Once There Were Wolves, by Charlotte McConaghy: Immensely well done. I have not read Migrations (yet) and didn’t know anything, really, about either the author or the novel before beginning it. The past and present are woven together expertly and everywhere you look there’s something else that the story is about – wolves, conservation, twins, mirror-touch synesthesia, place, domestic violence. I was impressed by the author’s writing and storytelling both, and the novel never stopped surprising me.

Lost in Summerland, by Barrett Swanson: Someone is writing personal narrative about experiencing existential depression in South Florida? I feel threatened! Okay, that was primarily the first essay. I wasn’t totally sold on the premise of this collection – “looking for the real America” – seemed like a pretty thin rod on which to hang a bunch of stories that happened to, in some cases, take place in different parts of the country – but I may just have been extremely grumpy while reading this. Things kept needling at me – the way the author is so consciously self-effacing, the overdone flourishes in the prose (in particular when they were reused – how did an editor let two instances of “pumicing away” and two instances of “a whole nomenclature of ______” and three instances of “the vade mecum of _____” make it into the same book?). I might have appreciated them more one at a time, over years, rather than over a week during which I wasn’t having the best of times and may not have been as receptive as I otherwise might be. But these are many conditionals. I will say that as I read on, I did really admire the title essay and another late essay, “Disaster City,” although when Swanson began to recount his experiences with OCD I again started to feel like, hey, this guy is taking my beat here…so perhaps I should consider that the things nettling me in the collection are those that reflect my self.

Home, Land, Security, by Carla Power: The title, albeit clever and ultimately fitting, doesn’t completely capture the focus of Power’s book, which centers on deradicalization and the different methods countries around the world (in particular the UK, Indonesia, Belgium, Pakistan, and the US) have enacted (or failed to enact) in reintegrating former terrorists (neo-Nazis, members of ISIS) into society. There are a wide range of approaches and an equally wide range of participants being deradicalized – from those who have committed atrocities to those who have only planned on traveling to Syria to join the Islamic state or whose “participation” in terrorism was strictly providing support (eg food, lodging) to terrorists. Powers does a great job of questioning herself at every turn – how her allegiances and motives may cloud her judgment, how she can better examine her own prejudices and beliefs, how even the act of doing so may still leave her with lacunae in her understanding. The experience of reading her well-reasoned, empathetic, and compelling narratives, then reading on as she deftly questions herself, made me edgy (in a necessary way) in trying to interrogate my own biases and even my response to the book itself. Incredibly compelling and crucial.

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner: The first thing I did after someone recommended this memoir was go to my Spotify “liked songs” (all of which come from my Discover Weekly playlists – ie all of the songs are recent discoveries and representative of only a tiny part of my actual “liked” music) to see if I had liked any by Japanese Breakfast, Zauner’s band. Yes! “Diving Woman” from their 2017 album Soft Sounds from Another Planet. (This was just to satisfy my curiosity – I realize that could sound as if I might decide whether to read the book based on whether I liked the music). Initially, it pained me to imagine that Zauner probably had an easier time publishing this due to relative fame – because it’s SO good that the idea of it not existing (if Zauner were unknown to the world) was painful. But then I discovered that actually, Zauner’s writing success and her musical success happened almost simultaneously, and she likely sold Crying in H Mart on the strength of the excerpts she had already published as essays (including one that won Glamour Magazine’s writing contest). I loved this book – but it’s also, for anyone with a mother, or anyone close to their mother – extremely sad and difficult to read.

Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner: Okay, as much as “spy stuff” is one of my top two most problematic favorite things (the other is the summer olympics), I didn’t harbor any illusions that the CIA has been a force of good in the world (or even a force of neutrality…or mild evil…) – but good lord was I not expecting just how incompetent it’s been! Sure, I knew about some of the missteps and the more recent flat-out failures, but at some level I went into this history of the CIA expecting underhanded, unethical intelligence…and found sheer bumbling destructive incapability. The book, though, is fascinating. It can be tricky to keep track of all of the players in the CIA’s history, but the 1000-page tome is structured around the tenure of each president, which helps. Unfortunately, because this is a 2007 book, there isn’t anything on more recent years, though I think the past ten years would still be classified. For comparison’s sake (and there is significant attention paid to how “advanced” (I need a punctuation mark there that looks less sarcastic than quotation marks but more ambiguous than no punctuation) the British intelligence service and the Soviet intelligence apparatus are while America had almost nothing), I’d love to read a history of the primary intelligence agencies from other nations. It was fascinating to see the transition from a time without electronic records, surveillance, or data – how much easier it was to lie (as the early directors of the CIA did, copiously) to the president and congress and continue to fail in the same exact ways repeatedly.

