Tag Archives: Samantha Harvey

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!]

James Morrison’s Year in Reading, 2023

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

Excited to once again present reading reviews from some of my favourite readers. Kicking things off is the one and only James Morrison, back for his third installment. James lives and works in Adelaide, Australia, on unceded Kaurna Country. For many years he has written about book design as the Caustic Cover Critic. He has too many books. He’s online at @Unwise_Trousers (Twitter) or @causticcovercritic.bsky.social (Bluesky). His first novel, Gibbons, or One Bloody Thing After Another, was published in 2023 by Orbis Tertius Press.

‘Tonight too / does my woman’s pitch-black hair / trail upon the floor / where she sleeps without me?’
Masayuki Miyata

[We push through the crowded train station and step up into the carriage, compulsively checking you have your ticket several times in the process. You find a seat and open your mouth to speak, but I suddenly launch into a monologue.]

So, yes, it was a tremendously crappy year, both personally and globally, but at least I got some books read. Indeed, that’s pretty much all I did. I scythed through 296 books, and only a few of them were terrible, so that’s some sort of achievement right there. Right? Right??? [Ed. – Holy shit yes.]

DENSE SLICES OF TIME

Two of the most fascinating non-fiction books I read this year both took the same approach—densely researched group portraits of the lives of interconnected writers and artists over the period of a month or so—applied to two very different eras. Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month (1965) covers the world of literary London in June 1846, from Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett planning their elopement to Jane and Thomas Carlyle driving each other round the bend, all joined together by the last acts of now-forgotten artist Benjamin Robert Haydon as he prepares his suicide. Uwe Wittstock’s February 1933: The Winter of Literature, translated by Daniel Bowles (2021/23), uses the same close focus on the writers, filmmakers, dancers and actors of Germany in the first month of Hitler’s power, from Joseph Roth wisely fleeing, via Thomas Mann being unbelievably naïve, to Gottfried Benn enthusiastically Nazifying himself. It’s chilling and depressing in equal measures, what with [points helplessly at everything]. [Ed. – *nods glumly *]

As a pendant to the Wittstock, Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Oppermanns (1933), translated by James Cleugh, is hard to beat, detailing the rise of the Nazis through the story of a successful Jewish Berlin family. Written when the events it details were still ongoing, and with much worse to come, it is a perceptive and still timely book. [Ed. – Amen]

From ‘The adventures of Sindbad’
Leon Carre

AUSTRALIANS

It’s wonderful to have been one of the many readers who finally got hold of the books of Jen Craig this year, and fell in love with them. Intensely, almost claustrophobically, looping narratives of communication breakdowns, troublesome families, injuries, art, eating disorders, and the irritation of being named Jenny Craig when that’s the name of the country’s most famous dieting pyramid scheme. The experience of reading each book—Since the Accident (2013) and Panthers and the Museum of Fire (2015)—is something like peering closely at the back of an incredibly detailed tapestry, trying to guess at the structure, and then with the last few pages suddenly flipping it over to discover a masterpiece. I also read her third novel, Wall (2023), but that was earlier this month so just imagine me saying something similar in 12 months about that.

Susan McCreery’s All the Unloved (2023) is a wonderful novella about the inhabitants of a block of flats in 1990s beachside Sydney, centred on a teenaged girl’s coming of age. Amanda Lohrey’s Vertigo (2009) is another small gem, the story of a traumatised couple fleeing to a new home on the rural coast, and ending in bushfire and terror, told in an engagingly odd way. The two most recent collections of Greg Egan’s short stories, Instantiation (2020) and Sleep and the Soul (2023), demonstrate with impressive depth just why he is widely regarded as one of the world’s best science-fiction writers, especially at this length—story after story will use an amazing idea that a lesser writer would spend a 1200p trilogy on, and then move on to something else even more mind-boggling in just a couple of dozen pages.

Adam Ouston’s Waypoints (2022) is a splendid example of one of my favourite genres of book—an obsessive monologue by an unreliable narrator, in this case somewhat pinned to reality through the disappearance of airliner MH370 in 2014 and Harry Houdini’s attempts to be the first person to fly an airplane over Australia in 1910. Finally, Tommi Parrish’s newest graphic novel, Men I Trust (2023), is a drably beautiful exploration of parasitic friendship, and I really am trying to get over the fact that they mistakenly include a Walmart in an Australian setting. [Ed. – Oh I just picked this up—had no idea it was Australian!]

