lesson for any of us obsessed with the idea that the surroundings and events of our lives must be just so.

Isabel Cañas, Vampires of El Norte (2023)

Historical romance and vampire story set in the early part of the Mexican – American War (aka the US invasion of Mexico). As children, Nena and Néstor are inseparable, even though she’s the daughter of the patrón of a hacienda and he’s the son of a vaquero. Everything changes one night, when their expedition in search of buried Spanish silver coins goes terribly awry. Something, some creature, eyeless, all teeth and silent destruction, attacks Nena. The boy fights off the beast and carries the girl to the main house, but convinced he is responsible for her death he runs away never to be seen again. Until ten years later, that is, when he returns to join the forces the local ranchers are putting together to fight the Yanquis. When he sets eyes on Nena—who eventually recovered from her mysterious wounds—he freaks out. As does she, but for a different reason. She’s furious that he never wrote and can’t understand that he thought she was dead. This sets off an enemies-to-lovers story during a desperate mission in the wilds of northern Mexico: conveniently, the two become separated from the rest of the auxiliary cavalry during a battle. (Nena is there because in the intervening years and under the tutelage of Néstor’s grandmother she has become a curandera or healer.) Can the two overcome their differences to admit their love for each other? If so, what will happen when they return to the rigidly stratified world of the hacienda? And what are the terrible creatures the Yanquis have captured and forced to fight for them? You can probably guess the answers to all these questions. Vampires of El Norte doesn’t ever surprise, but it’s plenty satisfying. I do think Cańas needed to get a better handle on her allegory: those damn Yanquis are indeed vampiric but in the book’s most interesting moments the vampires are literal creatures, not just symbols. Just where did these vampires come from, anyway? It’s all a bit fast and loose. Still, I enjoyed this enough to seek out Cańas’s other books. Thanks to Hope for putting this on my radar.

Cy Twombly, Lepanto Part IV (2001)

March roundup coming soon!

What I Read, January 2026

Posted on by under book review, lists, month in review, review, Uncategorized

Gonna knock out some posts on this year’s reading before we hit the half-way mark of 2026. Here’s what I remember about January in St Louis. A snow storm came through near the end of the month. It was cold for a while. That was great. I ran as often as the street cleaning allowed. I spent some time applying for a job that I would later get. That was very good. And I read these books.

Childe Hassam, Messenger Boy (1902)

Georges Simenon, The Two-Penny Bar (1932) Trans. David Watson (2014)

What, you expect me to remember the plot of a Simenon I read five months ago? What I do remember is that this is one of the atmospheric-outskirts-of-Paris Maigrets. The search for the killer of a moneylender (Jewish, natch, boo) whose body has been seen being dumped in the river leads Maigret to a group of friends who spend weekends and holidays at an inn (the bar of the title) near Morsang, a village on the Seine about 40 km from the capital. They fish, paddle about, play cards, chase children, eat fulsomely, drink a hell of a lot, and sleep with each other. Maigret insinuates himself into the group, which is no trouble for him since he loves all those things too. (Except the adultery part. Maigret could never.) The vibes are immaculate, and the crime gets solved too.

Seichō Matsumoto, Tokyo Express (1958) Trans. Jesse Kirkwood (2022)

Born in 1909 in Japan’s Fukoka prefecture, Seichō Matsumoto did not publish until 1950. But then he made up for lost time, publishing over 450 books in the next four decades. These range from procedurals to psychological slow-burns in the vein of Patricia Highsmith or Celia Dale. Until recently, Matsumoto was hard to find in English. Happily, Modern Library (following on the heels of Penguin UK) has launched a program of reissues and they’ve started with one of his best. Tokyo Express (1958) begins with the discovery of the bodies of a man and a woman on a remote beach. Investigators rule the deaths a lovers’ suicide. But two detectives—one local to the scene, older, out of fashion; the other from the city, young, full of new ideas—aren’t buying it. Before long, they think they know who did it—but not how. Part odd-couple buddy story, part oblique criticism of a society desperate to repress its wartime past, the novel is famous for its plot, which centers on the detailed scrutiny of train time-tables. Trust me, this is a lot more exciting than it sounds. Tokyo Express is so clever you’ll be left shaking your head in appreciation at Matsumoto’s skill—and counting down the days until the next reissue appears.

Ray Nayler, Where the Axe is Buried (2025)

Nayler’s second full-length novel—after the excellent The Mountain in the Sea, about octopus intelligence—offers what are coming to seem his trademark elements: compelling characters; clear explanations of how systems function, whether these be ecological, political, or technological; and deep knowledge of political organizations and local customs gained from his other career in the foreign service. Set in an unspecified future in which many parts of the world are run by AI systems designed to maximize resources and human flourishing whereas others rely on more old-fashioned methods of coercion and surveillance, Where the Axe is Buried is a compendium of authoritarian strategies—and the resistances they inevitably provoke. Whether you read for the heart or the head, you’ll find much to appreciate here.

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875)

The subject of Episode 42 of One Bright Book. In my introduction to the episode, I said:

The central concepts of this terrific novel are cowardice and cruelty. Which is not to say it is a cruel or cowardly novel. How could it be, given Trollope’s amused interest in even the worst of the rogue’s gallery that makes up its cast of characters? But there sure is a lot of cruelty in its pages. Maybe we should be glad that even its worst characters don’t seem to take pleasure in their cruelty. (They are not Stephen Miller cruel.) But they are cowards, and in their desire to have things go their own way they will say or do anything, especially if it means they can avoid making a hard choice. Saying enough’s enough to someone else’s bad behaviour; taking responsibility for one’s own actions: these are things almost no one in this novel will do. That cowardice is what leads to cruelty. Something to think about re: our own day. Turns out The Way We Live Now is also about the way we live now.

Anne Youngson, Meet Me at the Museum (2018)

Anne Youngson was unknown to me when I noticed her two novels on the shelves of Leviathan. I figured James had a good reason for stocking them, so I asked him to tell me more. His response: “Light reading that doesn’t insult your intelligence.” Since that is my favourite kind of reading, I immediately moved them to the top of the TBR pile.

I started with Meet Me at the Museum because I love epistolary novels. As a teenager, Tina Hopgood wrote a letter to Professor P. V. Glob at the Silkeborg Museum in Denmark about the Tollund Man, which he had recently gained fame for identifying after the 2500-year-old body was found, perfectly preserved, by two peat-cutters in a bog. Glob—a real guy: his book was reissued by NYRB a while ago—wrote back, prompting the young woman to promise herself that she would visit the museum one day. Since then forty years have passed. Tina, now a middle-aged English farmwife with grown children, writes the professor again, this time because the friend she had planned to take the trip with all those years ago has just died. A reply to her lament for lost time arrives—but not from Glob, because he too is dead.

