The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan: Overall, I loved this. The constellation of characters was much more compelling to me than it was in A Visit From the Goon Squad, although the writing was so excellent that I may need to revisit Goon Squad. There were a few chapters whose format felt gimmicky, while others worked as experimentations with form. I’ll read it again, especially because there are so many characters that I know there are more connections to be made.

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, by Jeannie Vanasco: This was tough – it’s about rape – but important, impressive, and brave. Difficult to read, but worth doing.

The Deep, by Alma Katsu: Oh how I wanted to love this…I read Katsu’s The Hunger a year or two ago and thought it struck the perfect balance of literary fiction and hints of something supernatural. It’s possible that I was disappointed by The Deep because the sinking of the Titanic is less compelling to me than the journey of the Donner Party, or because I’m more open to intimations of werewolves than I am to plots about possession or ghosts, but I don’t think that was all – the writing just wasn’t as good, especially in the final chapters. Still, I’ll read Katsu’s latest in hopes of chasing the thrill of The Hunger.

Who Gets In and Why, by Jeffrey J. Selingo: Similar to, and slightly less engaging than, another admissions book I read recently (Valedictorians at the Gate). The case studies of three students were the most interesting, and there was some good background about the ways in which colleges advertise themselves to students (and when that began). New to me was some of the info about how huge state schools deal with 50,000+ applications and balance in-state and out-of-state applicants.

Alive, by Piers Paul Read: I recall being ten or eleven and seeing a documentary about the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972. I remembered the most “scandalous” element (that they survived by consuming their friends who had died) but hadn’t registered just how long they were trapped in the mountains – more than two months, which seems truly fantastical. By nature, it was hard to keep track of most of the characters – there are so many – but a great work of nonfiction.

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Cabin Fever, by Jonathan Franklin and Michael Smith: I suppose I may get tired of reading about COVID at some point, but I doubt it…this nonfiction book benefits from its focus on a limited set of people in a singular location – the occupants of the Zaandam cruise ship. The authors focus on crew, officers, and passengers; it’s harrowing to see the pressure the crew feels to continue to “perform” for the passengers, and the severity of the situation is a stark reminder of what things were like at the beginning of the pandemic.

Nightcrawling, by Leila Mottley: This was hard to read because I was so gutted for the character. The narration felt slightly uneven, as if it were shifting in and out of the protagonist’s view and a wider one yet always in first person. I only just found out that the author is TWENTY-ONE, which means she wrote this when she was probably still a teenager, and now I’m extremely impressed. I’ll be interested in seeing what she writes next.

A Tale for the Time Being, by Ruth Ozeki: Utterly delightful exploration told through an instantly intriguing premise – a diary washes up on the shore of a small Pacific Northwest island and the writer who finds it and realizes it belonged to a young woman living in Northern Japan just before the tsunami and Fukushima disaster.

The Wave, by Susan Casey: I don’t know if reading about the tsunami subconsciously made me seek out this nonfiction work about waves, but it’s what I read next. The book focuses mostly on surfing, albeit with detours into tsunamis, rogue waves, and wave science, and I wished for a bit more exploration of all things wave-related, even as I marveled at the bravery and recklessness of big-wave surfers.

The Idiot, by Elif Batuman: I reread this in preparation for reading Either/Or, and I managed not to dwell too heavily on how many names and plot points I’d forgotten from what’s been one of my favorite books of the past decade. Everything that I did remember still worked perfectly – I’m sure many, many readers identify with Selin, but I can’t help feeling that her experiences and mine overlap more than most – the dialogue, the sense of confusion, the structure. Everything I didn’t remember was a new joy to rediscover.

Either/Or, by Elif Batuman: Based on the way the parts and chapters are set up (similarly to The Idiot), I am hopeful that Batuman will write a novel for each of Selin’s undergraduate years. I would spend as much time in her mind as she’s able to give. While The Idiot still wins for me as far as resonance with the awkward college experience, this was equally excellent.