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The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan: I’ve been dying to read my dear friend Jessamine’s novel since it was announced, and that only intensified after another good friend read an advanced copy and couldn’t stop raving about it. She lent it to me so that I could read it while awaiting my “bookshelf” copy to ship in January. I was so absorbed in it that I told my partner I wanted to watch something with him as soon as I finished the chapter I was on, and really meant that…and then I read another chapter…and another…and literally could not put the book down. It’s gripping, inventive, and terrifying, with impeccable prose. I would have read it in one sitting if I didn’t start it in the middle of a period of work and travel.

The Guide, by Peter Heller: Heller’s The Dog Stars made me cry as much as a book ever has (well, it was one passage specifically that was up there with Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and one of the short stories in Jesus’ Son), but I think I recall the romantic element in that novel feeling a little forced, and the romantic plot line in this felt similar. What I did like about The Guide were the descriptions of fishing and the way COVID was a realistic presence – similar to how the world feels now – and less a threat for its own destructive capabilities and more for how people are able to weaponize isolation in nefarious ways under the auspices of health. I had a very difficult time imagining the main character as a 25-year-old man – I could have believed mid thirties or forties – and overall the narrative was a bit hackneyed. But I read most of it while unable to sleep for a period of 90 minutes in the middle of the night and it was entertaining enough. I did have a good time trying to figure out what the sinister secret would be (I was incorrect).

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata: I loved this novella, which a friend recommended to me as “engrossing and short.” In some ways it reminded me of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen – not because both are set in Japan but because both are set in highly particular spaces (kitchens, a convenience store) and the attachments to those spaces provides so much information about the respective main characters. Furukura, the titular protagonist of Convenience Store Woman, reads as autistic and perceptive of the ways in which she is and isn’t able to/interested in fitting into the cultural mores of modern society (get married, strive for a high-paying job, etc) and how unable others are to accept that her interests and aims are different from theirs. She recognizes that her life will be easier if she pretends to have the trappings of a “successful” adult life, and that creates the central plot of the story. I found the second most important character nearly unbearable, but Furukura’s observations about him made me reconsider…at least momentarily. After the novella ends, there’s an essay by the author that made me wonder how directly autobiographical the book was – the author, too, was a convenience store worker for years, and although there’s a sense that the essay is playful and not entirely serious, there’s also a sense that it’s actually pretty literal. Of course this made me immediately look up the author to find out if she’s written any other books, and there’s one that came out just two months ago in English – a full 250-page novel, which will be my next read if I’m lucky enough to find find no waitlist at the library.

Earthlings, by Sayaka Murata: I was indeed lucky enough that the ebook of Murata’s second novel was available immediately. (Side note: I don’t know where I got the 250+ page figure – it’s actually just under 200.) And…this was tough to read. The main character is substantially different from the protagonist of Convenience Store Woman (in some ways, the main character’s sister has some of the elements of Furukura, though the main character herself abstains from societal norms like marriage), but the major themes are similar. The things that happen to the protagonist, though, are far more upsetting. And as the novel continues…it didn’t pull me in the same way that Convenience Store Woman did. It becomes increasingly disturbing in a similar vein to Eugene Marten’s Waste or Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God (though there is no necrophilia), but less effectively, and the tone of wide-eyed innocence and lack of comprehension of social mores felt forced rather than illuminating.

The Country Will Bring Us No Peace, by Matthieu Simard: Another novella? Yes! Another eerie, present or near-future dystopia of human folly? Definitely! Another translated work? Correct. There’s a deep sense of dread throughout, and even though elements of both the past and present of the primary couple are spelled out, somehow both feel murky, as if the present tense of the novel is a spotlight around which all else is dark. Deeply unsettling.

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Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson: I knew there was an environmental contamination element to the plot – unexplained incidences of cancer, possible toxicity – before I started reading it, but that had grown hazy by the time I started, so my point of entry was “man wants to buy and cut down the world’s biggest tree” and the unease crept up on me as the references to “the spray,” miscarriages, mysterious cancers, etc slowly piled up. These are the things in the background as the narrative focuses on survival in a waning industry and the immediate threat of death by enormous log or piece of machinery. Overall – the setup and some of the buildup was very compelling, but there were so many minor characters that it was hard to keep track of them all, and I had a torturous time attempting to picture the logging tools. The pacing felt uneven in that there was so much buildup and setting of the stage and then everything happened at once. I was not a great fan of the ending, which felt too convenient in numerous ways, but the writing throughout was strong (with the quibble that the phrase “so and so sucked snot” was used more than felt necessary!)