The letter writer is a curator named Anders Larson, who expresses mild interest in her past encounter with his famous predecessor and condolences on her recent loss. From this kind but detached beginning stems a lengthy correspondence in which two modest and decent people open up to each other about their shared puzzlement at how they came to have more life behind than ahead of them. The obvious comparison to Meet Me at the Museum is 84 Charing Cross Road and if you liked that one you’ll like this too. Like its more famous forbearer, Meet Me is gentle and modest in its ambitions and prose—but thrilling precisely because it doesn’t try to do too much. Its sincerity becomes it. As usual, James is right: it never insults your intelligence.

Youngson was in her 70s when she published this, her first book, written after her retirement from a career as an executive in the car industry. I’ve written before about how much the idea of the late bloomer means to me. (Maybe I’ll still do something with my life!) Learning about the author’s circumstances made me enjoy this lovely book all the more. I think a number of you would dig it, too.

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Tainted Cup (2024)

Rex Stout with monsters. The most dangerous place in Khanum is its sea-walls, where soldiers and engineers must constantly guard the empire from malevolent leviathans that inflict terrible damage any time they manage to breach the defenses. Yet these monsters don’t just threaten Khanum. They are also the source of its most powerful technologies. Alchemists have figured out how to synthesize the beasts’ blood and organs into bodily modifications that grant supernatural abilities and are thus coveted by the Empire’s citizens even though they are so powerful they often cause early death.

The narrator, Dinios “Din” Kol, has chosen to be modified as an Engraver: he remembers everything he ever hears, sees, smells, tastes, and touches. For obvious reasons, Engravers serve in law enforcement, typically serving as assistants to Investigators. At the beginning of The Tainted Cup, Din meets Anagosa “Ana” Dolraba. She is brilliant, idiosyncratic, vaguely disreputable. And she has asked for Din by name. Ana needs an Engraver more than most Investigators, because her agoraphobia and neurodivergence (she is so easily sensorily overstimulated she needs to wear a blindfold) generally keep her inside and away from crime scenes. (See what I mean about Nero Wolfe? And Sherlock Holmes for that matter.)

The pair have been tasked with solving the murder of a prominent Engineer. The man was found dead while visiting the home of a powerful oligarch, killed by dapplegrass, a modified plant that explodes from the inside anything that inhales or consumes it. Shortly thereafter, a section of seawall is breached and several of the Engineers responsible for protecting it are found dead in the same way.

I loved The Tainted Cup from start (a wonderful map) to finish (a teaser for the next volume). The solution to the crime is as good as the world-building: an impressive feat. A lot of books that try to do just one of those things don’t succeed. This is Bennett’s third series. I’ll be getting to them all.

Hans Peter Richter, Friedrich (1961) Trans. Edite Kroll (1970)

Postwar German children’s classic about the persecution of a Jewish child in 1930s Germany. The unnamed narrator has a best friend named Friedrich: the boys, born one week apart in 1925, grow up in the same apartment building, in an out of each other’s lives. At times, the narrator wishes he were part of Friedrich’s family. He looks up to his friend’s parents, warmer and wiser than his own. But the boys diverge as they age and Nazism takes hold on German life. For a time, the narrator manages—like his father, who remains friendly to Friedrich’s parents even after throwing in his lot with the Nazis, thanks to whom he has found work after long-term unemployment—to reconcile his friendship with the new norms of public life. But the contradiction can’t hold: the best part of the book concerns Kristallnacht, when Friedrich finds himself, in a moment of genuine ecstasy, that is, of being thrown outside himself, joining in with the destruction of Jewish property and life, starting with Friedrich’s home.

Richter served in the German army (he lost an arm on the Eastern front); after the war he studied psychology and sociology, but found his calling as a writer for children. Friedrich, the best known of his books, was for years a classroom staple in Germany. It’s easy to see why: it exemplifies the universalist school of representing Jewish life in the Nazi period: that is, it believes German Jews were as ordinary and as German as anyone else; their Jewishness was contingent and incidental to their lives. (In the guise of openness and acceptance, this view manages to reject the idea of Jewishness as meaningful in its own right.) It is also frank about German culpability. Which makes sense, given the audience it was written for. For the same reason, though, it’s not the book contemporary readers, especially non-German ones, are likely to most want on the subject. We might expect a book on the Holocaust to foreground Jewish experience, for example. We might want such a novel to have a Jewish main character. But that doesn’t mean the book isn’t worth reading. It is a document of its time, and carries its own interest, especially its willingness to suggest that there might be a thrilling element to destruction and persecution. A middle-grade book today probably wouldn’t do that, either. And that might be a loss.

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)

The past couple of years I’ve been part of a group, headed by Shawn of the Shawn Breathes Books YouTube channel, reading Edith Wharton’s collected works. Regular readers will know I think she’s a genius. I was excited to learn more about where that brilliance came from, and enthusiastically agreed when someone suggested we tackle her autobiography. By the end of the book, I wasn’t so enthusiastic anymore. I didn’t quite expect a tell-all, but I certainly thought it would be more personal than it is. Which makes sense: A Backward Glance predates the era of personal writing. Wharton is discrete to the point of obliquity about her failed marriage to the Boston Brahmin Teddy Wharton and silent about her lengthy love affair with the journalist Morton Fuller. Her look into the past is glancing indeed.

Still, I remember a number of moments, including:

Wharton’s claim that she was taught only two things as a child (she had, to put it mildly, erratic schooling): modern languages and good manners.

Her further claim—which you can see motivating a book like Age of Innocence—that her childhood was worth remembering only because the New York of that time is as vanished a world as Atlantis.

What William Dean Howells told her when the dramatization of The House of Mirth flopped: “What the American public always wants is a tragedy with a happy ending.”

Little Edith, carrying around a book and making up stories from it even before she could read.

A nearly silent visit with Henry James to the aged George Meredith, in the grip of locomotor ataxia and deafness.

Countless drives in an open car through the English countryside with a profusely sweating Henry James, who adored motoring, though of course never drove himself.

What I took most from the book is that Edith Wharton was an excellent, devoted friend. Her shyness and social anxiety caused many to ignore or be disappointed by her. But those who got to know her were richly rewarded. Readers of this book, however, can only glimpse that person. A Backward Glance is interesting but underwhelming. Certainly not the place to start with Wharton, who just looms larger and larger for me as a great 20th century writer.

Alex Katz, Winter Branch (1993)

More soon on February’s reading!