Catch and Kill, by Ronan Farrow: Reading this was much like reading Lawrence Wright’s Scientology tome, Going Clear, in that it gave me a crawling paranoia and made me fear for the author. For Wright, though, I feared for retribution from the Church of Scientology, while fear for Ronan Farrow’s safety is a plot point of the book (and, it seems, the danger ended with the jailing of Harvey Weinstein). Incredibly compelling and horrifying.

Valedictorians at the Gate, by Becky Munsterer Sabky: I read this at the recommendation of one of my student’s parents; there’s very little I disagree with in what Sabky says about college admissions (in particular that all of us would be better off if we considered overall fit rather than pure prestige and acknowledged that there are MANY fantastic colleges). It’s always fun to look behind the curtain, and college admissions committees are rarely described in this level of detail.

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Dark Summit, by Nick Heil: I’m always reaching for the high that was reading Into Thin Air for the first time (in Kathmandu), and falling short (OF THE SUMMIT haha?). This was definitely readable and good, but it seems like it’s Krakauer rather than Everest itself – or at least the alchemy between the two – that makes Into Thin Air so hard to compete with. Still, I enjoyed this because it focused on someone I’d already watched on the reality TV show Everest: Beyond the Limit and I had a hazy recollection of what transpired, but not a strong enough one to make the book predictable. I still have no desire to go even to Everest Base Camp.

Social Creature, by Tara Isabella Burton: Holy cow this went grim quickly. I grew a little weary of the characters.

Tell the Wolves I’m Home, by Carol Rifka Brunt: Really lovely and haunting, though I was slightly perplexed by the focus on the protagonist being “in love” with her uncle – it seemed too much was made of it.

Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett: Patchett’s The Wonder made a deep and lasting impression on me, yet I somehow never sought her other titles. (I have a similar lacuna with music in that if I love a song, I love a song, but it almost doesn’t occur to me to then listen to the rest of the artist’s catalog.) Commonwealth is both grand and personal, starting off as a family saga and turning into a discussion of who controls the narratives they’re a part of.

The World Cannot Give, by Tara Isabella Burton: I preferred this to Social Creature – I think Burton so expertly portrays a half-formed adolescent who’s easily convinced by those with stronger opinions (and torn when those stronger forces combat one another).

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Trust, by Hernan Diaz: In the Distance is one of the most sublime books I’ve ever read – also one of the only books I’ve ever read that I would describe as sublime rather than some other merit – so I was both desperate for and wary of his second book. Very similar, actually, to waiting to read Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel (perhaps mainly in the wariness about subject matter – finance world – of the subsequent novel. As a digression – why haven’t I read Mandel’s back catalog? And isn’t it great and shouldn’t it be more frequently the case that she was able to write three novels before her “breakout success”?)

I was about to start Trust when, almost exactly 2.5 years to the day since NYC shut down, COVID finally caught me. The first chapter felt incredibly expository, as if a preface to everything else. Where is the dialogue? I wondered. The entire first section continued in that way, and a sense of dread crept in as the pages sludged by. If I weren’t a completionist, I might have given up. And in the end, I’m not sure that the turnabout of the third and fourth parts, which are vastly better than the first two, makes the book worth it. Yes, I saw what he was doing once I read part two, but that didn’t make the experience of reading it more pleasurable. Alas!

The Invisible Kingdom, by Meghan O’Rourke: This is very well written and well researched, but I found myself wishing that it were a more in-depth exploration of the origins and history of autoimmune diseases (which is a tall ask given that there isn’t just one disease or disorder and the origins are so murky). It’s a rare book that benefited perfectly from being nearly complete during the rise of COVID, at least allowing for a glimpse of hope as more research is done into long COVID that could benefit little-understood autoimmune and post-infection syndromes as well.

Invisible Child, by Andrea Elliott: I read Random Family when I had been living in NYC for a year or two and, I think, stayed up overnight finishing it. This will (or already has, I’m sure) be compared, and it’s equally compelling and dismaying. Unlike Random Family, it takes place just a few blocks from where I live, so the stores and streets and parks are all incredibly familiar even as the experiences are so different from mine. Completely devastating. With years-long reportage like this there are always questions of ethics, of purview, of enmeshment, but it’s incredibly written and I’m glad it won the Pulitzer.