The Sea of Lost Girls, by Carol Goodman: I remember exactly where I was standing in one of Cincinnati’s Barnes and Nobles the summer after I graduated high school when my AP English teacher emerged from behind a bookshelf. She was a beloved teacher and I was happy to see her – even happier when she pointed at the book I was browsing, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and said, “You’ll love that. It’s trash, but it’s delicious trash” (apologies if I am misquoting – that’s what I took from the conversation, and I think it’s interesting now because I agree with the summary but it feels like The Secret History has been recast as serious literary fiction in the wake of The Goldfinch, which strikes me as much more literary). I did indeed love The Secret History and immediately after reading it I looked for something that would scratch precisely the same itch. I found something quickly that was truly a perfect match even though it had very little plot overlap – Carol Goodman’s The Lake of Dead Languages, which, like the Tartt, was a debut novel. Both books would do well with the current hunger for “dark academia,” but while I almost always see The Secret History on lists of “10 Dark Academia books for fall” etc, I rarely see Goodman…which seems strange because if my sample size of two proves correct, the majority of her books are dark academia. This one wasn’t quite as exactly tuned to my interests as The Lake of Dead Languages *also I read that SO long ago and have no idea how I would interpret it now* but definitely met my expectations for it – a little overwrought, somewhat predictable, but pretty page-turning.

Noise, by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein: I have not read Thinking, Fast and Slow and feel that I should, but I did read The Undoing Project (Michael Lewis’s book about Kahneman’s friendship and collaboration with fellow economist Amos Tversky) and there’s a fair amount of summary of Kahneman/Tversky’s work there…and ultimately I might prefer to read Lewis’s distillations of Kahneman’s work and life. Noise focuses on sources of error (in court sentences, insurance evaluations, etc) that are not caused by human bias but by other forces. This was a bit dry, probably suffered from multiple-author syndrome, and was formatted in a slightly cloying way with quotes at the end of each chapter that were supposed to summarize the topic but instead sounded like a wacky statistical Greek chorus. I started to wish it were shorter about a third of the way through. And then I had to bring my Kindle back online to download loans that were about to expire and…just let the library take Noise back. I do plan to finish it, but I need a break for fiction.

Behind Closed Doors, by B.A. Moore: Well this…was just cartoonish. Overwritten everywhere, generally predictable, highly unbelievable. It did help me pass the hours of an afternoon spent on the couch, I suppose. And if I were marooned somewhere with nothing else to read I would be glad to have it. But…really. Come on. It wrapped up well, at least, but the treatment of one of the major characters throughout was…problematic. I’m realizing that the proportion of my review paragraph composed of ellipses is probably a good predictor of

The Hunger, by Alma Katsu: So curious, always, what’s categorized as genre (horror in this case, though it’s not especially explicit) and what’s considered literary. The writing of this retelling of the Donner party crossing is beautiful (and literary…), and it’s very subtle horror (the focus is far less on the potentially paranormal and instead directed on the mundane horrors of other human beings).The reason I’m thinking about genre/literature (I know it’s a tired conversation for the most part) is that this was published by a horror imprint and I don’t think I heard much – or at all – about it when it came out in 2018 (and I’m generally always scouring “coming soon” and “books to anticipate” and “best of _____” lists), but if I didn’t know that I would have thought, based on the characterization, atmosphere, and narrative threads, that it was a highbrow title. The ending wasn’t a disappointing fade-out nor a too-neat climax.

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Red Crosses, by Sasha Filipenko: This is brief, rich, and bracing. In every way but one it does not remind me of Philip Roth, but the framing device is the exception – a first-person narrator is not the main focus of the novel (though this one has a much more devastating backstory than Zuckerman is typically given); rather, he functions as a set of ears – stand-in for the reader – for the story of another character. While I thought that the framing device functioned beautifully overall, I wanted more of a conclusion to the narrator’s own story. The motifs of crosses and bridges are compelling and the ending is a hard slap of cold water – I would call the novel delightful, and I suppose I am calling it delightful, though it feels slightly wrong given that much of the narrative centers on Stalin and the terrible lack of choices citizens of the USSR faced during his reign.

The Lamplighters, by Emma Stonex: I think that whenever I read a book that takes place on a tiny rocky island – or in this case, simply in the middle of the sea on a lighthouse moored to nothing – I return to the same mental image, as if I’m visiting one place from dream to dream. It helps that every book seems to draw from the same color palate – slate, pewter, all of the lesser stones – and emotional range (which is not a knock against them). This novel is a variation on the closed-room mystery, except that this room is a hundred foot tall tower whose sides can only be breached by the worst of storms. All three of the lighthouse keepers go missing at once, the iron door locked from the inside. In the first 50 pages the author (by way of a character’s internal monologue) lists all of the speculated theories about the disappearance, so I was very curious to see how she came up with something unexpected. It’s hard to say without spoilers whether she did so or not, but I think it worked in the end!

