February Reading Recap

Great books this month, and great variety!

→ THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AUGUST SWEENEY by Samuel Ashworth: August Sweeney was a celebrated chef, famed for his restaurants and TV shows, and after a life lived to excess, he's dead at 52. He stipulated that his body be fully autopsied so that everything possible could be learned from it or put to use, just as he'd use every part of a butchered animal in his kitchen. In alternating chapters, August's autopsy is performed and his life story plays out. The pathologist, Dr. Maya Zhu, is as skilled at and devoted to understanding bodies as August was to appreciating food. In the course of the autopsy, her work is interrupted by the intrusion of elements from her own life story.

Ashworth pulls off this unusual concept with great skill. To research the novel, he spent time in restaurant kitchens and an autopsy lab, and the story is packed with fascinating detail. Much of that detail is about the inner workings and dismantling of bodies, both animal and human, so this is absolutely not a book for everyone. But I appreciated how much I learned in the course of the story, and I appreciated how imagery from these fields is used to describe everything: "New York is like the human liver, brilliant at absorbing toxins, forever sloughing off the dead cells of failure and re-growing thriving new tissue in its place." There's a compelling energy to the writing, the characters, and the plot. I recommend this novel to everyone who can stomach it.

→ MỸ DOCUMENTS by Kevin Nguyen opens with the story of how Ursula's grandmother got her family out of Vietnam and to America after the fall of Saigon, and Ursula's discovery that there's a darker truth behind the story. Ursula, a budding journalist, is learning how to uncover and shape the truth into stories, though in her uninspiring first media job, her beat is beauty products. Ursula's brother is also starting his first real job as an intern at Google. Their younger half-sister (the siblings were all abandoned by the same father) is a first-year college student in New York City, where she expected to see Ursula more often. All these exciting futures are interrupted when coordinated terror attacks are committed by Vietnamese perpetrators. In response, the US government incarcerates Vietnamese-Americans into remote camps, cutting them off from contact with the outside world. Ursula and her brother, who have a white mother, escape internment. In the face of the country's apathetic acceptance of the situation, they try to figure out what they can do, as a journalist and a tech worker. Their half-sister and brother are shipped off to a camp somewhere in a desert, where surprisingly quickly, the prisoners adapt to the new normal, and their young lives continue through the usual milestones. In time, opportunities arise to fight back from within the confines of the camp.

Nguyen grounds this story deeply in the experiences of each sibling, to great effect. As the novel explores the details of the horrific premise, the recognizable absurdities of young people fumbling into adulthood makes it even more chillingly plausible. The characters are portrayed with wonderful specificity, and I cared about them, laughed with them, and was frequently infuriated by their flaws and choices. The narrative moves along quickly, switching between characters and building up the tension of how their actions will affect each other. This is an excellent, complex story about characters figuring themselves and their family members out in the middle of a terrible time.

→ WHERE PEACE IS LOST by Valerie Valdes: Kel has been living for years on an isolated planet, where she's avoided getting close to anyone because she doesn't want to reveal the facts of her past and the reasons the Prixori Anocracy empire might be after her. Then one of the empire's abandoned war machines is mysteriously activated and begins lumbering across the peaceful planet, threatening lives and ecosystems. Kel knows she might be the only one with the power to stop it, but two strangers land on the planet and claim they can handle the problem. Their motives are unclear, and as Kel is still deciding whether she can afford to get involved, a naively eager young neighbor volunteers them both to guide the offworlders to the machine. The four set off on the treacherous journey, harboring various secrets and suspicions.

It took me some time to get into this story, but then I became absorbed in the characters and their undertaking. I think I would have connected with Kel sooner if her often-alluded-to past had been explained earlier so I understood what was at stake. (Oddly, the book's marketing copy includes details that aren't revealed until halfway through.) The dynamics between the characters are depicted well and evolve believably over the course of the novel. The worldbuilding is strong, and while the events of this novel are confined to a single planet, Valdes has sketched out a whole galaxy with the potential for more stories. If adventures in this universe continue, I'll read on.

→ WRITERS & LOVERS by Lily King: Casey is a writer who's been working on her novel for six years. She writes in the mornings before her exhausting job waiting tables at a high-end restaurant. Losing herself in both endeavors lets her temporarily escape the grief of her mother's recent death. Casey makes an unexpected romantic connection with a guy who's also a writer. And then she falls into a relationship with a second one, adding even more uncertainty to her future.

As the title suggests, this novel is mostly about writing and love, but it also includes many interesting sections about restaurant work, a topic that lends itself better to concrete description than the other two. The story is set in 1997, so there are a lot of (sigh) period-accurate details, especially about how communication worked way back then, with Casey receiving calls from the men on the restaurant's phone line and mailing manuscripts at the post office. I enjoyed reading about all these things (especially the writing struggles!) and spending time with Casey and the other characters. I hoped the plot would have a bit more oomph, and I was surprised it all ended so tidily, in contrast to King's EUPHORIA, which I liked more.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel discusses plot as a story element and the principles of plot escalation: "Eschewing plot because you dislike formulaic stories is like renouncing character because you dislike stock figures and stereotypes. If a plot is too rigid and the hand of the author too overt, that's bad writing. It isn't the fault of plot per se. The idea that plot is in opposition to innovative, experimental, or strange fiction is perhaps even backwards. A strong plot can be a sturdy foundation that allows you to build weirder and wilder structures, akin to how avant-garde painters use traditional subjects (like still lifes or portraits) as springboards to new styles."

Releases I'm Ready For, Spring 2026

Another season of books approaches, with new novels from so many of my favorite authors!

