Habito qui adesso.

I’m teaching this year at NYU Florence; I’ve been here for not quite two weeks and am stunned by both the beauty and the heat (which I say as someone who lived in Abu Dhabi for eleven years, so if I say it’s hot, it’s muthaeffing hot). And the tourists, my gawd, the tourists. I thought tourists were bad in NYC, where they stretch out across the sidewalks, moving erratically and carrying too many bundles, but here? The tourists move in packs, in herds, in moistly sweaty bunches. They need to be whipped into shape by Madeline’s Miss Clavel:

Tourists and heat aside, the city is — well, it’s Florence. So a person cannot complain; a person will not complain. A person will do her damnedest to make her aging brain learn Italian, at least so that a person can order in a restaurant without sounding like a total dufus.

But anyway. Books! Libri! There’s been some good reading this month, although I’ve slowed down a bit when I got to Firenze: trying to learn to go to dinner like an Italian, which cuts down on my night-time reading. I’m from the Midwest: I like dinner at 7ish, when the Florentines are maybe juuuuust starting to think about aperitivi.

As usual, all the books listed here are linked to my shop at Bookshop. But you can get most of these at your fave library or indie bookstore! Grazie mille for subscribing and sharing this newsletter with friends!

The Night Women: Marlon James. James’s first novel, set on a Jamaican slave plantation in the 18th century, focuses on an enslaved woman named Lilith, whose powers involve her in the plans of other enslaved women who are planning a revolt. The story is sometimes hard to read, but the prose is stunning. Absolutely worth your time.

Whistler, Ann Patchett. I loved this book so much. It’s quiet and observant and utterly brilliant about being in a long-term marriage, about being in a family, about aging—and about being alive at this moment in the world. Yes, there’s a horse on the cover, and no, none of the people in the novel are “horse people.” But still: that horse. I found myself tagging pages as I read, marking sentences for their insights.

The Classic for this month is actually three books, for which you can blame Christopher Nolan: everyone and their mamma seemed to have an opinion about “The Odyssey,” which is great! Let’s talk about culture, ideas, images, art! And whether you loved the Nolan movie or hated it, you owe it to yourself to read Pat Barker’s three books that retell The Illiad: The Silence of the Girls, The Women of Troy, and The Voyage Home. Primarily through the eyes of Briseis, former slave of Achilles, we see the “glory of war” from the viewpoint of prisoners, slaves, and the so-called spoils of war. Each is brilliant; each could be read alone, but taken as a trio, they’re amazing.

And because thinking about the women of Troy made me cross, I started thinking about the first-ever queen I ever admired: Eleanor of Aquitaine, inspired by EL Konisburg’s A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver. It’s the story of Eleanor’s life, as told from heaven by Eleanor and three other people—whose opinions of her aren’t always flattering, despite their heavenly situation. History, strong women, politics, humor, and great illustrations. What more do you want in a middle-grade chapter book?

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A new bookstore! If you’re in NYC, there’s a new indie bookshop to celebrate: Rabbit Books and Bar, because we all know that food and books and conversation go together. If you’re in the East Village, stop by!

Reading is resistance, baby: Matt Seybold on reading as resistance (it’s a long read, but it’s worth it. Tressie McMillan Cottom has been saying the same thing: reading matters. Audiobooks, e-books, print books, it doesn’t matter. Reading is like cross-fit for your brain.

Look at it this way: at least now you don’t have to read in Latin:

A presto, amici…

So hey, if you’re reading this newsletter, if you’ve got a library card, if you buy books, congrats. Read to your kids, read to other people’s kids, read to the elderly whose eyes might not be up to print, listen to books in your car or wherever else, give books as gifts. Reading is resistance in this post-literate society. Hashtag, read don’t scroll.