The Turnout, by Megan Abbott: Abbott’s novels always provoke an extreme response in me – frequently it’s admiration and intense interest, as with The Fever and The End of Everything; sometimes it’s disappointment because the settings and characters cater to pet interests, like gymnastics, but the characters’ actions are so difficult to believe; once it was an exaggerated eyeroll (Give Me Your Hand). Ballet, the focus of The Turnout (unsurprisingly), ranks up there with gymnastics for me, so I was cautiously hopeful…atmospherically, this felt more like a Shirley Jackson novel (not a bad thing in itself, but it clashed with the modern yuppie ballet moms and their over-scheduled, 2010s-popular-named offspring) – the siblings in a crumbling old house, the dead parents, the odd familial and romantic relationships. I was slightly aggravated the entire time that although we learn that the main characters, sisters, are one year apart, we never find out which is the elder. The one I determined to be the older sister, possibly just by virtue of the narration being in her perspective, seemed overly invested in her sister’s sex life to the point where I wanted to shake out the book and say get a grip, lady. I grew more invested as the story continued, although I could see what was coming a mile away, and ultimately appreciated the overlay of very modern concerns – architectural contractors! yuppie parents! – with the gothic setting worked more effectively than I had expected. I still prefer her earlier novels.

100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: I first read part of this some years ago – probably after reading a list of “30 Books to Read Before Turning 30.” I didn’t finish because I was having such a hard time keeping track – of time, of events, and mostly of names. When I interacted with the book again, it was because one of my students was writing an essay about it, and the pieces that I read convinced me to try again. Now I’m reading it alongside a (different) student, one chapter a week, paying closer attention and referring back to the family tree the precedes the book as often as it takes.

Infinite Powers, by Steven Strogatz: I love Steven Strogatz. Every time I’ve heard him on a podcast or seen a YouTube video featuring him, he’s seemed so kind and so truly in love with mathematics. I’m reading this book – a history and explanation of calculus for the layperson – with a student (who is not taking calculus yet, and there’s definitely an argument that we should have started with Strogatz’s The Joy of X, but I felt the pun of Infinite Powers would be more appropriate, and I wanted to demystify calculus since my student will likely take it next year). Strogatz also has a named math/communications competition for high schoolers in association with New York’s MOMATH museum, which is fitting since part of his life’s work has been to expose more of the post-secondary world to higher math.

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Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder: Oh boy, this was a wild and fantastic ride. A friend pointed out (when I recommended this book) that there’s an emergent body of literature dealing with domestic drama + a single element of the fantastical, such as children who burst into flames when upset or women turning into rabbits. Transmutation is the thread between them; in this case, a woman’s experience of motherhood and domestic tedium results in her turning into a dog – Nightbitch – both incrementally and occasionally all at once overnight. I wondered briefly how the author would write an ending that matches up to the conceit, but I needn’t have worried. Parts of this are hard to read – intentionally – for the sentimental, but that’s a fair price of admission.

What to Miss When, by Leigh Stein: Leigh is a close friend and I have almost her entire oeuvre, though I need to acquire her first book of poetry, Dispatches from the Future, to complete my set – especially since this, her second poetry collection, is such a fantastic experience. I read it all at once, which is probably neither necessary nor ill-advised for most collections but, I would say, enhances the event. This is an album, not a collection of singles, and the poems play off of one another in both direct and subtle ways. Quarantine, illness, the internet, performativity – these all intersect in Leigh’s work, which in this collection takes on a variety of voices – often within the same poem – both of the Decameron-era and of our post-post-modern online existence.

Empire of Pain, by Patrick Radden Keefe: In my mind, for the first quarter of this book, the title was “House of Pain,” which I realized was incorrect only when I Googled it to make sure I was spelling the author’s name with the right number of Es and was returned results for the “Jump Around” band. Whoops. I should be more careful with Radden Keefe’s titles, given this and the fact that I kept calling Say Nothing “Tell No One.” My first recollection of the name Sackler was as the name of a building at Tufts med school (which my then-boyfriend was attending) – Sackler B was where they had some of their classes. I doubt I thought much of it until years later, but I also don’t think the Sackler family itself was so heavily implicated in some of the longer works about the opioid epidemic (Dreamland, Dopesick) I’ve read (though it’s totally possible they were and this is a failure of my powers of observation and/or memory). I recall plenty of discussion about the pharmaceutical industry in general, and possibly even Purdue Pharma, but little about the Sacklers themselves. This book covers both the family members themselves and their role in creating/marketing oxycontin, comprehensively and compellingly. I heard some complaints that the first section, on the rise of Arthur Sackler and making of a dynasty, was too long, but I disagree. I think getting back to the roots of these dynastic families, especially those that end up nearly singlehandedly funding something so destructive (eg Blackwater…), is critical.