→ LAKE EFFECT by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney (March 3): I loved the complicated family and marriage dynamics in Sweeney's first two novels, THE NEST and GOOD COMPANY. I'm expecting more excellent relationship drama in this new novel, which starts in 1977 with THE JOY OF SEX and an adulterous scandal that has long-ranging effects.

→ CHERRY BABY by Rainbow Rowell (April 14): Rowell is the author of so many books I've enjoyed, and I'm glad for another novel with adult characters. The premise involves a failing marriage and a successful webcomic that's getting a movie adaptation, and it's sure to be full of emotion and humor.

→ LAST NIGHT IN BROOKLYN by Xochitl Gonzalez (April 21): OLGA DIES DREAMING and ANITA DE MONTE LAUGHS LAST are both fascinating stories that unfold the complex pasts of their characters. In Gonzalez's next novel, set in 2007 (an alarmingly distant past!), a young woman gets a chance to enter the world of glamour and wealth in a changing Brooklyn on the brink of the financial crisis.

→ FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY by Francine Prose (May 5): I've read a few of Prose's many novels, and when I learned what this one is about, I knew I'd be picking it up. The story is an imagining of the real life episode when Hans Christian Andersen went to stay at Charles Dickens's home in what became a legendarily bad visit. That sounds like a ton of fun.

→ PLATFORM DECAY by Martha Wells (May 5): Yes, it's a new Murderbot Diary, the eighth in the series about a Security Unit who's great at its job but would rather be watching media than interacting with humans. I've been gradually revisiting the previous installments, inspired by the wonderful TV adaptation, so now I have a deadline for my reread.

→ RADIANT STAR by Ann Leckie (May 12): Thrillingly, May is also bringing a new book from my other favorite writer of space adventures! This is a standalone story in Leckie's Imperial Radch universe, featuring politics, religion, and characters from disparate backgrounds.

→ WHISTLER by Ann Patchett (June 2): I always admire Patchett's complicated character relationships, especially among family members in novels like COMMONWEALTH and THE DUTCH HOUSE. I'm excited to see what she'll do with this story of a woman who reconnects in middle age with the man who was her stepfather for only a brief part of her childhood.

→ FOUNDLING FATHERS by Meg Elison (June 23): Elison's previous novels include speculative fiction (a post-apocalyptic series starting with THE BOOK OF THE UNNAMED MIDWIFE) and intense stories set in the real world (FIND LAYLA and NUMBER ONE FAN). I like her work in any genre, and I can't wait to read this science fictional satire about an attempt to save America with clones of the founding fathers.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Baffler, Lydia Kiesling explores the practice of anticipated book lists and the changing internet: "By the time I came on as the editor [of The Millions] in 2016, the previews were creeping up toward a hundred titles. Max, who still owned the site when I was its editor, encouraged me to pare the list down and exert some curatorial influence, but I was constitutionally incapable. First of all, five minutes with the sausage-making of list culture was sufficient to understand how arbitrary the process really was. Secondly, as a new novelist myself, I felt the pain of being excluded. Moreover, the exclusivity denoted by curation was at odds with the revenue possibilities presented by more affiliate links..."

January Reading Recap

I started off the year with a good variety of surprising stories, mostly speculative fiction:

→ WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan opens in 2119 Britain as an academic travels between islands by boat on his way to a library set high on a mountain. Tom is visiting the library to continue his historical research into the life and work of poet Francis Blundy and his wife Vivien. Specifically, he's searching the hundred-year-old archives for information about a poem Francis wrote for Vivien's birthday dinner in 2014, a poem that was never shared publicly but nonetheless became legendary in the decades that followed. While the poem remains elusive, Tom is able to piece together so many details about the dinner and the attendees from an extensive collection of preserved journals, messages, social media, and so on. He's fascinated by these people from the past, and how different their lives and outlooks were in a time before much of Britain was underwater. But even though Tom feels he understands Vivien and Francis as well as or better than his own closest friend, there are limitations to his knowledge.

I was fascinated from the beginning by the unusual layers of narrative and the way they gradually unfold to reveal more of the story. This is a novel where it takes time to understand what's going on, why we're following these people, and what all the pieces have to do with each other, and I enjoy that experience when it's well done, as it is here. What emerges is an exploration of (among other things) love and betrayal, the value and shortcomings of historical perspective, and the impact of climate change. There is also a devastatingly raw story about caretaking a spouse in cognitive decline. I wouldn't give this book to everyone, but if it sounds like your sort of story, I recommend it.

→ LIGHTBREAKERS by Aja Gabel: Maya and Noah's marriage exists in the shadow of his grief. Noah was married before and had a daughter, who died at the age of three. Maya has never quite managed to reach across his sadness, and she carries the baggage of her own past, a once-promising painting career that stagnated. When Noah, a physicist, is offered a job at a secretive science lab in the art center of Marfa, Texas, it seems an ideal opportunity for them both. Maya hopes she'll find artistic inspiration, and that the change of scenery will allow the couple to refocus on each other and their future. But Noah's new project involves a way to travel back into memories, and his great hope is that he might see his daughter again. His fixation on this possibility brings his ex-wife back into his life, and at the same time, Maya reconnects with a great love from her own past.

I liked this more as a relationship story than as the time travel story it eventually becomes. Gabel writes with insight about the complicated relationship dynamics and how the characters love and hurt each other. I found the emotions realistic and affecting. The time travel contributes to the plot in some interesting ways, and the details are fairly well developed, but I expected it to produce a more radical impact on the characters' situation. Though the novel didn't deliver as much as I hoped for on the speculative front, it's a compelling and original story about shared history, memory, grief, and art.