[The conductor passes down the corridor, bellowing in a monotone. “This train is about to depart, all visitors please leave! Ticketholders only!” A small, relieved smile passes over your face as I step down from the carriage onto the platform, still talking.]

HUNGARIANS

Anyone who has read one of my year-in-readings before knows how I go on about the Hungarians. And here I am doing it again. The best Hungarian literature I read this year was Magda Szabó’s The Fawn (1959/2023), translated by Len Rix, the story of the career and personal life of increasingly enraged actress through Hungary’s tumultuous mid-twentieth Century. Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai (2018/2022), translated by John Batki, is another tremendous example of the obsessive monologue/unreliable narrator mentioned above. And Ágota Kristóf’s Yesterday (1995/2019), translated by David Watson, was sadly the last book of hers I had left unread: an illegitimate small-town child flees his past by moving to the city, but the reappearance of his now-married childhood love throws everything into chaos.

‘Hare 2’
Jan Pypers

OUTER SPACE, INNER SPACE

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital was just my cup of tea, a quiet and thoughtful 24-hour slice of the lives of six people at work, where said work is in the International Space Station in its final days. In Ascension by Martin MacInnes goes further afield, from the ocean depths to the Oort Cloud, in search of First Contact, strange dreams, and the dawn of life. I loved it, but not unreservedly—there were occasional weird glitches, like MacInnes’s childlike idea that as you travel through the Solar System you pass the planets one by one in a neat line, the way they are drawn in a kids’ encyclopaedia. [Ed. – Wait, that’s not what they’re like???]

The This (2022) by the always interesting, and ludicrously underrated, Adam Roberts, is a hugely entertaining extrapolation from the near into the far future, taking us from the Next Big Thing in social media to humanity as a hive mind. And an end-of-year treat was the new collection Selected Nonfiction 1962-2007 (2023) by J. G. Ballard, a chunky and tremendously entertaining mix of reviews, articles, memoirs, lists and rants.

[The train begins to move, very slowly at first. I’m standing at your carriage window, still talking, and I begin to walk along the platform, keeping pace with the train. You glance at your fellow passengers, blushing.] [Ed. – Ugh shit like this is sooo embarrassing… What a weirdo right I don’t even know that guy!]

ENDS

There were lots of excellent cataclysms in this year’s reading. How I’d taken this long to read David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress is both mysterious and an indictment on me, but this beautiful book from the point of view of possibly the last woman on Earth is full of gorgeous writing and vivid images. [Ed. – Is she thrilled to be free of bros at long last?] I absolutely loved it. I also loved Oana Aristide’s Under the Blue, a particularly well-done plague-and-after novel, so I was very sad to get in a fight and end up blocking the author online because of her being an anti-trans bigot. Why are authors all so unpleasant?

Pink Slime (2020/2023) is an Uruguayan novel of toxic miasma and slow societal collapse by Fernanda Trías, translated by Heather Cleary, another weird case of a book being written pre-COVID that foreshadows and refracts the weirdness we all then went through. Rebecca Campbell’s Arboreality (2022) is a Canadian novel in stories that takes us further and further into our future of rising waters and collapsing ecosystems, offering no cheap false hope but still providing a glimpse of something worth being alive for. [Ed. – I keep hearing about this book. Gotta check that out.]

And turning from global to personal cataclysm, there was Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home (2023), where one of the two main characters is very, very dead. But readers of Anagrams will know well that a character doesn’t have to exist for them to be vividly, hilariously rendered by Moore.

STORIES

There were so many resurrections and collections of great short story writers this year. Among the best were Rattlebone (1994) by Maxine Clair and Lover Man (1959) by Alston Anderson, both beautifully observed interconnected collections about Black American communities. No Love Lost (2023) collects the incredible novellas of Rachel Ingalls, and if there’s a richer, stranger book than this out there, send it to me now!

Jean Stafford’s Children Are Bored on Sunday (1945) is as brilliant as the title promises. [Ed. – Great fucking title.] I also read her novel The Mountain Lion (1947), and fucking hell could she write. Weird misfit children, unhappy loves, badly behaved artists. Have at it!