James Morrison’s Year in Reading, 2025

Posted on by under book review, Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

Regular readers will know that for the last several years I’ve solicited Year in Reading reflections from friends and trusted readers. As we’re well into February, I’ve scaled the project back considerably this time, but quality takes quantity every time… Today’s installment, his fifth, is by James Morrison, reader extraordinaire. James lives and works in Adelaide, on unceded Kaurna territory.

Charlie Stone, Behemoth from ‘The Master & Margarita’ (1999)

Working out which books to write about for these discussions is always fraught—there are easily another twenty great books I could have raved about, but neither you nor I are made of infinite time. I’ve tried to narrow things down to a few broad categories, but even then a few books would not be restrained by such, so they’re tacked on at the end.

In a couple of other people’s year-end reading round-ups on Bluesky, they talked not about what they’d read, but why they’d read it—what had prompted them to buy or pick up the books they ended up reading. It was strangely interesting, at least to a big horrible nerd like me, so I’m including that here for my own choices. Feel free to pass over it with glazed eyes. [Ed. – No way! I think people love that stuff. I know I do.]

RAMUZ

My most compelling new-to-me writer discovery of the year was Swiss novelist Charles Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947). The three of his books that I read all have the same basic premise—Something Horrible Happening in the High Alps—but go off in very different directions. Great Fear on the Mountain (translated by Bill Johnston) was what got me hooked first: a historical novel where a group of men set off to take the village’s flock up through a mountain pass to find feed, and then everything goes to hell. It has all the rhythms of an 1980s horror movie, but is beautifully written and was first published in 1926. Derborence [When the Devils Came Down] (translated by Laura Spinney) features an avalanche and its spooky survivor, while Into the Sun (translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan) is an impressionistic, atmospheric early climate change novel. As the Earth slowly falls into the sun, the snows melt, the mountain lakes boil, and society collapses into violence and despair.

Why: Nathaniel Rich’s splendid overview of Ramuz’s work in the NYRB.

BIG FAT EPICS

For some reason 2025 became a year in which I started, and sometimes finished, a number of big fat epics. [Ed. — Always big and fat, the epics.] Look at me, aren’t I tough?

Miklós Bánffy, The Transylvanian Trilogy/The Writing on the Wall (translated by Katalin Banffy-Jelen and Patrick Thursfield): I had actually read this massive Hungarian modern classic before, some quarter-century ago, but remembered very little other than it was hugely enjoyable. If anything it was even better this time around, now that I am older and theoretically wiser. Aristocratic Hungarians in Transylvania scheme and gamble and party and fuck, fighting for their rights as a minority in the Habsburg Empire while simultaneously being unable (for the most part) to see how they are simultaneously repressing and neglecting the Transylvanians whose land they rule. And all the politicking and manoeuvring takes place as the Great War draws closer, ready to sweep their whole world away. It’s like a vastly more incident-packed counterpoint, set at the other end of the Empire, to one of my other favourite books, Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. [Ed. – James and I as always on the same wavelength…]

Why: Over recent years I’ve been going back to a number of books I remember as brilliant, to see if they actually are. For the most part, fortunately, they have been.

Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (translated by Barbara J. Haveland, Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell): Happy to say I fell for the hype and read the three books of this septology so far available in English. It’s a closely observed and beautifully written variation on the “Groundhog Day” premise of being stuck reliving the same day endlessly, but adding more and more wrinkles and complexities as the looping time passes. Fortunately this seems to be doing extremely well in English, so there’s every chance that, assuming Balle finishes the series, we’ll get to see all of it in translation. If she doesn’t, you’ll see me frothing blood in a tempest of rage.

Why: Though not original, the premise is fascinating, and I fell for the hype.

Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage: I read the first four books of this 13-volume modernist masterpiece, and while each book individually was excellent, the cumulative effect of this subtle, witty and awkward fictionalised autobiography is even more impressive. I hope to read the rest of this massive thing in 2026.

Why: I’ve wanted to read this for decades, but Virago’s treatment of their Modern Classics heritage being what it is, it’s never been possible to get all four volumes of the collected edition. Fortunately, Brad Bigelow of Neglected Books published his own edition, and I finally got my disgusting paws on it.

Len Deighton, the Bernard Sampson series: In terms of pure, sardonic, exciting and bleak reading pleasure, it’s hard to go past this trilogy of trilogies about the much put-upon spy Sampson, his extremely complicated wife, and his infuriating superiors. I still have the last three books to go, so that’s another treat in store for 2026, assuming any of us live. [Ed. – James. A little less truth-telling, please. As to these books, I’ve only read the first three so far, but they are terrific.]

Why: I’d only ever read a couple of Deightons in the past, and they were excellent, so why it took me until now to realise just how good he is and just how pleasingly extensive his back catalogue is must stand as a testament to my general dimwittedness.

C. J. Cherryh, The Morgaine Saga: Extremely futuristic science-fiction masquerading as swords-and-magic fantasy, this trilogy of novels (there’s a fourth, published much later, which I have yet to get) is so richly imagined, and so cleverly paced and written, that it makes you despair about how crap most of its genre competition remains. Outcast prince, magical witch queen, brutal politics, war, extremely difficult moral choices, aliens; the whole shebang.

Why: Every now and then I get the urge to read some fantasy to recapture the kick it used to carry when I was a teenager. Sadly I am no longer a teenager with a teenager’s standards, and almost every time I give up on whatever overpraised nonsense I’ve been tricked into reading. This was one of the rare exceptions.

Homer, The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson): Only a single (big fat) book this time, but one I haven’t read in 20 years, and the newish Wilson translation was calling to me. And it’s great! I’d forgotten just how oddly structured the book is (the famously interminable journey home of the hero taking up a relatively small part of the story), and how mental some of the developments. And apparently, she’s going to retranslate it and publish a whole new version? [Ed. – Seriously???] Seems like sheer madness to me, but I guess that’s what working in academia does to someone. [Ed. — Laughs bitterly]

KILL ALL NAZIS

Why: All the worst people seemed to be enraged by Wilson’s translation, and her gender, so I could not resist. [Ed. – Yeah, those guys suck.]

Charlotte Mano, From the Mythologies series (2021)

All Nazis must fuck off and die. Here are some books about what they were like, and how they were dealt with, first time round…

Marie Chaix, The Laurels of Lake Constance (translated by Harry Mathews): Astonishingly good in English, and the French original is apparently even better? How can this be? An autobiographical novel from the point of view of the daughter of an enthusiastic French Nazi and traitor before and during WW2. Unsensationalised, elliptical, and marvellous.