→ THE COMPASS ROSE by Ursula K. Le Guin is a collection of wonderfully varied short stories. It opens with a brief and very Le Guinian story combining imaginative cultural details with surprising developments and humor: "The Author of the Acacia Seeds" presents "extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics," which turns out to be the study of animal language, including writing systems, dialects, and literature. Later stories range across formats, tones, and amount of speculative content, but strong detail of cultures and characters can be found in all of them.

A few stories stood out for especially well-developed emotional situations inside fascinating science fictional plots. "The Eye Altering" is a gorgeous and clever story about the difficulty of adapting to life on a new planet. "The Pathways of Desire" also sends Earthlings to another planet, this time a small team of ethnographers studying the local culture, and the story takes some intriguing and unexpected turns. I'm not sure I completely understood "The New Atlantis," but I was drawn in by the characters and the hope they carry despite their oppressive society. "The Diary of the Rose" features another authoritarian regime and a technology allowing doctors to see and analyze a patient's thoughts.

→ In THE ROAD TO TENDER HEARTS by Annie Hartnett, four people who have survived a variety of traumas take a road trip together. Along the way, more terrible things happen around them, some they experience and some they never even know about. The travelers are a ragtag family, thrown together by accidents of both birth and death: PJ, an aging alcoholic mourning the long-ago death of his daughter; Sophie, his other daughter, who grew up adrift and resentful of her father's neglect; and two children, Luna and Ollie, newly orphaned and left in PJ's questionable care. The four humans are joined by a cat with the ability to detect when someone is going to die, and also a softball cap that occasionally speaks to PJ. It's that sort of quirkily, darkly comic novel.

Quirky humor isn't going to connect with every reader, and in this case it was an imperfect match for me, but I ended up liking the novel pretty well despite that. I grew attached to the characters in all their foibles, and I was genuinely moved by how they (of course) came to care about each other during their journey. But I was often jarred by the story's quick tonal shifts between heartfelt moments, terrible things treated with absurdity, and other terrible things treated more seriously. I get what Hartnett was going for, but I just didn't find it as funny as I was meant to. Still, since I did enjoy the characters and their relationships, I'll be curious to check out her previous novels.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Eli Cugini writes at Defector about fanfiction’s impact on publishing: "Fanfiction's influence is no longer most discernible in specific, singular megahits. It has deeply shaped some of the highest-selling genres, particularly romance, young-adult, fantasy, and their hyperpalatable Frankenchild, romantasy."

2025 By The Books

In 2025, I read a lot of good books. And I just read a lot: 57 books total, nearly as many as in 2024, which was my highest count in a decade. I continue trying to squeeze as many books as possible into my life, while also trying to accept that so many more will have to go unread. My reading selections for the year shifted back toward new releases, with more than half of what I read published in 2025, and most of the rest from the previous few years.

I've kept up my practice of writing about my impressions to share via Goodreads and my monthly reading recaps, even though more books to review means more investment of time that could be spent reading. (Or, you know, writing my own novel.) For me, part of the joy of reading is the delight I get from reflecting on the books, getting analytical, and discussing stories with other people.

Reflecting on 2025, certain reading experiences stand out. I started the year with A HALF-BUILT GARDEN by Ruthanna Emrys (from my January recap), a story that's optimistic about people working together in difficult times. The novel is set in a future where humanity has made some progress against the damage of climate change, and the arrival of aliens creates new problems to solve. I love science fiction that succeeds at both building out ideas on an ambitious scale and focusing in on effectively drawn characters. I carried the inspiration and hope of this book through the rest of the year.

Another favorite, THE STRANGE CASE OF JANE O. by Karen Thompson Walker (March), illustrates a different type of speculative fiction I love, one where there's a slipperiness that resists categorization. In this novel, a psychiatrist presents his account of treating a patient with an unusual mind who is troubled by experiences she can't explain. I found a deep pleasure in the careful unfolding of the plot and the characters' investigation of the intriguing strangeness.

Many of the books I read in 2025 fall between and across multiple genres. I've become a big fan of well-detailed historical fiction that also breaks away from the bonds of reality, and the year's best example is THE BUFFALO HUNTER HUNTER by Stephen Graham Jones (also March). On the Montana frontier in 1912, a white pastor hears the confession of an Indian man who appears too young to relate firsthand the decades of his people's suffering that he's witnessed. The novel combines real and supernatural horrors in a viscerally gross but engrossing story.

As it happens, I read a second fascinating book with a unique, genre-bending approach to the shameful history of racial violence in America. THE TREES by Percival Everett (September) is a comedic mystery horror with an over-the-top, page-turning plot involving the victims and perpetrators of lynchings.

Several more of my top reads mix supernatural elements with the emotional stories of characters excavating family and personal histories. In LESSONS IN MAGIC AND DISASTER by Charlie Jane Anders (October), a witch tries to help her mother emerge from a long period of mourning by sharing the secrets of magic, a plan that goes badly when her unpredictable mother turns out to be scarily good at casting spells. CURSED DAUGHTERS by Oyinkan Braithwaite (November) is a twisty family drama about generations of women who live under a curse, and the daughter who everyone says is a reincarnation of her doomed aunt. In THE UNVEILING by Quan Barry (also November), a kayaking excursion sets out from an Antarctic cruise ship, and things go horrifically wrong, especially for the main character, who isn't always sure what's real in the best of circumstances.

Two more great books from 2025 play around with genre by using inventive formats and featuring characters who are fans and creators of fiction. METALLIC REALMS by Lincoln Michel (August) masquerades as a volume of annotated science fiction stories, with chapters of commentary that provide context and plot about the writers. The novel's protagonist is the compiler of this work, a fan who takes himself and his subject far too seriously. In A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton (July), three teens meet online in 1998 through a shared interest in playing and developing ASCII art fantasy games, as well as experimenting with identity and gender. By 2016, they've lost touch, but they're pulled back into each other's orbits in a story that develops with intriguing narrative shifts, including sections of IRC text chat and email.