The Wonder, by Emma Donaghue: I haven’t read Donaghue’s best-known book, Room, but I heard this was atmospheric and eerie. It was those things and more – it gave me a master class in deploying information/moving plot forward while simultaneously building character with every scene.

Hell’s Half Acre, by Susan Jonusas: A book about some of the first known American serial killers that combines Kansas history (in particular, other atrocities that were ongoing there courtesy of American gov’t) with the story of the murderous family? It sounded like it couldn’t possibly be boring, but it was slightly boring. There are so many different players to keep track of. It’s a tall order to write about something that happened more than 150 years ago that wasn’t documented as much as other historical events were.

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Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri Fink: I’m not sure whether this crossed my radar because there’s a current TV series based on it or if I just saw it recommended somewhere – focused on the week of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this was published in 2013. I’m curious if there’s any sort of follow-up or update nine years later. Though – unavoidably, because of the number of people involved – it was sometimes difficult to keep track of all of the threads and individuals, the chronological structure helped. It’s difficult to read – easy to both wish people had made different choices and to recognize that they were in an impossible situation, one I could try to imagine myself in but surely without any real insight into what I would have done. There are some obvious systemic failures, of course, but the individual choices – made by doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and others, under general conditions of sleep deprivation, dehydration, and extreme heat – are harder to judge. At least initially. As I read on, I started to judge more. Then wavered. Then read about all of the hospitals where this didn’t happen, and judged again, thinking surely I would have chosen differently. The book’s strength lies not in neutrality – it’s not neutral – but in complexity.

Cover Story, by Susan Rigetti: Reading this right after Five Days at Memorial could have felt like extreme whiplash. It didn’t, but this was…well. There are a couple of clever elements, but the writing was excruciating (I think that was a choice – to make the narrator’s diary unbelievably naive – but that didn’t ease the burden of reading it) and the premise was less “a wink and nod to some recent events with a fresh take” and more “a pastiche of recent events, beat by beat, and combined in silly ways.”

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, And Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin: This story of a long-term partnership between video game designers was delightful. The experience was somewhere between that of reading The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay or a long family saga. I had quibbles – one of the main characters’ families felt strangely absent; the narration at times was so expository as to sound robotic – but nothing worth dwelling on. The playfulness with form was a highlight, as were the characters themselves, in particular the way the author was able to present two versions of the same events that each sounded completely reasonable.

Plum Island, by Nelson DeMille: I’m going to need another 90s thriller to read for comparison in order to gauge just how egregiously misogynistic and insensitive this was…I suspect more than most. It was more ludicrous than offensive – lines such as (about a female detective) “she had a colt 45 in her holster and 36Ds holstered in her blouse” or something similar. I mean! Hard not to laugh. While the author is clearly trying to write a main character who’s a proud asshole, I had the impression he was pleased with himself (as the character is) and picturing a roguish Harrison Ford portraying the protagonist in a film version. So…schlocky and dated and somewhat offensive. I wanted to read a schlocky thriller about biological warfare, and I did get that. Unfortunately, I also got the narrator, ludicrous plotting, and a second half that dragged on and on. Not much to recommend.

The Only Plane in the Sky, by Garrett Graff: I read this – not entirely by design, but I had it on my Kindle and opted for it when I noticed the date – on the days around 9/11 this year. It’s not, of course, an easy read, but I do love oral histories. Fragmented (more than some oral histories) but wrenching.

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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk: I knew very little about this before reading, other than that it’s set in Poland and won the Pulitzer Prize. I think that was an ideal way to go into it; I had no preconceptions about the “sort” of story it would be, and for the first third of the book I felt totally content to follow the main character through her routines without really caring if anything “happened” (I say this even though there is a death within the first five pages). Beautiful, beautiful writing. I was somewhat baffled by all of the astrology, but it didn’t detract. I’m already looking forward to rereading.

Rules for Vanishing, by Kate Alice Marshall: I’m not really the audience for this – I went into it thinking it was YA, and I think that’s accurate, though I later heard people describe it as middle-grade – but there have been a number of YA novels I’ve been compelled by as an adult. So…maybe I’m not the audience for this genre (supernatural horror). I’m not sure how much I would have liked it regardless – really, really overwritten, and not a solid enough set of rules or origin story for the horror. But again, I may be evaluating it with the wrong pen.