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Taiwan Travelogue, Yáng Shuāng-zǐ’ (translated by Lin King): A deeply impressive feat of meta-textual colonial critique, staged as a 1938 novel by a Japanese writer visiting Taiwan and slowly falling in love with her Taiwanese interpreter. First published in Mandarin by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, the novel starts with a foreword that makes it seem as if the novel first published in Japan in the fifties, then in Mandarin, and now by Yang. The story of the two women, which centers around language and food, raises questions about the subtle, often unconscious ways a colonizer (Taiwan was a Japanese colony in 1938) sees the colony: is it wrong of the writer to give her interpreter lavish gifts? Should she claim that her interpreter is her dear friend? And how, then, does translation become the weapon of the colonized, who knows exactly how language (and culture work)? I’m not sure I felt the emotions of this novel, but its technical achievements were stunning—and for anyone who lives in multiple languages, it’s a must-read.

A Violent Masterpiece, Jordan Harper: This neo-noirish thriller follows several different characters through the dark underbelly of LA’s glitz and glamor. When a sleazy lawyer takes as his client a known Hollywood pedophile who dies in custody—an apparent suicide—his path eventually intersects with a former journalist who now makes his living live-streaming violent crime scenes, and with a woman who works for a private concierege company that arranges “parties” for high-end clients—men who believe that everything, and everyone, has a price. A great fast-paced read that twists and turns like the roads that climb through the Hollywood hills and shines a mirror on the ugliest aspects of our contemporary culture.

The Fire Agent, David Baerwald: Historical fiction based on the life of the author’s grandfather, which moves from Germany before World War I to Tokyo’s “Jazz Age” (who knew Tokyo even had a jazz age? not me) to World War II and beyond. Ernst Baerwald, a German Jew, is recruited as a spy in 1900 and his cover story is working as an agricultural consultant for IG Farben. Ernst goes to Tokyo, falls in love with two different women (who love each other), becomes part of an extraordinary Japanese salon, and watches the rise of facism in Germany and Japan, which eventually forces him with incredibly difficult choices. The prose isn’t always fabulous, but the story is a stunner.

CLASSIC

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood: Speculative fiction in which bio-engineering companies manufacture animals, food, weight-loss drugs, and diseases that effectively do a hard reset on society. Snowman, who used to be known as Jimmy, narrates this tale that chronicles how he came to be—he thinks—the last human on Earth. Funny, frightening, enraging, occasionally heart-breaking, this novel—first published in 2004—is the first in the Maddam trilogy. What seemed far-fetched in 2004 now reads like the top headlines in your news feed.

FOR KIDS

Homer Price, Robert McCloskey: Set in small-town Centerburg, these goofy, funny stories about Homer are a great read-aloud: how many donuts can he eat, what happens when you try to make a skunk a pet—and can that skunk help foil four gangsters? These tales have been making kids laugh for decades.

EXTRA! EXTRA!

Not one but two friends have new books coming out soon and they’d love for you to pre-order!

Appetite, P. Paramita: an up-and-coming Bangladeshi chef wants to open her own restaurant in New Haven but her friendship with a famous white wrestler that derails her plans.

The Squatters, Saba Brelvi: An affluent second-generation woman doing volunteer work helps a refugee family…with unexpected and wrenching consequences.

As always, thanks for reading—not just this newsletter but just reading! Books never run out of batteries, always fit, never go out of fashion (well, sort of), and in a pinch make great door-steps and open-window-proppers.

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In New York, all anyone can talk about is the championship run of the Knicks; there is a sense of fizzy good will that probably won’t last but is currently delightful. Knicks in four? We live in hope, I guess.

And while we’re waiting for that to happen—and for the sky to shake with the city’s cheers, if it does—here are some books to read, at the beach, in the park, inside on the couch with the AC going full blast. As always, most of these books are available at your local fabulous public library or your local fabulous indie bookstore OR my page at Bookshop.org. So many ways to support your favorite authors!

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NOVELS

Last month, I wrote about David McCluskey’s book The Persian, and now I’ve read all the others. If you like spies and skullduggery, interesting characters, and solid, inventive plots (in other words, if you miss Le Carré), McCluskey is your guy. Try Damascus Station, the first to introduce the unforgettable (and often unlikeable) Artemis Proctor. (After Damascus Station, there’s Moscow X, and The Seventh Floor.) A new book comes out from McCluskey in September, so start now and get ready.