Why: It looked both pretty and interesting in the bookshop, and that’s all I needed to see.

Uwe Wittstock, Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature (translated by Daniel Bowles): A day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, account of the lives, desperation, plots and betrayals of the huge array of German and Austrian writers and artists who fled the Nazis to France, only to have France fall soon afterwards. Lucid and utterly fascinating.

Why: Wittstock’s previous book, February 1933: The Winter of Literature, did the same thing for the month the Nazis came to power, so there was no way I was not going to read this follow-up when it appeared.

Grete Weil, Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat (translated by John Barrett): An obsession with a lost friend taken by the Gestapo in Amsterdam spills into the post-war life of a man now living in Germany. He marries the man’s sister in a confused, guilt-fuelled attempt to try to bring him back to life. Complications ensue, as you might expect. Rich and compact, and highly recommended. [Ed. – More on Weil here…]

Why: If I see a book in the Verba Mundi series, I buy it. It’s an eclectic but extremely well-selected library of translated literature from all over the world.

Lorenza Mazzetti, The Sky is Falling (translated by Livia Franchini): Another fictionalised memoir, about a pair of sisters sent to stay with Jewish relatives in Tuscany—relatives then slaughtered by the Germans in 1944 (Mazzetti always believed they were killed for the Nazi-perceived crime of being related to Albert Einstein). The beautifully observed child’s viewpoint contrasts with the horrors of the confused world she inhabits, and the book’s brevity gives it the intense kick of all the best novellas. [Ed. – Fascinating! Ordering now…]

Why: This was the first book released by a new feminist publisher, Another Gaze Editions, whose output focuses on the work of women filmmakers like Mazzetti. It’s a hell of a promising way to kick things off.

Niaz Uddin, Airplane Home in Hillsboro, Oregon'(2017?)

HOPELESS FUTURES

Jane Rawson, Human/Nature: Rawson is a fine and unusual Australian novelist whose first book was a manual on climate change survival. In this non-fiction return she takes a simultaneously despairing and bleakly funny look at the horrible state of things, what it all means, and where it’s all leading. None of it’s good, but at least it’s wonderfully written. We still have good prose, if nothing else.

Why: I love the author and would buy anything she wrote.

Jack Womack, Random Acts of Senseless Violence: Somehow I missed this in 1993 when it first came out, more fool me. In the convincing form of a young girl’s diary over several months in (then) near-future New York as everything falls apart under gun-wielding late-stage capitalism, it’s amazing how much this gets right, yet it’s also a strangely analogue vision of the future. It also posits a series of successful US presidential assassinations, and sadly the real world seems unable to provide any of those.

Why: It’s now an established science-fiction classic and I needed to read it.

Bradley Somer, Extinction: A ranger tries to protect the last living bear in North America from poachers. Gripping and downbeat and all-too believable. [Ed. – Why are these all so depressing???? *re-reads section heading* Oh.]

Why: Impulse remainder purchase that panned out extremely well.

Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne, ‘The Serpent-People’ from ‘Découverte Australe par un Homme Volant, ou Le Dédale Français’ (1781)

PARENTS AND OUR MYRIAD FAILURES

Krystelle Bamford, Idle Grounds: Astonishingly good debut in the collective first person, told by a group of unmonitored children at a family party as they get bored, muck around, encounter something wrong in the garden, and go searching for one of their number who vanishes. Spooky, funny, original stuff. I couldn’t recommend this book more highly, to be honest.

Why: The cover of the UK edition, with a picture of roped-together monochrome children lost in a field of fluorescent green, was enough to convince me. [Ed. – I wish more people talked about how book covers influence their buying.]

Violette Leduc, Asphyxia (translated by Derek Coltman): A well-named book if ever there was one, this dense little novella details the suffocated life of a young girl with an unloving mother in rural pre-War France. But, flinty matriarchs aside, it’s also a richly drawn world of natural wonders and discoveries.

Why: I only discovered Leduc in the last few years, and she was such an extraordinary writer. This was published as part of a very small collection of French classics by female writers by Gallic Books.

Adrian Nathan West, My Father’s Diet:  A wonderful book that takes some well-known signifiers of modern American fiction (hollowed-out suburbs, emptying malls, masculinity in crisis, etc etc) and does new and strange things with them. A depressed son learns his father has, out of nowhere, become an obsessive bodybuilder, determined to win the Body You Choose competition. The characters are never caricatures, and it’s extremely funny despite the quiet desperation of it all.

Why: One of the many excellent books put out by And Other Stories, and this is from before they went for their current ugly typographic covers. [Ed. – James! I love those covers!]

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Lee Lai, Stone Fruit and Cannon: Australian (but now based in Canada) artist Lai’s two graphic novels are both minor masterpieces, and genuinely full novels in complexity and subtlety. Sad and perceptive dissections of failing relationships, parenthood, faltering elders, exploitative friendship, and being part of the Chinese diaspora.

Why: This review in Meanjin, an 85-year-old Australian literary magazine currently being put to death by the witless timid bureaucrats who cower in terror of angry letters from the Zionist lobby and who are ruining pretty much all the arts in Australia at the moment.

Emily Carroll, A Guest in the House: A seriously Gothic tale of madness, downtrodden femininity and hapless stepmotherhood, drawn with Carroll’s usual visual flair and attention to detail.

Why: I’ve raved about Carroll before, and love all her work. Somehow, to my annoyance, I didn’t even know this book, published in 2023, existed until I saw a copy a couple of months ago. My spies failed me. [Ed. – Maybe they were busy failing to assassinate US Presidents.]

VOYAGER 2 – Europa (1979)

UNCATEGORIS[ED/ABLE]

Mariette Navarro, Ultramarine (translated by Eve Hill-Agnus): Wonderfully unsettling novel about a woman captaining a cargo ship with a male crew. In the middle of the Atlantic they stop for everyone to have an illicit swim—and when everyone climbs back on board there’s one extra person.

Why: The Deep Vellum edition (already a recommendation) has a great cover with a vast cube of ocean on it, and I am only weak flesh.

Li Qingzhao, The Magpie at Night (translated by Wendy Chen): A beautiful collection of the complete surviving poetry by one of China’s greats, from the Twelfth Century. I mean, get a load of her perfect description of a lazy, drunken evening, from ‘As in a Dream’:

Remember that day

spent on the stream,

watching the sunset glaze

the pavilion.

So drunk, we could not find

our way back.

It was late when we had enough.

We turned the boat around

and were caught, accidentally, in the deep

tangle of lotus roots.

Rowing through, rowing through –

startling, from the banks,

herons.