Dream Girl, by Laura Lippman: I know I’ve said this before, but I need Laura Lippman, Tana French, and Jane Harper to rotate putting out novels so that I’m never without a new one from one of them. This was a bit of a departure for Lippman, and played with ideas of authorship and ownership, going somewhat meta. It was hard for me to tell what degree of sympathy she felt (or intended the reader to feel) about the protagonist; half of the time it seemed obvious that he was the sort of change-resistant epitome of privilege that refuses to recognize his misdeeds, and the other half it seemed like he was supposed to be the one we were rooting for. Not to oversimplify…

The Premonition, by Michael Lewis: I thought I might not be up for a COVID-focused book so soon (since the others I’ve started haven’t taken), but most of this is about preparedness (or the impossibility of such) and public health and focuses on two doctors who attempted to thwart COVID when it began and were dismissed by the CDC, the White House, and their superiors. Of course this is a narrative of the events from their perspective and could be colored by how clearly Lewis respects them, but it’s fairly damning (most particularly of the CDC, US health care, and bureaucracy in general). I did prefer the first half, which takes place before 2020, although it sent me into something of a spin over the safety of things like facials (which I occasionally get) and pedicures (which I don’t, in part because I already harbored these concerns before reading this!) I can’t say I enjoyed this as much as the other Lewis I’ve read (The Undoing Project) but I put that 100% down to subject matter. The writing is delightful.

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Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead: Oh man, this is a fucking fantastic book. The writing is incredible on a sentence and imagery level, but the plot and the interwoven storylines are equally good. I occasionally felt that it could be tighter, but that seems like an impossibly petty quibble when I also didn’t want it to end. Maybe it was a feeling similar to but distinct from the feeling you get as a reader when a book is full of amazing images, but they all compete with one another and it’s harder for any individual image to really stand out. It doesn’t seem like that should translate quite to “plot” or “pages” but I think that’s what I’m feeling (and I know from her acknowledgments that the book was originally 1000 pages instead of 600!)

Sapiens, by Noah Yuval Harari: I think I heard about this when it first came out, or shortly thereafter, and was under the mistaken impression that it was…fiction? I have no clue as to where I got that idea other than a vague memory of someone saying that the book ends with humans going to space, which I must have taken literally i.e. all of humanity has to leave Earth. Anyway…obviously it’s nonfiction, and in general is an interesting read. It’s so broad, though, that there’s very little room for depth. In that sense it reminded me (weirdly, I guess?) of The Beginner’s Bible that some relatives gave me when I was six, which simplified every story from both testaments into a paragraph or so. There are definitely some arguments thrown out far too casually and without much backing – one of my Kindle notes was “facile and specious” – especially towards the end of the book – and a few takes that translated more into raised eyebrows and wtfs from me.

The Other Black Girl, by Zakiya Dalila Harris: I should admit I’ve read both the reviews drawing parallels between this novel and the movies Get Out and I’m Sorry to Bother You and the reviews lamenting that those are the only comparisons being made, and…I understand the comparisons! I did try to rack my brain to think of other novels or films with the same intersection of acerbity, growing unease, and ultimate departure into the fantastical/science fiction/horror (I would say, though, that Sorry to Bother You feels much more similar in tone) that this book shares with those films, but failed. Maybe the point of the laments is that readers feel the need to draw comparisons between this and other works when this is such an intricate work on its own (but comparisons are fun!). I don’t mean to diminish the plotting or tone of The Other Black Girl, which could also be reviewed as “a masterful act of high-precision tightrope walking and social commentary.” I read it almost in one sitting.

Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch, by Rivka Galchen: I enjoyed the writing, but the narrative felt too well trodden. I did enjoy the sudden (to me – I didn’t read a synopsis or a back of the book or anything beforehand) appearance of Johannes Kepler, though. So…good ratings for voice and style but lacking in terms of plot and originality.

Until Proven Safe, by Nicola Twilley and Geoff Manaugh: A history of quarantine, the research for which began several years before COVID but the publication of which was just this summer. The authors do a commendable job, I think, of balancing the inclusion of current events with the larger scope of the book (I started to read a nonfiction account of COVID-19 that came out recently and…found it super boring). I’m interested enough human quarantine for reasons of disease prevention that I would have read an entire book about that, but was extremely happy to be surprised by sections on plant quarantine/biodiversity/non-native species, nuclear waste disposal, and the measures taken to prevent Earth and outer space from contaminating one another! There were so many fascinating details – that cocoa trees are quarantined in the English countryside for up to two years before they can make their way from one tropical region of the world to another on the other side of the planet! That some pig farmers in Northeastern China attack their competitor farms by dropping drones of contaminated pig feed on them! That there’s a nuclear vault in the US made entirely of salt that we’ll almost surely never be able to keep future humans from opening while it’s still radioactive, because when have any humans ever heeded warnings on locked vaults or archaeological sites, especially if we can no longer interpret the symbols the warnings are written in? Totally fascinating.