The Runaways, by Fatima Bhutto: Each section of this novel is split among its three main characters, each of whom is connected to Pakistan and whose paths wind together as the book moves forward. The desert scenes are incredibly evocative (perhaps all the more impressive because of the emptiness of the landscape) and effective. But I found some of the character arcs (one in particular) unconvincing, contrived in service of the plot, and the ending jarring but not necessarily illuminating.

Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, by Alison Esbach: The title is kind of misleading, and I’m not sure how much of the central plot was intended to be revealed only later in the book. It’s hard to write something entirely in the second person. I liked the main character – I thought she was hilarious – but the focus on the high school golden boy didn’t do much for me, even given the basis for it (which becomes clear maybe a quarter of the way into the book.

The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer: Though this was written 60 years ago and set in Germany rather than Poland, it reminded me tonally of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead – the solo female narrators, both of whom presented themselves as “older women” though I think the protagonist in Tokarczuk’s novel is in her 60s while the unnamed narrator of The Wall is only in her 40s (I guess in 1963 that counted as older?); the missive nature of the texts; the attention and care to animals; and the sense of isolation. When my partner asked what my book was about and I told him the premise – an invisible wall appears around an Alpine region and every living thing outside of it dies, leaving one woman alone in the world with the animals inside of the boundary. “Is the wall a metaphor?” he asked, and, actually, it’s not. I’m sure you could find a way to interpret it as such, but it’s definitely more of an instigating plot device to examine solitude.

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Take My Hand, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez: Ignorant of this novel’s publishing date, I was initially incensed that I had heard so little about it in the past…and then I realized it’s a very new addition to the world, published in April of this year. Set in the 1970s and 2016 (I assume so as not to…have to deal with Trump), it’s the story of medical ethics, good intentions gone wrong (and bad intentions gone worse), complicity, and control. There’s a bit of…almost obsessive justifying/qualifying/disclaiming that appears suddenly and that feels like it comes more from the author than the narrator, but I sympathize with the compulsion. Highly compelling.

The Overstory, by Richard Powers: Not to make myself look out of touch in two entries in a row, but I hadn’t heard of Richard Powers until The Overstory came out. And I don’t think that’s terribly unusual, even though it seems wild to me that I wouldn’t have heard of an author who had already won a National Book Award and published a dozen novels. There are so many books every year, so many authors, and if you aren’t following the major awards (which, until about 2018, I wasn’t) you could miss an incredibly prominent name. The upside is that now I have an entire back catalog of Richard Powers to read. A third of the way into The Overstory I was ready to declare it genius. The first 150 pages are the slow growth of a network of people whose lives will eventually overlap, in sections long enough to be memorable but brief enough to leave you wishing for more time with each character. Each explores, directly or obliquely, the character’s relationship to trees. Eventually, the human characters collide with one another. Occasionally I had quibbles about plot points or sentences, and I sometimes wished for less sudden violence – I felt like an open nerve as I read – but when I finished the novel my verdict was still: genius. Extraordinary.

The Fourth Man, by Robert Baer: Am I truly about to read a book about a spy who has not yet been caught, which by definition will have no neat resolution? Yes, because it went so quickly once I started, and because – as I told myself – perhaps the publication of the book (a nonfiction search for a KGB spy within the CIA) would lead to the case being finally solved, the way I’ll Be Gone in the Dark nudged along the Golden State Killer’s capture (or maybe it didn’t really have much of an impact but I read it after he was arrested?). I found myself losing interest in this because it was so focused on logistics at the expense of narrative. And – spoiler not spoiler – you never find out who the spy was! What a disappointment. It could have worked if it were written in a way that was interesting beyond the question of who the double agent was, but it was not.

Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel: At long last! I loved Station Eleven, very much enjoyed The Glass Hotel, and have been waiting for this for years (in my heart) and months (on the library waitlist). This was a thoroughly delightful read, but I have to admit that as I read I kept thinking “these sound like the musings of a very talented writer while she’s on tour” (granted one of the main characters is a writer on tour, so fair enough, but…listen, if I could write a great book that way believe me I would). I was further delighted by the realization that St. John Mandel must live in my neighborhood, because in one scene she describes the park and restaurant around the block from me (later, when the story briefly stops in my hometown of Cincinnati, I felt even more special!). Still wished it were longer, as it was so cozy (in spite of all the world-ending) inside of it.

The Meritocracy Trap, by Daniel Markovits: Much of this theory – that the “merit-based” social structure many perceive as an antidote to the prior system of leisurely aristocratic landowners is actually nearly as destructive – rang true for me, in particular the frenzied panic with which parents invest in their children’s educational scaffolding (I say this because that’s what the frenzied panic is – it’s about the outcome, the competitiveness, the going on to more and more elite institutions, not about the actual education itself (though many parents are also invested in that; it does not generally cause panic), especially since, as a tutor, I’m part of and complicit in that scaffolding). That said, I had questions throughout about where the author was really deriving his conclusions. For example, he discusses in great detail a community in the suburbs of Detroit where everyone makes more or less the same income (or, rather, the difference between the richest and poorest is vastly less than elsewhere in the country) and can afford the typical mid-century middle-class aspirations like a comfortably-sized home, the ability to buy necessities and non-necessities, etc. Markovits sees this not as a boon but as a problem, because he associates it with stagnation and feels that the people of the community have no ability to join “the elite.” But…he doesn’t include any quotes from members of the community that speak to what seems to be his fear alone. The quotes he does include give the impression of satisfaction with life. So – is it really a problem? He’s focused on how the poor have gotten closer to a middle-class lifestyle while the divide between middle-class and elite widens, but I feel it’s worth saying that, although I agree that the insane divide between the .1% or the 1% or whatever top stratum and “the rest” is Very Bad, it would be worse if the middle class had grown closer to the elite while the worst off had fallen further behind in terms of money and opportunity. No?? He also laments the loss of “middle managers” and trades like tool and die cutting, in which someone could make a comfortable living without a college degree or without aspirations to enter “elite fields,” but later seems depressed by the way even management jobs have been splintered and stratified…but aren’t the lower offerings of the management jobs similar to, you know, a middle manager?

This was written in 2019. What about influencers, Patreons, etc? Definitely a provocative and engaging read – though felt repetitive at times – but I did have to laugh a little when the section on “so, what should we do about this?” was basically a 10-page epilogue. I kept thinking about this book as a companion piece to This Life by Martin Hagglund, in which the answer is “socialism” – I don’t know that that would be Markovits’s answer (though it seems like a European model would do quite a bit to alleviate the exaggerated disparity); it struck me that he might want more of a return to mid-century focus on what he calls mid-skill workers, which is an interesting idea that leads to questions about what society values – “progress”? General happiness and well-being? Equality? I think I’ll revisit this text in a few years – much to digest.

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The Sentence, by Louise Erdich: The first half of this is absolute unfettered delight while simultaneously philosophical and profound. The characters – especially narrator Tookie – the descriptions, the language play, the voice – it’s hilarious. In its distinctiveness, its humor, and the sense of “here is a master at work” it was akin to James McBride’s Deacon King Kong. In the second half, COVID appears. At first I was disappointed, wanting to remain in Tookie’s individual timeline, but that was misguided. It was just as mesmerizing to be with Tookie during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis.

A Place For Us, by Fatima Farheen Mirza: Overall I enjoyed this and certainly feel that the author is talented, but the pacing and register of the novel really slowed it down – there are so many descriptions that all feel of equal weight and a persistent sense of “how wondrous is it all!” that doesn’t allow anything to feel truly wondrous. I didn’t mind the shifting perspectives at all – though one family member really gets short shrift – but often the switches in time period felt arbitrary, as if they were occurring simply to keep up a pattern rather than to serve the narrative.