Why: Having only read a couple of her poems in anthologies, it was a pleasure to find her complete works available in English.

J.M. Coetzee & Mariana Dimópulos, Speaking in Tongues: If you’re at all interested in translated literature, and in the process of translation itself, this is a very rewarding book. Two novelists and literary translators discuss what translation is, what it does, how it works, and a peculiar but intriguing project they undertook (and which was foiled by commercially minded publishers) to make the translated Spanish text of one of Coetzee’s novellas the “original” version of the book.

Why: If the topic is this interesting and the two writers involved this good, what sort of a fool would I be to not read it, I ask you?

[Ed. — A fool indeed. As is anyone who reads this and doesn’t head to their local bookstore or library ASAP on the hunt for some of these recs. Thanks, James!]

Hope Coulter’s Year in Reading, 2025

Posted on by under book review, Guest post, lists, review, Uncategorized, year in review

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!]

A Shelf of Promises: My Starter Library

Posted on by under lists, personal, Uncategorized

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?

My Year in Reading, 2024

Posted on by under book review, lists, personal, review, Uncategorized, year in review

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.

Eight standouts

Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (2023)

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.

Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (1935)

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 study of deprogramming: Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (2023).

Maybe useful these days.

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.

Best literary fiction:

Laurie Colwin’s Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object (1975) is sad and delightful, filled with loving anger. A splendid beginning to a marvelous though much too short career. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980) is famous for good reason. Audacious structure and play with time, heartbreaking story, even a section told from the point of view of a dog. Joan Chase’s During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983) deserves its resurrection thanks to the good people at NYRB. Another story of childhood in the American Heartland, at once bucolic and traumatic.

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.

Memoir: József Debreczeni’s Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz (1950, translated by Paul Olchváry). If I could legislate that people had to read one Holocaust book, I’d choose this one. Indelible. You think the Holocaust was bad? You don’t know from. Honorable mention: Michael Frank’s One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World (2022), which I wrote about in 2023 but read again for a book group last fall. If anything, it was even better the second time. To read about Stella is to love her.

YA: Elana K. Arnold’s The Blood Years (2023). Gonna do what I can to see that this one gets more traction.

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.

What I Read, June 2024

Posted on by under book review, lists, month in review, review

Dropping this as something to keep you busy—and maybe even entertained—while I carve out the time to write my Year in Review piece. I won’t be catching up on the last half of the year—in fact, not sure I’m going to continue with the monthly pieces, might be time to try something new—but I’d already written most of this one and it seemed a shame to let it go to waste.

Joaquin Sorolla, San Sebastian Landscape (1911)

Shelley Parker-Chan, She Who Became the Sun (2021)

Fantasy novel set in 14th Century China (with the smallest bit of magic) about a young girl who fulfills the destiny foretold for her brother, who dies, along with the rest of her family and everyone else in her village, from a harrowingly described famine. Zhu Chomngba drags herself, starving and mute with fear, to the nearest monastery, where she is taken in because she has disguised herself as a boy, a deception she never disabuses anyone of, going to great lengths to keep the secret. Her bunkmate, and best friend, learns the truth, leading to an unexpectedly progressive outcome. The meat of the book concerns Zhu’s long, slow rise to power, as she consolidates the Han and prepares to do battle against the Mongols. I liked the idea of this book more than the actual reading experience. By the end, I was keen to learn what happens next, but I was also relieved to have finished the book. (It’s long.) Jury’s out whether I’ll read the sequel.  

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980)

Seems like everybody knows this book, but if you don’t, do yourself a favor and read it. But make sure you’re in a good head space first. So Long, See You Tomorrow, a novella about things people can’t bear, isn’t easy. A woman can’t bear to tell her son her estranged husband has ordered her to forbid the boy from visiting the farmstead where he, the former husband, is quietly cracking up, and, even more heartbreakingly, the boy’s dog is tearing itself apart in grief. Years later, another man, the story’s narrator, sits in a New York City analyst’s office and means to say that he “couldn’t bear” his mother’s decades-ago untimely death, but says, instead, he “can’t bear it,” a realization that sends him out of the office and into the streets, for only in the streets of NYC can one cry freely.

As these examples might suggest, the book consists of two strands. Interestingly, they intersect only glancingly. In one the first-person narrator, who seems an awful lot like Maxwell—today, the book might be marketed as autofiction—describes his mother’s death in the little town of Lincoln, Illinois in the 1918 flu pandemic. (The story that took up the whole of They Came Like Swallows is here compressed into a handful of anguished pages.) When the boy’s father remarries the couple decide to build a new house. The work-site, the house framed but without walls, and as such a metaphor for the book’s fascination with unfinished, maybe unfinishable structures, becomes the boy’s refuge after school. He bring his friend Cletus, and as the boys play amid the unfinished space, the narrator believes he “had found a way to get around the way things were.” But nothing gets around the way things are: that’s why life is so unbearable.

Cletus, whose experiences comprise the book’s other strand, also has much to mourn. His family, tenant farmers scrapping a life together, has fallen apart. He now lives in town with his mother, who has left her husband to be with the husband of the couple’s best friends, who work the next farm over. Cletus soon has even more to deal with: his father shoots his wife’s lover, his former best friend. (Not a spoiler: the novella opens with the rifle shot.) The boys drift apart. The narrator next sees Cletus years later in a high school hallway. The narrator sees Cletus, sees that Cletus sees him seeing—and ignores him. This unkindness haunts him all his life, getting tangled with the earlier loss of his mother. The book’s premise is that the narrator, now an old man in New York, the kind of person who visits MOMA regularly, where he is much taken with a Giacometti sculpture that reminds me of his father’s half-built house, a man, as I said earlier, like William Maxwell, excavates, through a mixture of research and imaginative reconstruction, what happened on those farms between those people.

Death, adultery, murder, cruelty: these are the things that can’t be borne in So Long, See You Tomorrow. Which makes the book sound lurid when in fact it’s heartbreakingly restrained. Or, more accurately, a strange blend of the two. The writer Antonya Nelson gets it exactly right:

I don’t know how William Maxwell manages to balance those two stories, one plotted like a melodrama, replete with murder and mayhem, and the other a quiet meditation that hinges on the tiniest non-gesture of passing strangers many years in the past. It’s a combination that oughtn’t work. And yet it does.

Even a three-page swerve into the mind of the abandoned dog works. Which it absolutely should not. Anyway, like I said, read it. It’ll tear your heart out, but in a good way.

I read a lot of Maxwell in my mid-twenties (somehow never this one, though). Now that I am old enough I want to revisit them all. And that’s just the novels. I haven’t even cracked the stories yet.