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The End of October, by Lawrence Wright: So I’ve only read one of Lawrence Wright’s numerous nonfiction books (Going Clear, the most comprehensive look at Scientology of our time), but that was enough to know he’s a great nonfiction author. This…is fiction. It’s simultaneously very prescient in that it’s a plague novel that came out in April of 2020 – originally I thought, oh, maybe this was a fun thing he did at the beginning of the pandemic – and not all that prescient in that people write plague novels all the time, so one was bound to hit at the right moment. I’m definitely the audience for pandemic fiction, but this was so silly. Ridiculous plot elements, heavy-handed dialogue, backstories that were both overwrought and yet unmemorable at the same time…I finished it because it reads fast and I’m something of a completionist (not a compliment to myself), but I very much look forward to reading the next Lawrence Wright work of nonfiction and forgetting about this foray.

Phase Six, by Jim Shepherd: …I needed another pandemic novel as a palate cleanser. Not that I ever needed an excuse for a dystopian, disease-ridden, or otherwise post-apocalyptic journey. This is set in Greenland, which immediately made it interesting. I know that sounds reductive, but Greenland! A place almost as difficult to travel to as Antarctica, but where people actually live. But…it fizzled after that. There was a B-plot with a character that seemed totally superfluous to the story, and the A-plot itself was unsatisfying. I found myself forgetting the characters and their backstories and not particularly invested in any of them. Even along plot lines there was nothing to really hold onto. I do appreciate that it’s hard to publish a pandemic novel right on the heels of COVID (the press material for Phase Six notes that it was completed before COVID, so it must have been edited fairly late to include references about how humans had learned nothing from that pandemic). But…regardless of circumstances, I found it lacking.

City of Ash and Red, by Hye-Young Pyun: It was a rainy day and I thought to myself, do I really want to go for a trifecta of pandemic novels? Yes! I do. I want to work my way to a good one. Unfortunately…the trifecta I hit was one of disappointing pandemic novels. This was so anonymous and abstracted, down to the main character being “the man” and the locale being “Country C,” that it slipped away from my train of thought if I let my concentration waver for a fraction of a second – but it wasn’t especially rewarding when I was able to focus on the page. In the second part of the book, the focus shifted from abstract illness to more tangible mystery (and also: rats!) and grew more interesting. It ultimately was too vague and generalized to truly grab me.

After a run of disappointing pandemic books, I am pleased to report that I found a Netflix show perfectly tailored to my interests: pandemic, but in Russian (so I can practice). Though I am biased by my predilections I find the show, To the Lake, well acted and written so far (I’m three episodes down), although I started to worry that it was going in some directions I’ve already seen in early seasons of The Walking Dead (though no zombies so far).

The Terror Years: From al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, by Lawrence Wright: Back to Wright’s nonfiction. I discovered early on that I probably should have read The Looming Tower before reading this, but…I watched the TV show adapted from it and it felt like it would be something of a retread. According to some disappointed reviews, The Terror Years repeats material from The Looming Tower, but I’ll probably still read that one at some point as well. These are essays, which I find more compelling when they’re gathered together in book form. I had a New Yorker subscription for a while and found it overwhelming. Of course, Kindle books don’t just magically show up each week on my device, and it was the arrival and subsequent piling that drove the feeling of not-reading-fast-enough. But it seems a weak excuse that I need a formatting change in order to propel me through what is ultimately the same text.

Hoarders, by Kate Durbin: At first I…had a hard time with this. Not the content, but the form. I thought it might have worked well if it were much shorter (even shorter than its 185-ish pages), but it was all just a list. Yes, in aggregate it gave a sense of overflow and overwhelm, but that sense was apparent after chapter one and didn’t seem like it was going to evolve from there. That said, I found myself more and more affected as the chapters piled up, which I imagine was one of the intended effects, and some of the sections on their own are highly affecting.

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Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson: Incredible work of research, extremely significant, and additionally a tremendous read. It’s obviously not a “delight” to read, but even given the depressing facts of its subject, it does somehow feel like a “quick” read, one that you can’t stop moving through. Part of it is the structure – while each component of Wilkerson’s overall thesis is treated with depth and nuance, the work is broken up into sections and subsections that provide a strong framework for relating all of the interconnected pieces to one another. While I was reading Caste I was also in the middle of rereading A Fine Balance, set in 1970s India, and reading When the Emperor was Divine, which takes place during the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; though it would undermine Wilkerson’s book to suggest that only some other books (or stories, or lives) relate to the idea of caste – since her claim is that it’s inescapable as a framework and threat – those two books are related to caste in specific and particular ways. I would love to read more of Wilkerson’s thoughts on the origins of caste – what causes a stricter caste framework to arise in certain times and places (the three she focuses on are the USA, India, and Nazi Germany, though she mentions South Africa as well) and not others? Or are there caste structures always at play in every society but to different degrees?