The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn: It seems I’ve been conflating Kate Quinn and Kate Atkinson for a while (likely because Atkinson has a novel, Transcription, that sounds right out of Quinn’s oeuvre – World War II, England, spies), but this was my first Quinn novel. It was quite immersive and I grew more invested as I read despite feeling, initially, that it was dragging a bit. It might have dug a bit deeper into the concepts of betrayal, allyship, and patriotism, but ultimately a great read, both as mystery and history.

The Illumination, by Kevin Brockmeier: Does anyone work from a conceit better than Kevin Brockmeier? In A Brief History of the Dead there’s a second world, or a limbo, inhabited by people who have died but who are still remembered by at least one living person. In The Illumination, physical and emotional pain become visible in the form of light. Six short stories (or long chapters), each with a main character, connected by a noteboIt seems I’ve been conflating ok that falls into their possession. There’s another trick hidden in one of the chapters, in which a character notes “and after that, everything happened in tens” and then every sentence for the rest of the chapter is ten words long. Small things nagged – there’s a turn of events in the second chapter that made me recoil slightly, and the fifth chapter gets hard to follow at times – but the writing is often exquisite.

The Least of Us, by Sam Quinones: Dreamland, Quinones’s 2015 book, is one of the most compelling works of journalism/narrative nonfiction I’ve ever read. His follow-up is also engrossing and enlightening, but doesn’t have the same cohesion or converging narratives that Dreamland did so well. The Least of Us is more fragmented, and it’s hard to keep track of the individuals across the different sections of the book – it might have worked better to have each person’s entire store in one contiguous space. I don’t agree with every single policy idea Quinones puts forward, but in reading I trusted that I was in the mind of someone who is deeply invested in the opioid/heroin/now fentanyl and meth crises and who has thought carefully about how to approach it. The most startling thing I learned was that there are two different processes for cooking methamphetamines, and around 2016 the P2P process – which doesn’t require pseudoephedrine and thus is easier in terms of supplies, but which creates far more toxic byproducts (even beyond the effects that meth typically has) and can cause temporary psychosis and permanent brain damage – became far more common among suppliers, and that may account for a significant amount of the increased homelessness major cities have seen in the last five years.

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When the Stars Go Dark, by Paula McClain: An engaging mystery with depth and atmosphere – the descriptions of coastal northern California towns and redwood forests are captivating. There were three occasions, though, on which I thought “Surely X character would not do Y – oh, here goes X character doing Y” in a way that felt contrived for the plot.

Vladimir, by Julia May Jonas: Fifty pages in, I thought, “Do I hate this? I might hate this.” I definitely squawked several times in the early chapters, was taken aback, was put off. At the same time, it’s trenchant, mordant, and funny. One hundred and fifty pages in, I was somewhat repulsed by nearly every character, and also cognizant that my repulsion might say something about me and that the author might be aware of this and have intended it. By the time I finished, I was both impressed and annoyed. Absurd, madcap, and definitely not boring.

These Silent Woods, by Kimi Cunningham Grant: I recognize that the ending to this was “unrealistic,” but it was satisfying nonetheless. I’ve so frequently and recently read novels with ambiguous, quiet, or unresolved endings that I was craving a neatly packaged ending like salt. Sometimes the voice of the narrator slipped a bit for me, but overall I found this compelling. The voice of the eight-year-old, though, wasn’t difficult to accept, even though she made for a precocious and unusual child.

The Other Side of Perfect, by Mariko Turk: Reading contemporary YA performing arts novels out of nostalgia, but finding that I may simply need to continue revisiting the performing arts fiction from my own childhood to satisfy that nostalgia yearning (I do, in fact, have a book on my shelf called Another Way to Dance, which has a pretty similar ring to it although the two don’t track the same plot). I read a piano-prodigy-novel a few years back called The Lucy Variations that I wanted to be as good as my childhood favorite The Mozart Season, and I had the same basic experience. Which is perfectly logical; these were not written for me! And favorites from growing up get preserved in amber (and also have the benefit of speaking the way you spoke, having the same technology you had, being set in the same world…). Maybe I should do a test with YA fiction from my generation that I never read growing up – see if it’s that I’m too old or that it’s the era that matters. In the meantime, I wouldn’t mind more literature for adults set in ballet companies! **On revisiting this train of thought after finishing the book (which, I confess, grew on me as I read), I realize I’ve read recent fiction that’s billed as YA (We Are Okay by Nina LaCour, for ex) that has been thoroughly enjoyable, and also that I didn’t wholesale endorse all of the YA I read as a kid (That Summer by Sarah Dessen never did it for me, even when I was 12). The Other Side of Perfect was a bit didactic, but ultimately successful. I think I just wanted something that is still thoroughly behind-the-scenes of performing arts rather than “what comes next.”