Tessa Yang’s The Runaway Restaurant (2022) and Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel (2023) were two of the best new story collections I came across this year. Both are peculiar and fizzing with ideas, completely happy to depart reality for the depths of weirdness at the drop of a hat, and very moving—imagine George Saunders if he was actually as good as everyone thinks he is. [Ed. – Heh, you’re not wrong, James…]

And then there was The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard (2023), which was an absolute revelation. Stories, autofiction, memoir, reportage, not of it conventional, all of it astonishing in its quality and death-haunted eccentric brilliance.

[The train accelerates. You try to pretend the man running along at the window, now bellowing, has nothing to do with you. Not paying attention to where I’m going, I run full-tilt into a metal bin with a resounding clang.] [Ed. — *snort *]

‘Nature Takes Over’
Thomas Strogalski

RANDOM OTHERS

Some books you just can’t shoehorn awkwardly into a category, and there are still too many good ones left to mention. In brief:

Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia (1991) pairs perfectly with The Mountain Lion, a black comedy about a strange and unloved daughter.

James Hannaham’s Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta (2022) is a delicious exercise in capturing a voice, in which a trans woman gets out of prison and tries to reconnect with her family and normal life.

Szilvia Molnar’s The Nursery (2023) is an unnerving and convincing novel of fear-of-everything from the point-of-view of a new mother.

Nigel Balchin’s Simple Life (1935) starts off like a mild comedy mocking get-back-to-the-land types, but quickly turns into a fascinating and alarming study of a fraught ménage à trois in a cottage in the middle of nowhere.

And finally, the complete Diaries of Franz Kafka, translated by Ross Benjamin (2023): a monolith of a book, a treasure trove, a heartbreaking testament.

From ‘L’Ange’
Patrick Bokanowski

[You glance back, caught between relief and embarrassment, as I leap to my feet and charge like a maniac after the repeating train, still yelling. Then I reach the end of the platform and plunge into the shrubbery, vanishing from sight. You exhale, and pull out your book to start reading in blessed peace.] [Ed. – Not true, I’d do almost anything to spend a train ride talking books with you, James!]

January 2019 in Review

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

In my 2018 review post, I promised monthly reading updates. I’m a week tardy, but here’s what I read in January 2019.

jean-paul-lemieux-the-express-kw

1 Anthony Powell – A Question of Upbringing (1951) Like many readers I was swayed by Andy Miller’s praise for A Dance to the Music of Time; his suggestion to read one novel a month seemed manageable—especially as I’ve had the first six on my shelves for a while.

My verdict: good stuff, which promises to become even better. Eric thinks it’s the weakest, and if that’s the case the cycle is going to kill it. My sense is the books will improve when Powell more confidently does his own thing, rather than revising Proust. Or, when I get over my sense that this isn’t quite Proust. Either way, I’m taken with the intimations of the narrator, Jenkins, that his first opinions of intriguing characters, especially Widmerpool and the delightful Uncle Giles, are going to be deepened, revised, maybe even completely reversed.

A Buyer’s market to come later this month! In the meantime, if you want a better sense of what A Question of Upbringing is about, do read Jacqui’s post.

2 Samantha Harvey – The Western Wind (2018) I was engrossed and seduced by this novel from the start. Set in the East Midlands in the 15th century, it is, as Rohan says in her TLS review, a story about the desire to confess and be forgiven. Well, to be forgiven, anyway. The confessing part is trickier. So many contradictory motives, many of them laudable, complicate, even thwart confession. That ambivalence is amplified by the novel’s structure: it is told backwards over four days, so that you’ve actually read the end of the story about a quarter of the way into the book. Could have been a gimmick, but totally convinced me. Even once you realize you’ve already read the end, you have to accept you don’t know exactly what’s happened, so subtle is Harvey’s touch.

The setting is Oakham, a village cut off from the rest of the world, and sinking from hardscrabble to irrelevant: the local monastery is eyeing a takeover of its lands. And now the richest and most forward-thinking (at least by his own account) villager is dead, presumably murdered. The narrator is the local priest, who is pulled in different directions, unsure which secrets he ought to keep.