When the Emperor was Divine, by Julie Otsuka: I love a novella, and it seems like publishers are often reluctant to publish them (I’m defining a novella as between 100 and 200 pages, somewhat arbitrarily and of my own accord). The narrative is broken into sections with alternating narrators: the woman, the girl, the boy, the children, and finally the man. Unfortunately…the man’s section misses the mark pretty hard. Compared to the rest of the novella it feels trite, possibly in part because the man has been absent (physically) from the rest of the book, but mostly because it doesn’t really make sense.

Run Me to Earth, by Paul Yoon: This is, I believe, only the second novel I’ve ever read that’s set primarily in Laos (the first was Tom Robbins’s Villa Incognito). It’s set in The Plain of Jars near Phonsavan, which is a place I wanted to visit but which was on the other side of Laos from where I ended up traveling. The ending is more of a fade-away than a conclusion, but one that feels natural, like a day coming to an end.

The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi: A mystery composed of fragments that never feel disjoint. As with Emezi’s novel Freshwater, I read this nearly in one go.

Deacon King Kong, by James McBride: My aunt recommended this to me with the note “It’s hilarious” and by page six it was obvious that she was right. I was reading it in bed and commenced the kind of laughter in which your attempts to contain it make you vibrate and are probably more dangerous than just letting it out in the first place. The images, even in chapter one when there hasn’t even been time to fall in love with the characters yet, are so singular and delightful. Upon finishing: Yes, this is a jewel. Utmost recommendation. I immediately checked to see if it had been optioned for film and it looks like there’s potential for a TV series. One of the characters reminded me of no one so much as Wile E. Coyote ineptly attempting to sneak up on a target. Options are fast and making TV is slow but I hope I get to see this; I hold my breath for the casting.

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The Lightness, by Emily Temple: This isn’t a “closed room” mystery (or, necessarily, a mystery at all, though it is suspenseful) – it takes place on a mountain – but it has that feeling all the same. And I thoroughly loved spending time there. The narrator’s verbal tics cloyed a little (“and etc,” “what have you,” “as they say” and defining words/tracing lineage) – perhaps in part because I recognize them (the linguistic elements, at least, not so much that repeated phrases) in my own writing and so am more sensitive to whether they’re working or not. I think the use of “etc” undercut the narratorial voice, as if hedging its bets about whether what it was saying was worth saying, and that it would have been much stronger without it. But this is a quibble.

Mill Town, by Kerri Arsenault: This work of nonfiction opens in 2008, and it was easy for me to imagine the long, arduous process of gathering stories and compiling them as they were still taking shape – I was so impressed thinking about her decades-long process (which is very much part of the book). The “mill town” in question is Mexico, Maine, where Arsenault grew up and where a paper mill operated for many years. Some of the prose is straightforward and factual, but the book is pocketed with sections of incredible description – combinations of words I’ve truly never seen placed together before – that create a coherent mosaic of styles. The writing in these sections is utterly mesmerizing. I don’t think I ever describe writing as breathtaking, and I would gladly describe some of Arsenault’s words in this way. The book’s content is, of course, 90% depressing.

The Divines, by Ellie Eaton: Is this “dark academia”? I’m not up on literary trends or new categorizations, just as I’m not caught up on the latest neighborhood designations in NYC, but I’ve certainly been reading many novels that take place in high school/college settings…though maybe it was ever thus? (Evergreen?) **After finally Googling “dark academia literature” (I was thinking Secret History but hadn’t gotten much further than that), it’s mainly what I expected – one of the novels from my last post, Catherine House, shows up, as does Trust Exercise, the National Book Award winner that it seems everyone but me loved. Perhaps Oligarchy and The Divines belong to a separate boarding-school (all-girls, specifically) backdropped set of dramas (even The Illness Lesson, which I need to deliver back to the library by hand tomorrow, would figure in here, though set in a much earlier time).

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, by Clarissa Goenawan: The atmosphere in this narrative is impeccable, as is the structure (three parts, each from the perspective of a different main character affected by the death of the title character, who remains inscrutable until the end of the novel). The themes of invisibility, being known, and holding onto secrets are drawn out deftly, though I did feel that the story ended more abruptly than it could have. Perhaps I just wanted more.