Vigil, George Saunders. Angels, of a sort, are at the heart of this new novel—not your winged-harp-playing type, but a very human type, whose memories of their own lives complicate their ability to help others ease towards their death. The novel concerns the death of a billionaire—an oil tycoon—who refuses regret, refuses accountability, refuses, in fact, to relinquish the living world. The dying man insists—despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary—that the world is better for his “inventions” (which may remind some of us of a certain [in]famous daughter who wants to help an uninhabited island off the coast of Albania “realize its potential”). If you’re the angel in charge of this man’s death, what do you do? Short, funny. beautifully written—and like Lincoln in the Bardo, a book that makes us think about the lives we lead and what we will leave behind.

I spent a rainy Memorial Day in Woodstock, NY, where we took refuge from the rain in The Golden Notebook, a great indie bookshop on Main Street. (Note: have you read Lessing’s amazing novel? You should, if you haven’t, as well as The Fifth Child, which if you haven’t had kids, will make you re-think any plans you have for procreating.) And because I cannot leave a bookstore without buying something, I got FOX, the new novel from Joyce Carol Oates. This new one isn’t for the faint of heart, but it is nonetheless amazing: a thriller, on the one hand, and then also a critique—and an homage—to Nabokov’s Lolita. (There’s even a minor character named Quilty.) The novel is set in yet another of Oates’ hardscrabble towns, with a keen eye for how class and money operate in small towns, and an equally keen eye on the vulnerable, acerbic, souls of adolescent girls. Francis Fox is a beloved middle-school teacher, but when he turns up dead, secrets slowly begin to ooze out.

(NON)FICTION

THE PARIS EXPRESS, Emma Donoghue. Author of The Room, Donoghue turns her attention to the famous photograph from 1895, when the Paris Express train crashed into the train station at Montparnasse. Donoghue imagines the various passengers aboard the train and details the class system of the train cars. The novel—based in research—captures a moment in time that everyone thought was the peak of modernity, as the train hurtles across the French countryside . . .

CLASSIC

HILD, Nicola Griffith. Maybe this novel isn’t old enough to be a full-on classic, but it’s pretty amazing and deserves to be widely read. In 7th century Britain, tribes struggling for power, including Edwin of Northumbria, who is guided by his niece, a young woman with the prophetic abilities. This young woman will grow up to be St. Hilda of Whitbey, one of the most important figures in the Middle Ages. Griffith breathes life into an incredibly distant past and Hild became, for me, one of the characters I can’t forget.

KIDS’ BOOKS

JADE, Sally Watson. When I was a kid, Sally Watson’s books were among the few that featured girls having adventures—real adventures, with swords and spies and danger. Swashing and buckling across any number of historical periods—and eventually, somehow, many of these books resolved themselves into some kind of loose genealogy. The word “spunky” was probably used with some frequency, and with disapproval, because these heroines were always running afoul of the status quo. In Jade, Melanie Lenox is caught trying to free a shipload of slaves and as she is about to be publicly flogged, the ship she is on is captured by pirates—so Melanie, now Jade—joins the pirates (including Anne Bonney). In Mistress Malapert, a girl runs away from home in Elizabethean England, dresses as a boy to avoid discovery, then gets a job with—you guessed it—the Globe Theater. I’ve always wondered if the brilliant Tom Stoppard didn’t read this book, which maps pretty neatly onto Shakespeare in Love. The books are perhaps now too tidily resolved with romance plots, but even so, the emphasis is on female agency, not marriageability.

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What’s on your summer list, for the beach or otherwise? What’s your favorite indie bookshop? Do you think the Knicks are gonna take the championship? Leave a comment below!

But it’s the thought, right?

In honor of Mother’s Day, this month’s list includes some very unlikeable women, and one man, plus a children’s book that was written decades ago—but seems sadly, terribly, still applicable, given the recent events in Tennessee and Virginia.