Manjula Martin, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History (2024)

Manjula Martin lives in Sonoma County. She is not a winemaker (although she drives past the fields full of seasonal workers, most of them Latino/Latina, working through the night to pick the grapes at the time when they are at their most succulent). Nor is she especially wealthy (though she and her partner have jobs that pay enough and make a difference (union organizing, writing), plus the proceeds from an apartment she sold in San Francisco).

They live in a redwood cottage in the WUI, the wildland-urban interface, as do so many in the paradise of northern California. A paradise threatened by fire. As it always was. But now more than ever. The relentless impingement of human habitation into the forest, plus a century’s worth of misguided fire prevention strategy, plus climate change means the wildfire season is ever longer and ever more dangerous.

Martin’s memoir begins in July 2020, when terrible lightning storms set off hundreds of fires that burned hundreds of thousands of acres. It ends in November, with the delayed end of the season, though with the tendency of fires to smolder underground through the increasingly dry winters, every season is now fire season. In between, she, like everyone in California, learns to prepare a go bag, to speak knowledgeably about AQI levels, and, like many, to evacuate for a time when the fire comes within a couple of miles of the house.

She breaks up her descriptions of those months of the fire by looking back to her childhood growing up on a commune with hippie parents who left that life to become a master gardener and a professor in nearby Santa Cruz and forward to the actions she has taken since to prepare to live with fire.

Martin is an expert at living with hard things; she suffers chronic pain from the operations required to free her from a broken IUD. As a woman who cannot and never wanted to bear children, Martin resists the tendency to think of nature in terms of fecundity and rebirth, even as she finds herself unwillingly returning to that language. Martin impressively blends the experience of living in a damaged body with that of living on a damaged planet.

Martin learns the key distinction between good fire and bad fire. Without the former we have no hope of combatting the latter, though we may have left things too late. She argues that there is no natural world outside its encounter with the human (just as there is no definition of the human that isn’t dependent on our reliance on nature, especially plants). Our fantasy of pristine or untouched nature is just the flip side of our rapacious consumption of natural resources. Thus she returns again and again to her garden, which not only distracts her from her pain but teaches her about the power of pruning, grafting, and weeding. “An intervention,” she writes, “was not inherently good or bad; it was part of a dialogue. The tending of a natural body required constant attention: the giving and receiving of nurture and discipline. Extraction and tourism were types of attention. So was gardening. It mattered how the relationship was structured, not just that there was one.”

At her best, Martin rejects easy thinking. The tendency to just get through to the end of the next fire season, for example, is strong, but Martin rejects this as blindness. We need, she argues, to think of ourselves as in a relationship with the world, to refuse to separate human from non-human life.

The Last Fire Season annoyed me sometimes: it’s too long, and its author is pretty self-righteous. I’m sympathetic to her politics and indeed her world view, but even I had to roll my eyes at her holier-than-thou attitudes. But even though I strongly suspect Martin and I would hate each other, I learned a lot from her book (not least the wonderful word “duff”), and I bet I’ll think about it for a long time to come.

Caleb Carr, The Alienist (1994)

In the Sherwood branch of the Central Arkansas Library System’s copy of Carr’s The Alienist, someone has written alongside a passage referring to the draft riots of 1863, “Oh Please! Too much B.S.” Telling that out of this entire 400+ page novel, only the passage describing the backstory of its sole African American character is singled out for such contempt. Who knows when some anonymous member of my community expressed this frustration. It looks like the book hasn’t been checked out for a while—but it also looks like it was checked out a lot, back in the day. And of course, The Alienst was a huge hit. I remember selling more than a few copies of it in my bookseller days. For whatever reason, I never thought of reading it then. But Carr’s recent death, and the story of his life as revealed in the Times obit, piqued my interest. And I knew the book has its fans. When I wondered on Bluesky about reading it, Anne Trubek said she’d spent years chasing the high of her first encounter with the book. How could I not see what the fuss was about?

In New York in 1898 someone is killing young boys. Not just killing them: maiming them horribly and leaving them on grisly display. These boys are orphans and runaways. They work in brothels, servicing a particular clientele: men who like boys dressed up as women. In the first chapter, the narrator, John Schuyler Moore, a crime reporter for the Times is summoned to the latest corpse by his former Harvard classmate, Laślo Kreisler. Kreisler is the alienist of the title, as psychologists were then known: they cared for or studied people “alienated” from society and their own, “true” natures. Under the guise of then police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt (another old pal), whose attempt to clean the force of corruption (same as it ever was…) threatens to founder if the killer isn’t caught, the pair methodically stalk the fiendish killer. They are joined by the first female police officer in NY, two Jewish cops ostracized for their identity and their passion for scientific methods of detection, and some devoted former cast-offs from Kreisler’s life’s work helping orphans. The band gets together, they make painstaking progress, but they’re always behind the killer. As the death toll rises, and nefarious elements seek to use the killings to foment reactionary unrest in the city, the case becomes a race against time…

The short verdict: it’s good! Not, in my opinion, great. But worth reading. I got a Name of the Rose vibe from it: a smart non-crime writer writing an investigation in a historical period they have researched to bits.

The long verdict: maybe what Carr was doing—spotlighting together historically marginalized figures and using historical figures like Jabob Riis and Teddy Roosevelt as more than just bit players—was more unusual at the time than now. Maybe the book is in that awkward in-between stage: a bit dated, not yet so old that it feels like a glimpse into another world.

What does feel of its time—the 1990s, not the 1890s—is the passionate defense of children, and the abhorrence of the violence (physical, psychological, sexual) done to them by adults. Based on what I read about him, this element seems to come pretty closely from Carr’s own life, with the desperate, authentic, slightly incoherent quality of not-fully-worked-through experience. In this, The Alienist reminded me of some otherwise completely different books, the crime novels of Andrew Vachss, all of which centered on the sexual abuse of children. Anyone remember those? Vintage published them in the 90s, they were kind of a thing, but I never see them anymore. Wonder what happened to him.

Ignore that anonymous Arkansas reader: no BS here. There’s plenty of fiction being written today that will look, if we are lucky, a little creaky in 30 years in its efforts to include marginalized experience. Worth a little awkwardness to kick open some doors.

Laurie Colwin, Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object (1975)

Colwin’s first novel, which I think I maybe found a bit slight on my initial deep-dive thirty years ago and which I haven’t read since, but which impressed me greatly as a middle-aged reader. Crazy to think Colwin was only about 30 herself when she wrote it.