A Flicker in the Dark, by Stacy Willingham: I don’t know if there was something subconscious going on when I was reserving these at the library – dark, woods, stars, flicker – or if all of the recommendations sprang from the same source. This was not especially memorable – I could predict most of the plot points and the writing itself was uninspired.

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The Swimmers, by Julie Otsuka: Before I read the first page, this reminded me of Yannick Murphy’s This is the Water, which also takes place primarily in a local swimming pool, from an unusual perspective (second person for This is the Water, first person plural for The Swimmers), in which the pool is a metaphor or vessel for exploration of the rifts in the community. There’s a panoramic quality to both of them, a distance. In some ways that made it harder for me to engage at first- there are recurring characters but no one stood out as a main character (handled differently, I could imagine the pool itself being the main character), and it felt more like a study than a story. That shifted around 50 pages in (which is significant – the book is only 130 pages) and from there everything took off in a masterful way, and then everything that came earlier took on greater meaning.

Clean Air, by Sarah Blake: I can’t help comparing this to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening, which was, even among his movies, quite ludicrous. Fortunately, there’s no pretense of “something incredible and amazing will be revealed” that turns out to be ridiculous instead of interesting – here, the premise is clear from the start: hyper-pollination causes massive health problems for humans, in an ironic twist on what one might expect to cause climate apocalypse. It’s also a better play on COVID than I’ve seen in almost any book that’s come out post-pandemic. A minor thing that annoyed me: there was a fair amount of over-narration, description of every mundane thing. “I peed. I wiped myself” etcetera. The protagonist’s daughter is written so well, though – I don’t even mind when children in books are a little unbelievable (people in books are often a little unbelievable), but an absolutely spot-on four-year-old is a delight to read.

My Sister the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite: I’m sure it’s considered very wrong in some spheres to be unable to suppress hysterical laughter while reading about murder, but in my defense this is satire and also hilarious. Did it stick the landing? Not really, but I recommend it with no reservations anyway.

The Latinist, by Mark Prins: Given that I took Latin for six years in middle and high school (and went to the Ohio Junior Classical League state Latin convention for five of those…a literal toga party in which adolescents were unleashed in the ballrooms of a conference hotel to compete in certamina and art contests and take Latin tests for ribbons), I was predisposed toward this. Not at all disappointed – it’s somewhat similar to Possession, though without the historical timeline, and the academic and literary discussion is thoroughly impressive. I’m almost finished with it and…I don’t really know why it’s categorized as a “crime thriller” unless that’s a spoiler or we’re (deservedly) taking professional undermining as crime now? It’s not a spoiler – it’s in the first few pages – for me to say that plots like this one, which involving professional sabotage, are the hardest for me to handle (on TV sitcoms, it’s someone borrowing something and then the thing getting lost/stolen in a series of unfortunate and avoidable events – this is near-constant on Seinfeld), especially when it’s an older man attempting to hamstring a younger woman’s success.

And…now having finished the whole novel, unfortunately the ending does not work at all and detracts from the book. No regret in reading it as what came before was so compelling, but ugh.

The Unseen World, by Liz Moore: I really admire writers who can cross genres so deftly (I’ve also read Moore’s Long Bright River, which is very much a literary thriller), though the two Moore novels I’ve read are united in being, ultimately, about parenthood. This unfolded as a mystery in its own right, and was even more mysterious to me because I had inadvertently seen (and subsequently tried to forget) a spoiler for the novel, which I then badly misremembered into something that doesn’t happen at all (and I’m not sure what the actual spoiler, if there even was one, was).

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