I read The Western Wind (purchased at the wonderful Bridge Street Books in DC) based on Rohan’s recommendation, combined with my vague idea it might be like the Cadfael mysteries. Turns out, not really—Harvey’s novel is less interested in genre conventions—but that’s ok. (Plus, it’s set 300 years later, which even this unrepentant modernist recognizes makes a big difference.) I found it quiet and satisfying, beautiful without being self-consciously poetic. I’ve looked briefly into Harvey’s earlier novels and they seem completely different. Anyone read them?

3 Joe Ide – Wrecked (2018) The IQ series is enjoyable, and I enjoyed this third installment more than the last one. (His lead character, nicknamed IQ, is an East LA Holmes, many of whose clients can only pay him in goods or favours.) Ide is honing the relationship between IQ and his sidekick, getting a handle on his tone (he does humour better than drama, but is working on a good balance) and develops a female character who is too interesting not to return. But if you’re new to Ide, best start at the beginning.

4 Luce D’Eramo – Deviation (1979) Trans. Anne Milano Appel (2018) Scott & I wrote about this at length. Deeply problematic.

5 Esther Hauzig – The Endless Steppe (1968) Children’s books were different back in the day. It would be easy to read this book and assume it was written for adults. Neither style nor subject matter marks it as obviously for children. Although it reads like a novel, The Endless Steppe is a memoir, describing how ten-year-old Hauzig, together with her parents, is ripped from her comfortable life in Vilna (then Poland) in 1941, when the Soviets deem her family capitalist enemies of the regime. The Hauzigs are deported to Siberia, first, to a horrific labour camp, and then resettled in a nearby village, where they suffer poverty, ill-health, and terrible cold. At the end of the war, finally able to return to Poland, they learn that their fate was mild compared to their relatives, almost all of whom were murdered by the Nazis. Part Little House on the Prairie, part diagnosis of life under totalitatarianism, The Endless Steppe feels as fresh and moving as it must have fifty years ago. A fascinating addition to the literature of the war between Hitler and Stalin.

6 Laurie R. King – The Moor (1998) Fourth installment of the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series; revisits The Hound of the Baskervilles. Though you wouldn’t know it from my sporadic reading pace (I’ve been working on them for about four years), I quite like this series. Atmosphere always appeals to me more than the actual mystery, which, in this case, dragged a little. Really, all I want from a crime novel is bad weather and lashings of hot tea, and The Moor gave me plenty of both.

7 Ian Rankin – Rather Be the Devil (2016) My first audiobook of the semester. I’ve now almost caught up with Rebus, with only the brand new one to go. Rather Be the Devil is a step up from the last couple, I thought, though who knows how Rankin’s going to keep finding ways for the retired cop to inveigle himself into new investigations. Maybe the most impressive thing about the last half dozen or so installments of this now very long-running series is the way they’ve rehabilitated Malcolm Fox, while still keeping him a bit annoying—decent and dedicated, but a little selfish, know-it-all-y, charmless. In the previous book, Rebus got a dog, and I worry about him. Has to spend a lot of time alone, poor Brillo.

8 Sayaka Murata – Convenience Store Woman (2016) Trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori (2018) This featured on several best of 2018 lists from people whose taste I respect, so I gave it a shot. Dunno people. Loved the descriptions of the convenience store (these seem a different species from the ones here): what it takes to keep one running (military precision), what customers in Japan expect (everything) and how they treat employees (shockingly), and the range of items on offer (vast, and odd). Helped me see how hungry I am for books about work. (Where are our Zolas?) And I appreciated how doggedly and unselfconsciously the narrator pursues her desires, which don’t match at all the expectations of her society. In the end, though, Murata gives capitalism a pass, presenting the narrator’s final unity with the store as a perverse emancipation. I almost never say this, but this book should have been longer, so that it could be stranger. To me, it asserted its strangeness without ever being strange. In the end I just wasn’t sure what it meant for the narrator to have become a convenience store woman. Ultimately unsatisfying, but I’ll probably read Murata’s next book.

All in all, a decent but not a great month, mostly because I couldn’t make enough reading time. I spent a few days in DC with students (fun, but not conducive to reading), and of course had a new semester to prepare for and adjust to. Then that damn D’Eramo book took a lot of my attention. But the Powell is promising, the Hautzig a real find, and the Harvey deeply satisfying. How was your January?