I did also read and love some novels that remain firmly in the real world. The main character of FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane (August) is the real author Penelope Fitzgerald, and this novel imagines the events of an actual 1952 trip she took to Mexico with her young son in hopes that the journey would pay off financially. THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai (November), another work of historical fiction, concentrates on the AIDS crisis in Chicago, following characters from the gay community in the 1980s and from among the survivors decades later. And in the tightly-plotted WOODWORKING by Emily St. James (March), a high school teacher in South Dakota comes out as trans to the only other trans woman she knows, one of her teenage students, and an uneasy mentorship begins.

As always, my reading for the year was almost entirely fiction, but the few exceptions were all outstanding. ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS by Omar El Akkad and BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A RECKONING by Peter Beinart (both June) are two powerful books about not looking away from the death and devastation in Gaza. Both take a long view of history and have much to say about facing the reality of violence and oppression in the world.

The other work of nonfiction I read was THE LIONS OF WINTER: SURVIVAL AND SACRIFICE ON MOUNT WASHINGTON by Ty Gagne (September), the harrowing account of a 1982 search and rescue mission for lost climbers that led to the death of a rescuer. Finally, I ended the year with poetry, HOW TO COMMUNICATE by John Lee Clark (December), an excellent collection by a DeafBlind poet and historian with the theme of communication, including barriers and innovations.

I hope there's something in my list of favorites to catch your interest, and I hope we all find many more good books to read in 2026!

December Reading Recap

I closed out the year with a poetry collection in addition to the usual assortment of novels. In my next post, I'll take a look back at my reading year as a whole.

→ HOW TO COMMUNICATE by John Lee Clark: This excellent collection of poetry includes a range of styles and subjects, but the theme of communication remains prominent. Clark is a DeafBlind poet and historian who is active in the Protactile movement, so his perspective on communication includes many personal and historical barriers as well as innovations. He writes about these in ways that are often emotional and just as often quite funny. "On My Return from a Business Trip" and "Goldilocks in Denial" are both good examples of Clark's insightful humor.

I really liked this collection. I found the ideas more accessible than poetry on average, and I recognized and appreciated that occasional meanings were not fully accessible because I don't know Braille, Protactile, etc. I was glad to have some concepts from these introduced, and to receive an introduction to DeafBlind history. The book prompted me to do additional reading on assorted subjects, but that homework isn't required to enjoy these poems.

→ FLUX by Jinwoo Chong is a disorienting book to dive into without knowing anything, as I did, but that's part of what made the experience fun for me, so I won't reveal too much. The novel opens with a first person narrator (unnamed for a while) addressing a fictional character who's loomed large in his mind since childhood, a detective from an old TV show. His love for the series has been recently complicated by disturbing revelations about the actor who portrayed the character, making him reexamine the show's other problematic aspects. These issues of celebrity and fandom are explored throughout FLUX, but the plot that eventually emerges is about something else entirely. The narrator's uninspiring but stable job at a magazine is yanked away when the company is acquired, and his day only gets worse from there. Then a second narrative thread adds a science fictional layer to the story and increases the mystery of what's going on.

I was fascinated by all the storylines of this novel and enjoyed trying to understand how everything fit together. Many pieces click in satisfying ways by the end, but much is also left unexplained. While I would have preferred a little more clarity, particularly on a couple of events that seemed to be leading to reveals that never came, I was generally okay just soaking in Chong's engrossing story world. A major current of grief runs through the novel, leading to some emotionally affecting scenes. I recommend this to readers who are up for these challenges and interested in unusual science fiction, especially stories that play with time.

→ CHANGING PLANES by Ursula K. Le Guin is a set of travelogues about imagined worlds that lets Le Guin focus on the anthropological details she's so good at. The book is organized around the premise that while stuck in the misery of an Earth-bound airport, it's possible for travelers to pass the time by changing planes of existence and visiting other realities. Each chapter focuses on a particular plane (a planet, basically) and the cultures of its generally humanoid inhabitants. Usually one or a few characters emerge, along with a bit of plot, but these are less stories than well-presented bits of worldbuilding.

I'm a big fan of Le Guin's invented cultures, and I enjoyed this collection and its mix of tones. Most of the chapters contain some humor, and many tackle dark subjects, often together. For example, "Great Joy" concerns a plane developed with resorts themed around holidays popular among American Earthlings, then considers the native population pressed into service of this enterprise. Some sections are sort of thought experiments about how a type of society might function, like in "The Silence of the Asonu," where people possess a spoken language but rarely utter it past childhood. My favorite was "Seasons of the Ansarac," which describes a culture with a distinctive migratory life cycle and brings it to life in evocative detail.

→ MIDDLE SPOON by Alejandro Varela unfolds as a series of emails the main character is writing but not sending to his ex-boyfriend, Ben, in an attempt to process the heartache of their breakup. The two men were involved for about a year, and they were deeply in love. But Ben ended things because the narrator is also in a loving but open marriage with his husband of 20 years, and Ben reached the difficult decision that being part of a polyamorous relationship couldn't work for him. So the heartbroken narrator writes email after unsent email about his grief and his inability to move past it, thinking back on the relationship and describing how he's getting through his days. He shares his heartbreak with his very patient husband and his increasingly less patient friends, as well as his two therapists (who he keeps secret from each other!). Occasionally he switches things up to complain instead about systemic failures of entities like the United States health care system, making points that are valid while still kind of trying everyone's patience. And that's about all that happens.