A Jewish woman marries into an old WASP family. He husband, a charismatic ne’er-do-well, dies in a sailing accident. In the grieving process, she must come to terms not only with her loss but her recognition of how little her husband had ever been able to know about himself. In the process, she becomes close to her husband’s brother, as serious as her husband was carefree. I won’t tell you what happens, but Colwin does something so interesting at the end: her book takes an unexpected swerve that makes everything so much more complex. Man, it sucks she died so young.

Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz (2023)

God, what a book! I’ll say more about it in my Year in Reading piece.

Elisa Gabbert, Any Person is the Only Self (2024)

Essays on mostly bookish topics written by the poet Elisa Gabbert. I was happy to start in on the first one, because I remembered it from its first appearance in the New York Times: a lovely piece on the “recently returned” shelf at the Denver Public Library, where no algorithm or even individual taste holds sway. Gabbert has revised the piece so that it has a wider focus, and I actually missed the minor-key aspect of the original. But I swallowed these pieces one after another, unable to give them the time they, like all good essays, deserve. I ought to revisit them from time to time. Here’s what stuck with me, though: the to-me breathtaking abruptness of their endings. Gabbert does this thing where she meanders in classic essayistic fashion, and then simply declares herself done. I experienced this as an attack on my sense that the ending of an essay should call back to its earlier moments, allowing readers to see in a new light something they’ve have already been told. But they really are more ways to do things than you’d think.

Jamel Brinkley, Witness (2023)

Strong collection of stories of unhappiness. I still think about “Blessed Deliverance,” about a group of friends coming up in a gentrifying neighbourhood (one sign of which is that some white folks set up a bunny rescue) who drift apart as they enter high school. And I was blown away by “Barstow Station,” the story of a UPS driver whose adult relationships founder because he’s too busy preserving himself from the memory of something bad that happened when he was a teenager. I immediately decided to teach it this fall—along with this lovely close reading by my secret boyfriend Garth Greenwell. (Secret to him, not all of you.) In the months since first writing this, I did indeed teach the story, and even though most days in that class were hard slogging, the story was a hit. Or at least what counted for one in one of the least curious groups of students I’ve ever taught.

Colin Walsh, Kala (2023)

Debut Irish crime novel that seems to have made basically no impact in the US market. Friends who were teenagers when one of their gang disappeared are brought back together when the body is found. As the crime is investigated, these now-adults learn how much they’ve lost over the years. I’m grateful to the friend who sent me a copy: I read Kala with pleasure over a summer weekend. Walsh reminds me a lot of Tana French: they’re both Irish, obviously, and dab hands at dialogue. Above all, Walsh concentrates as much on character as his more famous (and, let’s be real, talented) confederate.

Linda Kinstler, Come to this Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends (2022)

In her brilliant first book, Linda Kinstler asks this vexing question: what counts as proof that the Holocaust happened? She begins in Argentina in 1965 and the Mossad’s assassination of Herbert Cukurs, the Latvian Lindbergh (in politics and aviation alike), known during the Holocaust as the “butcher of Riga.” Next to the body, the killers left this text from a closing speech at the Nuremberg Trials: “Mankind itself… comes to this Court and cries: ‘These are our laws—let them prevail!” A strange choice, at least for anyone uncomfortable with the idea of taking the law into one’s own hands.

From this historical event—prompted by unwillingness on Israel’s part to have a sequel to the Eichmann trial and fear that the statute of limitations for perpetrators was about the expire in Germany—Kinstler’s text becomes at once more theoretical and personal. Theoretical because her main interest is in parsing the difference between law, history, and story, and how the evidentiary claims for the latter two are different than those affecting the first. And personal because in the background of Cukurs’s story—a member of the Arājs Kommando, Latvian auxiliaries who competed with the Germans for cruelty and zeal in murdering their Jewish former neighbors—was one Boris Kinstler, the author’s grandfather, who disappeared or died in mysterious circumstances in the late 1940s and may have been a KGB spy and thus acting as a mole within the fascist-aligned organization.

Central to Kinstler’s argument is a historical situation that was new to me. In 1958 a German jurist named Erwin Schüle, the lead prosecutor on a trial of perpetrators who had been stationed in Lithuania, made a consequential decision. Initially faced with only a single defendant—a man named Fischer-Schweder who had white-washed his SS record and, perversely, even ran a displaced persons camp after the war—Schüle ran up against the problem that German law required him to prove that defendants had initiated murder (in this case, mass shootings), rather than doing them on the orders of others. Witness testimony was inconclusive. So Schüle ordered his detectives to expand their investigation to uncover what he called “the crime complex” of the area on the German-Lithuanian border where Fischer-Schweder had served. As Kinstler explains, by crime complex Schüle meant “the entire constellation of actors and actions that allowed mass executions to take place.” In so doing, the prosecution charged nine more men. All ten were convicted.

The idea of the “crime complex” considered Holocaust crimes as structural rather than individual:

it treated entire swathes of the Nazi administration as criminal organizations and presumed the complicity of everyone involved, including secretaries and radio operators and cooks. It required investigators to begin with a place, or a name, or a date, and comb through vast amounts of information to fill in the blanks: who had been killed, and how, and by whom?  How many ‘Aktions’ were there, and on whose orders? How many Nazi personnel had been involved? Were they still alive and in Germany? If they were able to answer all these questions with certainty, then they could initiate criminal proceedings.

Perhaps because of its status as both victim and perpetrator, Latvia never pursued the “crime complex” idea. Which, Kinstler argues, made it hard for the country to come to terms with its responsibility in the miserable fate of its Jewish population. And then, more recently, to refuse to take up a case against (the memory of) Cukurs, despite the pleas of the remnants of its Jewish community. For in these same years, Cukurs has again become a folk hero in Latvia, a devoted patriot, a fighter of the Soviets, a victim of Israeli aggression, who not only didn’t kill Jews but helped several members of that community, even rescuing one young woman and taking her to safety in South America after the war. (Kinstler meets the woman’s daughter to learn more, though mostly what she learns is that the woman’s mother never talked about her wartime experiences, leaving her and Kinstler companions in confusion.) Kinstler tells us about a musical that, like something out of Mel Brooks, white-washed Cukurs’s reputation; she even reads a spy novel (recommended to her by the local prosecutor) in which her own grandfather figures as a Soviet spy and thus a traitor to the Latvian people.

Historically, it’s clear that Cukurs both saved a handful of people and was present at many deportations, requisitions, beatings, and mass shootings, notoriously in the Rumbula massacre, in which 25,000 Jews were murdered on two days in late November and early December 1941 in a forest near Riga. Eyewitnesses report him taking part in such events. But no one alive can testify to it.