Writers and Lovers, by Lily King: Before the first chapter had even concluded I’d stopped at least ten times to think, “Damn, I wish I had made that statement.” It’s not just that the writing itself is fantastic, but that these extremely acute observations are scattered so densely throughout the prose. Somehow, when I put this on hold at the library, I had forgotten that Lily King wrote Euphoria. I was thinking of Writers and Lovers as a debut (there is a reference to Sons and Lovers in the first half of the book – I haven’t read it but I’m conjecturing that the similarity in titles means there’s some homage or riff on the D.H. Lawrence in King’s book). My nitpick is that there are a lot of men’s names flung at you in the first few chapters and I couldn’t keep landlord from ex-boyfriend from brother from other ex-boyfriend straight, especially since most of them were not present in the novel’s current time. As it’s set in 1997 with a writer protagonist just three years younger than King herself would have been then…of course I wonder how much is autobiographical. In any case – truly great.

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Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas: I find myself very intrigued by how archetypal the narrator of this novel felt, how similar to the protagonists of other books I’ve read recently, and how difficult it is to spell out exactly why she feels that way. I find myself thinking “they’re all the sort of hot messy girl who is detached and doesn’t care” but then recognizing the ways in which half of them actually care deeply about something or everything and don’t fit that trope. There’s a certain feeling of detachment I get from all of them, a sense that nothing can faze them. I’m thinking of the narrator of Blue Ticket by Sophie McIntosh, but there are other echoes I can’t quite recall. Catherine House is a sort of cross-breed between cloistered, debaucherous academia (eg Secret History) and dystopian mind/body alteration through science. I didn’t love it overall, but I admired the writing, and the author was so adept at creating sadness that I might rank one element of the plot up there with the other saddest things I’ve ever read, like Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant,” a particular scene from Jesus’ Son, or Kathryn Harrison’s scenes about trying to help kittens open their eyes before they were ready. The ending, though…I’ve recently read a few books whose endings have been just perfect, and this one was unsatisfying.

I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, by Laura van den Berg: I loved Find Me and then inexplicably never read van den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel. Why! Must remedy. These are excellent stories. I feel a perpetual sense of sadness about short stories, though, because I feel lacking somehow (or lacking of something) when, long after or even immediately after finishing the collection, I don’t remember half of the stories – not what they were about, not individual lines, not plot points. I suppose there are a very few exceptions to this – the exceptions tend to correspond to extremely memorable plots or surprising lines, though, not necessarily to the short stories that have stunned me the most (for example: Deborah Eisenberg and Lorrie Moore are two of the greatest short story writers and I can only tell you that Eisenberg’s most recent collection had the best description of a puppet show that I’ve ever encountered and…actually, I can recall the general feeling and multiple lines from Moore’s “Like Life.”) Now I’m trying to recall each of the stories from some of the best collections I’ve read recently – Sabrina and Corina, Blacklight, Man v. Nature – and I do find that I can give a pitch of at least three stories from each. There’s still something gently disconcerting, though, about not being able to pull up each short story, examine it briefly, and put it back. I know that I’m leaving out half of the experience of a short story collection, ie the experience you have during the actual time you’re reading the stories. And I know that fuzzy or nonexistent memory of stories past could be perceived as a boon, because it means you can reread your favorites anew again! but it gives me the empty feeling of a winter Sunday. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (which is a brilliant title) is amazing with place; most of the stories triangulate around Florida, Boston, or Italy, though there’s one set in Mexico.

A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry (reread): And I loved it just as much the second time. There are many 600-page books that feel like a slog, and a good number that feel enjoyable but long, and then there are those that read too quickly and end too soon. The ending breaks me, but clearly I went back in to be broken again. Mistry is incredibly adept at using words I’ve never heard before without any sense of pretense or deliberate erudition, and his ratio of astounding images to straighter narration is perfect. I assigned A Fine Balance to one of my students and, though I try not to take responses to novels personally, I was elated when she loved it right from the prologue. The structure, the expansiveness balanced with detail…one of my oldest friends recommended this to me years ago and now I pass that recommendation on universally.

The Third Rainbow Girl, by Emma Copley Eisenberg: The author’s journalistic take on story of a double murder, single disappearance; also the story of the history of a part of Appalachian West Virginia; also the author’s personal narrative of living and working in that part of West Virginia; all compelling.

The Immortalists, by Chloe Benjamin: This was so good but I just finished it and don’t think I can describe it without crying/continuing to cry. Instead I’ll just say that Chloe Benjamin is, to my knowledge, one of the only residents of the Venn diagram center of “successful writer” and “people who follow all of the same gymnastics competitions/commentators/twitters that I do.” One final note – other than to reiterate how much I loved this book – how is “immortalist” not a recognized word?

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