I expected something different when I started this book, imagining from the title and marketing that it would focus on a poly relationship occurring, rather than not occurring. Then I expected something else different as I read and imagined several shifts that might transpire, rather than nothing much really changing within the span of the story. I often didn't have a clear sense of when I was meant to be sympathetic to the narrator and when I was meant to find him ridiculous, which frustrated me. There's some interesting material over the course this novel, but I was mostly disappointed to not get any of the other versions of the story that I imagined.

→ THE PARIS EXPRESS by Emma Donoghue: A train leaves Granville on the coast of France one morning in 1895, scheduled to reach Paris in the late afternoon. The novel introduces numerous characters: the four crew members and a wide variety of passengers traveling in the first, second, and third class carriages. Over the course of the seven-hour journey, the story checks in with each character periodically, exploring personal concerns and developing small dramas. Hanging over the story is the foreshadowing from the end of the first chapter, that this train is "heading straight for disaster."

I was drawn to this novel for the same reason Donoghue was drawn to fictionalize the real-life incident it depicts: Photographs of the aftermath are striking and invite questions about what happened. But what happened turns out to be fairly simple, and only the final few minutes of the journey are truly relevant. So to weave in more tension, Donoghue invents a different potential threat, a misdirection I wasn't wild about. The bigger problem, though, is that there's not much life to most of the scenes. The characters, including notable figures who were in France at the time but not actually all on the train together, tend to deliver exposition about their biographies or discuss social issues of the time in ways that don't feel natural. I wanted a more interesting version of the story, with more nuance.

Donoghue wrote the remarkable ROOM, and I was expecting the same high caliber of writing from this book. I may still try another of her historical works, since several reviewers say they're better than this one.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel considers Books as Art Projects: "Yesterday, I got two pieces of mail that were completely different approaches to making books as art objects. The first was the new issue of the McSweeney's magazine, which is designed as a 1980s Lisa Frank-style school binder complete with a spiral notebook, plastic geometric ruler, and more. The second was the first installment of Benjamin Percy's apocalyptic-novel-as-serialized-newspaper The End Times.... I was excited to receive both not just because I paid for the subscriptions, but because they are interesting physical objects in an age when much of my reading is done on a cellphone or laptop screen."

Oh-So-Clever Title

My annual year-end post usually opens with a bit of self-deprecating humor about how my annual year-end post usually opens. Maybe I try to place this moment of personal reflection in the appropriate context by acknowledging the insignificance of my writing life against the vast scale of horrors in the world, as well as my continued gratitude for all that cushions me from the bulk of these horrors. But I avoid bringing down the mood too much, because I'm writing this to provide a smidge of delight and human connection to my readers.

The introductory spiel tends to go on and on. There's always a link back to the previous year's annual year-end post. Usually that leads into commentary (increasingly self-deprecating, decreasingly humorous) about the similarity of these annual year-end posts and the circumstances they describe. This part also calls back to the recurring bit about previously made statements that now appear ironic and/or hubristic.

Eventually it's necessary to address the ostensible topic of the post by summarizing the year's writing accomplishments. Links to writing updates from throughout the year allow both me and my readers to recollect that in fact words were written and progress was made. The progress must be referred to as "slow" in a resigned but cheerful manner. Any intentions that were stated but not followed through on also get a positive spin, for instance by renewing those intentions for January.

At this point in the post, I occasionally offer some philosophical musings about writing lessons learned, or re-learned, in the course of the year. But more often, having already produced enough paragraphs for a minimum viable post, I move on to the closing.

The closing includes at least two of the following words: wish, hope, bright, joy, forward, better, future. The sentiment is always a bit sappy, but it's genuine.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At The Walrus, Tajja Isen reports on the publishing industry's gambling problem: "Sales track—or simply track, in industry parlance—is an invisible force shaping contemporary literature. Much depends on that number. On the basis of track, published authors struggle to keep going; those just starting out fear their careers will be severed at the root. Track shapes how an agent pitches a book and how editors assess whether to buy it. Track restricts reader choice by dictating which books are served up as the next big thing (and the next, and the next) and by kneecapping writers deemed insufficiently commercial. The primacy of track, in other words, is a barometer for the health of literary culture. Right now, when the industry is especially skittish, the obsession with finding the next blockbuster hit privileges the survival of the few at the expense of the many."

November Reading Recap

I read some excellent novels last month, but am only realizing now that they all contain a good deal of tragedy.

→ CURSED DAUGHTERS by Oyinkan Braithwaite: Monife commits suicide by walking into the ocean at night on a Lagos beach. Her heart is broken by the events that have torn apart her young life (and that will be gradually revealed in the course of the novel). On the day of the funeral, her cousin Ebun goes into labor and gives birth to a girl who the rest of the family believes to be a reincarnation of Monife. Ebun doesn't want to hear any of that talk as Eniiyi grows up, and she also doesn't want to keep hearing about the family curse Monife was obsessed with. The story goes that because of a curse laid on an ancestor, women in the family can never keep the men in their lives, and this has proven true for generations. Interwoven narratives follow Monife to her tragic end, Ebun in the time afterwards, and Eniiyi as a young woman discovering that the idea she's a reincarnation may be more literal than she thought.

I love a story about family secrets when done well, and this one really delivered. As each section revealed new pieces, thickening the plot, I kept making different predictions about what was going on, and I was pleased to be sometimes right and sometimes wrong. I wasn't sure if the supernatural elements would work for me, but I ended up enjoying what they brought to the story. Braithwaite has created a great set of characters and given them a juicy (though often sad) plot to live out. I recommend this to fellow fans of family drama.