In this sense, Come to this Court and Cry is a fascinating expansion of what Dan Stone argues in his new history, regarding the reactionary backlash that has shaped the latest iteration of Holocaust memory wars. At the annual Holocaust remembrance events, local politicians downplay the Arājs Kommando’s responsibility, saying that no simple conclusion can be made regarding its activities. Too hard to acknowledge complicity.

As Kinstler concludes, in the 21st century, to expand the reach of justice in reopening cases from the era of WWII is a double-edged sword: “a crime that can still be tried can also still be pardoned.” Her book explores how “remembering went from being an injunction to a knotted, nearly impossible question.”

And what about Boris Kinstler, the author’s grandfather? Was he a spy? At the end of her book, which I recommend unreservedly, Kinstler tells us about the report she requested from the Russian government. Did they have a file on her grandfather? A one-page letter returns: no information or materials pertaining to Boris Kinstler exists in the archive. No answers there either. Kinstler’s subtitle, she tells us, is a warning, not a prediction. The fight against the Holocaust’s misuses never ends; as the forces who propagate those varied distortions grow in number and power, it seems a fight less likely than ever that we will win.

Helen Garner, This House of Grief (2014)

September 4, 2005 was Father’s Day in Australia. A man named Robert Farquharson was driving his three children home to their mother, who had initiated divorce proceedings against him earlier that year. Father and sons had spent the day watching the football, visiting family, making a KFC run for dinner, even doing a little shopping. Night had fallen; Farquharson was on the highway, five minutes from home. He headed up a railway overpass, then down the other side. Suddenly, his car veered off the road and plunged into a reservoir. Farquharson survived; the boys drowned.

Garner’s work of narrative nonfiction tells the story of the aftermath of this terrible event. Although he was charged by the Crown with three counts of murder, his soon-to-be ex-wife supported him, saying he could not have set out to kill his beloved children. But Farquharson’s behaviour after the crash was odd, to say the least. Splashing out of the water into the spring evening, soaking wet, he flagged down a car and ordered its drivers to take him to his ex-wife’s house. Only there did he mention the children were still in the water. And only then were the authorities informed. When Farquharson and the boys’ mother were taken back to the site, by her new lover, Farquharson stood silently, asking only for a cigarette. It was the new man in Cindy’s life who went into the water to try to rescue the boys. That first night, when police questioned him, he insisted he hadn’t done anything wrong, asking only, over and over again, what would happen to him.

Who acts that way? Well, anyone maybe.

What is the right way to respond to a terrible situation? Is some grief more acceptable than others? Could Farquharson’s confused story—that he had blacked out during a violent coughing fit—have been true? Is cough syncope a thing? Some experts said no. Others said yes. What about the physical evidence, tire tracks and the like? According to the police, the signs pointed to voluntary movements on the slope, inconsistent with an out of control car. Farquharson, they allege, steered the car into the water. But they messed up some of the evidence, and failed to account for the road’s camber. What about the explosive testimony of one of Farquharson’s mates, who said he’d had a conversation with the man a few months before the event, outside the local fish and chippie on a Friday night: Farquharson was not just low and helpless, as others had testified he had been, but angry and vengeful. He said he was going to kill the boys, and he would do it on a day everyone would remember, Father’s Day. Did Farquharson really say such a thing? Why didn’t the mate come forward at the time?

Was this an accident or an act of vengeance? Garner followed the trial for months, attending court every day, and her book records the efforts of the Australian legal system to come to terms with this baffling case. She gets friendly with the other regulars—reporters, gawkers, court officials—and one day runs into the defense counsel, to whom she says, “Only one man knows what happened, and he’s not saying.” This seemingly benign statement of perplexity incenses the lawyer (he threatens to ban from the courtroom): the whole point, he thunders, is that Farquharson doesn’t know what happened. What is knowing? What is an act? Can we entangle our conscious decisions from our unconscious drives? These are the big questions Garner probes in this riveting book.

Garner doesn’t like Farquharson—her take seems to be that the only thing more impossible than his having killed the boys is the possibility that he didn’t—and her descriptions of the man are pitiless, though, I wouldn’t say, unfair. In one especially merciless moment, she calls him a “small stump of a man, with his low brow and puffy eyes, his slumped spine and man-boobs, his silent-movie grimaces and spasms of tears, his big clean ironed handkerchief.” It doesn’t help, from her perspective, nor, I suspect, from that of either the law or public opinion, that Farquharson is profoundly inarticulate. He responds with baffled indignation to his plight; he turns to sentimental clichés and watered-down therapy-speak. Behind the story of the crime is an argument about a certain kind of Australian masculinity and its helpless, toxic loneliness. As a North American reader, I no doubt don’t understand the full context but Farquharson is legible beyond his corner of Victoria.

I’ll let you look up the outcome for yourself: if you like Janet Malcolm (name-checked here in one of the epigraphs) you’ll enjoy This House of Grief. I read with avidity, but I also never quite get on with true crime. Throughout, Garner projects herself on to the jury, imagining her own responses (boredom, confusion, indignation, you name it) reflected in their posture and expression. By the end, I felt like Garner was trying to reason out her own compulsion. It can’t be good for you, attending to a sensational trial this closely when you don’t have to. I found her final pages, where she mediates on her grief for children she never knew—ending in a sanctimonious aria: “They are ours to mourn. They belong to all of us now”—mawkish and unconvincing.

Read this, sure, but read her fiction first.

Dorothy West, The Wedding (1995)

Set in 1953 in a black enclave on Martha’s Vineyard called The Oval, West’s novel—only her second, written over decades in collaboration with her editor, Jacqui Kennedy Onassis, and published when the author was 88—is set on the day leading up the wedding of the youngest daughter of the community’s richest and most prestigious family. This economy of space and time is contrasted with flashbacks that go back four generations on both sides of the family. Over and over, these family stories show whites and blacks mixing, often intimately. The characters, obsessed with color, police racial distinctions that can’t hold. Seemingly impermeable ways of living and thinking prove to be all too permeable. Most interesting to me as a (remembered) record of the last moments of legally segregated America—a world Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote about in his underappreciated memoir Colored People. Had I read it on my own, I would probably have forgotten it soon after reading. But I read it for One Bright Book, and Frances and Rebecca helped me think about it more carefully. They didn’t quite convince me the novel is as smart about class as it is about race, but they made me see it as more carefully composed then I’d thought. Give the episode a listen and see if you are enticed.

Georges Seurat, The Hollow Way (1882)

Tell me—have you read any of these? If I could only recommend one, it would be the Spufford. And then the Colwin. And don’t sleep on Brinkley. But a good month all round. Doesn’t last summer seem a lifetime ago?