→ THE GREAT BELIEVERS by Rebecca Makkai: In 1985, Yale attends another memorial service for another young man dead from AIDS. The disease has been devastating his Chicago gay community, but Nico is the first close friend he's lost. Yale anticipates witnessing many more losses while he and his partner remain negative, thanks to falling in love years ago and making the unconventional choice to remain monogamous. Also experiencing the tragedy with a cushion of safety is Nico's younger sister, Fiona, who is estranged from her parents but has found a new family among her brother's friends, her "two hundred big brothers." In 2015, Fiona is middle-aged and traveling to Paris in search of her daughter, now estranged in turn. And back in 1985, Yale's story also becomes a search as his job at an art museum leads to investigating a mysterious set of artworks. In both timelines, the characters pursue their quests while the AIDS crisis looms large in Yale's present and Fiona's past.

The pieces of this novel fit together far better, and involve more nuance and complexity, than my brief description conveys. This type of dual timeline sometimes falls flat, but in this case, I found Fiona's chapters to be as compelling as Yale's and to add worthwhile layers to the story. An additional historical timeline figures into both threads, and all three are braided together in satisfying ways. Makkai is great at plot, building up suspense and mystery to create a page-turner while keeping the story believable and genuinely emotional. The novel clearly required extensive research, and the edition I read includes an oral history Makkai assembled from some of that research, recounting a 1990 Chicago protest for better AIDS healthcare.

→ THE UNVEILING by Quan Barry opens as a group of kayakers prepare to leave their Antarctic cruise ship for what's intended to be an hour's excursion paddling around the breathtaking scenery of the Southern Ocean. Striker is among the group because she's a location scout for a Shackleton biopic, so she's the only person not wealthy enough to afford the trip, and also the only Black person on the cruise. Before the kayakers even pull away from the ship, an albatross careens into a passenger on deck in a grisly scene that Striker immediately identifies as a bad omen. Sure enough, the expedition is soon thrown into disarray by bewildering tragedy, and that's only the start of the horrors. Striker reluctantly takes charge of the survivors while trying not to let on that she's increasingly unsure what's really happening and what's only taking place inside her troubled mind.

This novel is extremely tense and creepy, although Striker's sardonic narration does provide frequent moments of humor and incisive social commentary. Striker's narration also adds a disorienting layer to what is already a disturbing situation, ratcheting up the tension and creepiness. This is not a book where everything is explained by the end, but the story does unfold in a deliberate and satisfying way. I found it an effective work of horror that balances and blends external threats with psychological terrors. I continue to admire Barry's ability to write impressively complex novels that are completely different from each other in subject, tone, and genre. I imagine this one won't appeal to all fans of her previous work, but I do recommend horror readers check it out.

→ A GUARDIAN AND A THIEF by Megha Majumdar: In a not-too-distant future, the inhabitants of Kolkata are suffering amid severe food shortages and crushing heat. Ma, her toddler daughter, and her elderly father are better off than most. They have a house, a small supply of food stashed away, and most importantly, visas for immigrating to the United States on a flight that departs in a week. Ma is committed to doing anything necessary to keep her family safe, and so she's stolen most of their food supply from donations to the shelter where she works. Boomba, a young man staying at the shelter, observes her theft and follows her home to steal the food back and provide for his own family. He also takes Ma's purse with the travel documents, and not recognizing their value, he throws them away. In the days remaining before the flight, the lives of Ma and Boomba become further entwined, with terrible consequences.

This is a gripping story, effective at creating anxiety and tension. It is also unrelentingly bleak, all the way through to the ending. I'm surprised that hasn't tempered the largely effusive praise, because it makes me hesitant to recommend the novel, though it's well written. I appreciated Majumdar's narrative choices and descriptive passages. I was caught up in the situation and how it sets the characters at odds, but I was unprepared to be left with so little hope.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, two authors with new releases discuss their research and worldbuilding processes. First, Aja Gabel details the lessons she learned writing Lightbreakers: "I had to reckon with science in a way I resisted for many, many drafts. I thought I could gesture towards a time travel mechanism without getting too specific. While I do think that most readers don't need or want scientific precision in their literary speculative fiction, I failed to see that I was the one who had to be precise in my understanding if I was to give readers only what they needed to know. I didn't want my readers to drown in the details, but unfortunately, I had to. I had to build a believable machine, and I had to know exactly how it worked, even if readers only saw the tip of the iceberg."

→ Emma Donoghue explains her approach to historical fiction and the research for her latest novel, The Paris Express: "But as soon as I plunged into background reading about the kinds of painters, scientists, writers, inventors, artisans, aristocrats, students, radicals and queers who were living in Northern France in the 1890s, I realized that this was a dazzling pool of potential characters. Belle Epoque Paris, the heart of a wide French empire, was also a hub of modernity that magnetically drew a wider range of people than any place I'd written about before. Paris had expats from Philadelphia and Cuba, students from Ireland and Cambodia... I ended up only needing to invent two named characters. (One of them, a coffee-seller staggering about all day with a hot tank strapped to his back, like a human Starbucks, was suggested by a painting I spotted in a museum of the history of Paris.) The remaining fifteen are all real people who could plausibly have caught the train that day—and there's nothing to say that they didn't."

October Reading Recap

Once again, it's time for my monthly batch of book reviews:

→ LESSONS IN MAGIC AND DISASTER by Charlie Jane Anders: Jamie's relationship with her mother Serena has been strained ever since her other mother died. It's been more than six years, and Serena still hasn't recovered from the loss of her wife, and that grief keeps her isolated, living as a near hermit. Jamie thinks it might help Serena, and bring the two of them closer, if she shares a secret: Jamie is a witch. She's never spoken about this to anyone, even her own partner, but as a child, Jamie discovered that there's magic in the neglected, overgrown places where human structures and nature coexist. Throughout her life, Jamie has harnessed this magic to attain her modest desires for happiness, love, and success in her academic career. Magic has always made things better for Jamie, but the first time Serena tries on her own, the spell goes scarily wrong. Now Jamie isn't sure what to do about the fact that she's let her unpredictable mother in on knowledge that's far more powerful than she realized.

I was immediately invested in the emotional story of Jamie and Serena, and their uncertain attempts to heal their relationship and each other. I love how magic works in this novel, both the mechanism of finding neglected places and the subtle way that many of the spells take effect. An additional fascinating plot thread focuses on Jamie's academic research in eighteenth century literature. Anders has crafted a literary mystery involving real historical figures and a fictional book of unknown authorship, and Jamie's investigations lead to accounts of some fun historical scandals. The two parts of the story don't always sit together easily, but at the end, they connect up in a satisfying way. This is a beautiful novel full of big emotions and unexpected pieces, just like its characters.

→ THE WILDERNESS by Angela Flournoy opens with Desiree traveling from Los Angeles to Paris with her grandfather. She's been looking after him as his health declines, and now he has decided they should take this final trip before he undertakes assisted suicide in Switzerland. Desiree knows she needs to tell her sister what's happening, but she fears that revealing the plan only when it's too late to stop it will end their relationship—and she's right. Years later, Desiree is estranged from her sister, but she has three close friends, "almost enough to fill the hole a sister could leave." The three other women each take focus for parts of the story as it jumps forward and back in time, exploring the ways their lives and friendships evolve over more than 20 years.

This is one of those novels where I liked all the individual scenes but found the whole a bit lacking. Flournoy has crafted a great set of characters who I was glad to get to know over time, and sometimes wished to know better than the constraints of the story permitted. The friends are all Black women of the same age, but they don't have much else in common, making for interesting conflicts and changes in how close the different pairs are as the years pass. Each chapter places one or more of the characters in a situation that's emotional and realistically portrayed, if often fairly isolated from the surrounding events. With the way the book shifts between times, characters, and styles, leaving many pieces out, it might be better approached as a set of linked stories.

→ THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston: Janie returns to her Florida home after more than a year away, and the neighbors are abuzz with gossip. She left with a younger man, and because she's returned alone, they speculate that he ran off with someone else and stole all the money she inherited from her late husband. But Janie tells her best friend that isn't what happened to Tea Cake, and she'll relate the whole story, beginning back in her childhood. Janie was raised by her grandmother, who was born in slavery and tried to set Janie up well by marrying her off to a successful farmer. It wasn't the life Janie wanted, and her longing for love and for change led her into a second marriage. Eventually the story reaches Janie meeting Tea Cake, the love they share, and the adventures they have together before events bring her back home.

I first read this 1937 classic for a high school class—or at least I think I did, but I'd forgotten everything about it. I was inspired to pick it up now because of two recent podcasts: Our Ancestors Were Messy recounted the friendship and falling out between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, and Zero to Well-Read discussed Hurston's novel and its position in the history of Black literature.

This was fascinating to read as an artifact of its time, even though my engagement in the story fluctuated. Some sections dragged for me, but I was completely captivated toward the end, when the last few chapters become nonstop tension. I love the way Hurston writes, switching between two distinct modes: poetic descriptions that paint a scene or convey an idea, and dialogue in dialect that captures the sounds of the characters' spoken language. I was glad for an opportunity to return to this novel and learn more about its context.

→ AUDITION by Katie Kitamura begins with a middle-aged actress (our unnamed narrator) meeting a young man for lunch. This is their second meeting, and Xavier wants something from her, but what he wants, and what happened on the first occasion, remains unspoken. There is tension to their interaction, and in the narrator's realization that people around them are making incorrect assumptions about the nature of their relationship, when the truth is something else entirely. As the chapters unfold, who Xavier is becomes clear, though the situation is strange. And then in the second half of the novel, there's a major shift, and everything is less clear, and far stranger.

All the talk around this novel concerns the mystery of the shift at the midpoint, and my curiosity drew me to the book, and quickly through the first half (it's quite short). I definitely didn't predict how the story would change, and that surprise delighted me and set my hopes high for how the two halves would connect. I continued speeding through, forming theories around various fascinating moments, but also starting to wonder whether the disparate pieces could all lead to a single conclusion, especially after the narrative grows particularly strange toward the end. As it turns out, Kitamura didn't intend for the story to have a definitive solution or interpretation, and that approach left me underwhelmed. Reactions to this book have been highly polarized, and my feelings fall somewhere in the middle. It's a well-written and compulsive read, and I like the concept, but I wanted something different from it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Mo Willems breaks down the mechanics of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! for Dan Kois at Slate: "When someone reads a book, they try to spend the same amount of time on each page no matter what. When an adult reads to a kid, each page, you're going to spend the same amount on the page. So when you have eight images on a spread like this, you're going to read that four times as fast as single images."

Fall's Back

The calendar has come back around to fall, with its various seasonal trappings. The parade of holidays is underway, the days are shortening, the weather is changing. Here in northern California, the past month has brought a shift to less chance of sudden heat waves and more of sudden rain.

November has several traditional associations, including US elections, so I'll remind you to vote if there's an election happening where you live. I'll also remind you that any writers you know might become especially weird next month, due to November's connection with extreme writing.

If you're reading my blog, you're probably aware of National Novel Writing Month, an annual event that encourages writing a 50,000-word novel during the 30 days of November, for the joy, challenge, and community of it. You may not have heard that the nonprofit organization which provided the infrastructure for NaNoWriMo shut down earlier this year. Despite this unfortunate development, the spirit of NaNo survives. Plenty of writers will still push themselves to meet big goals in November, either solo or as part of a group, whether or not they're specifically counting to 50k. (One place to find resources and an encouraging newsletter is NaNo 2.0, a more modest endeavor launched by NaNo founder Chris Baty and other longtime volunteers.)

The spirit of NaNo always calls to me in the fall, and while I'm not setting myself any word count goals, I will be using November as motivation for increased writing progress. In my last update, two months ago, I shared photographic evidence of the planning I was doing to sort out structural changes and make decisions before moving ahead. The planning stage dragged on for longer than I intended, and I'm ready to get back into serious writing mode.

September Reading Recap

Another great month of reading, with some intense stories of different kinds:

→ THE LIONS OF WINTER: SURVIVAL AND SACRIFICE ON MOUNT WASHINGTON by Ty Gagne chronicles the true story of a 1982 search and rescue mission for lost climbers that resulted in a tragedy. Gagne begins by introducing Albert Dow III, a dedicated volunteer with New Hampshire's Mountain Rescue Service, and establishing that he will be killed in an avalanche while searching for two lost climbers. Then we meet the young but experienced climbers, Hugh Herr and Jeff Batzer, and follow them on their ice climbing expedition as Mount Washington's famously severe weather worsens and they lose their way. Over the course of their harrowing ordeal, it begins to seem increasingly impossible that Herr and Batzer will survive, except that we know Gagne interviewed them in the present. While their predicament grows more dire, a search is organized, and we also get hour-by-hour accounts of the teams of heroic rescuers who brave the extreme conditions. Among them is Dow, who we follow into the avalanche that claimed his life.

Gagne creates so much suspense in this story despite the known outcome, because the tension isn't over what will happen but how it will play out, and how it might have gone differently with other choices or circumstances. The account is full of careful detail about winter mountaineering, search and rescue, and other fields, and it's also full of emotion and compassion for everyone involved in the story. I read one of Gagne's earlier books, WHERE YOU'LL FIND ME, and found it gripping but sometimes overly technical. I think the pace and stakes of this book would appeal to a wider audience who enjoy reading about true life adventures and disasters.

→ THE TREES by Percival Everett: In the town of Money, Mississippi, during a family gathering in 2018, an elderly white woman remarks that she wishes she never told that lie about the Black boy all those years ago. (Only, she doesn't say "Black".) Soon, one of the men in her family is gruesomely murdered, and his body is found alongside another brutalized corpse belonging to an unknown Black man. Local law enforcement is puzzled, even more so when the Black body disappears from the morgue. The situation really starts getting out of control when a second relative is killed in a similar fashion, and the same dead Black man is found at the scene. (By the way, this novel is written as a comedy.) Two agents from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation are called in, both Black men who find the largely white population of Money resistant to their presence. As they push through racism to conduct their investigation, they discover that the murders are connected to the history of lynching, in Money and throughout the United States. (Again, this is a comic novel.)

I am impressed by the way Everett has crafted a madcap comedy with a rollicking, page-turning plot that revolves around the deadly serious topic of racial violence. From that unexpected combination comes further surprises, and every time I started to figure out where the story was going, it veered off in a new direction. The book is over-the-top in many ways, but it goes light on the history lessons, which works for the story, but motivated me to do some outside research into referenced events. I recommend this, and I bet you haven't read anything else like it.

→ KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang: Alice is a graduate student in Analytic Magick at Cambridge, and her advisor recently died in an experiment gone gruesomely wrong. With her professor dead, Alice has little hope of completing her dissertation and finding a good job in academia. She also feels responsible for his death, since she's the one who drew the pentagram. (He always made his grad students handle those tiresome details.) So Alice sets out on a rescue mission to Hell, armed with all the arcane knowledge she could uncover and a new box of chalk. But at the last moment, her co-advisee and former friend Peter insists on joining her, since he has just as much at stake. Together, they will have to face the unknown challenges of the Eight Courts of Hell in hopes they can return with their professor's soul, and their own lives.

This is a big novel with a lot of ideas, and while I liked all the pieces, I didn't find them as well put together as in Kuang's earlier (and even more ambitious) BABEL. I most appreciated the imaginative depictions of the different areas of Hell, the allies and foes that Alice and Peter encounter, and especially the wonderful magic system based around logical paradoxes. The portrait of academia is also very effective, both when it receives satirical treatment and when the toxic elements are seriously critiqued. Alice and Peter are compelling characters, but there's unevenness to how they're developed over the course of the story. In general, my major complaints are about pacing, and I wished the novel had been edited into a tighter story. I do still recommend this to interested readers who are willing to push through some slow sections and forgive some flaws.

→ THE BEGINNING OF SPRING by Penelope Fitzgerald: In 1913, Frank's wife leaves him, taking their three children on the long train journey from Moscow back to her original home in England. The next morning, the children return, since Nellie changed her mind about bringing them with her. Frank's life is naturally thrown into disarray by all these events, and he's faced with the problem of how to ensure his children are looked after while he attends to his work running a printing business. Some early attempts at finding caretakers go comically wrong. At the same time, Frank is dealing with various problems connected to his company, including the concern that the Russian government might stop tolerating businesses run by foreigners.

I was inspired to pick this up after reading FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane, a novel which features author Penelope Fitzgerald as the main character. I wasn't sure what to expect from Fitzgerald's own work, but I wasn't surprised to find that it focuses closely on Frank's observations and interactions with the people around him. I enjoyed Frank's view of the world and the way he often takes amusement from the events of the story. I also enjoyed how Fitzgerald portrays the details of the place and time, including the operations of the printing company. Even as I continued through the book, I never really knew what to expect next, and that made for a fun ride.