As always, these books are available through Bookshop or your nearest public library or your favorite indie bookshop. Please try to avoid the giant river of books.

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NOVELS

Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke. Okay, I’m breaking my rule about reviewing only books that I liked, but this novel has gotten so much press (and a movie deal) — and it absolutely aggravated me. Don’t get me wrong, I loves me an unlikeable heroine, and I’ve got nothing against plot twists or surprise endings, but all those things have to be earned. The book is billed as a satire of the tradwife influencer (aka Ballerina Farm) and “darkly funny,” but there was no discernable humor that I could see, and no satire, either. It felt like a novel written on IG reels—bits, pieces, snippets, and a turn at the end that pulled everything together in a deus ex machina move that felt like cheating.

Everyone Is Lying To You, Jo Piazza. When I was ranting about Yesteryear, my friend Andromeda (herself the author of a novel about a mother who is guiltily imagining the worst about her son) mentioned this thriller, also about the tradwife influencer world. And this novel manages to be a satisfying thriller, while also being satiric and darkly funny: “henfluencers,” anyone? The book is full of unlikeable women who are making bank off the internet (and having their achievements dismissed as their “little projects”), and there’s a surprise ending that is absolutely organic to the plot. If you’re going to read one tradwife book, read this one.

The Persian, David McCloskey. I was raving about this spy book to a friend, who says that he thinks McCloskey is the closest thing we’ve got to LeCarré, and that seems just about right. This novel concerns two groups of spies, in Israel and Iran, and the people inhabiting those worlds—who may share more than they realize. Another novel with a satisfying twist at the end, and a plot that seems more and more plausible every day. I’m now binging all of McCloskey’s other books, which are equally complex; they manage to be both thoughtful and fast-paced: fun to read and yet not brain rot.

CLASSIC

Stoner, John Williams. When my college-age son said he was reading this book, I thought it was “Stoner” ala Matthew McConaghey. . . but I couldn’t have been more wrong. This novel is stunningly beautiful and sad and quiet, about a man whose life never quite becomes what he hopes—and so he stops hoping. The beauty of the book counterbalances the sorrow of the story, which hit me all the harder because the man is a college professor: a profession in which, if we are successful, we make ourselves unnecessary. It’s a book that reminded me a lot of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House; it’s a book about aging and loss, and about the incredible beauty of the world around us.

KIDS

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, Mildred Taylor. Set in 1930s Mississippi, and narrated by nine-year-old Cassie Logan, this novel offers brutal and brilliant insights about life in the Jim Crow South. Published in 1976, this novel won a Newberry Medal, among other awards, and should be considered essential reading—particularly now, as we watch the attempts to roll back the Voting Rights Act. This essential history is, of course, one of the reasons various school districts have tried to have the book banned.

NIFTY THINGS

On my TBR list is this book, coming out at the end of the month from Bloomsbury UK: Our Later Years: The Women of New Ground, which is about the efforts of a group of aging women to establish a women-only group living community.

If you need more book recommendations, the marvelous writer Summer Brennan puts out a regular review, for which I wrote about A Splintering, a novel set in contemporary Pakistan.

That’s it for this month. As always, thanks for reading, and please share with friends! If you have a favorite indie bookstore, let me know and I will feature them in an upcoming newsletter!

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But I digress. We are past the age of costumes, although a good book can still sweep us away into lives other than our own. It’s the whole point of reading and—sadly—so many of my students read so little that they don’t have that muscle: they can’t “see” the book unfolding in their mind’s eye. They’re waiting for the movie/TV/video game adaptation.

As always, links here take you to my shop at Bookshop, which supports indie bookstores all over the country.

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NONFICTION

Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me, Mimi Pond. Maybe this book would be great for those whose imaginating muscle needs work: it’s a fabulously done graphic biography/memoir that combines Mimi Pond’s memories of growing up in 1950s California with the glamorous, wild, notorious, shocking lives of the six Mitford sisters: Nazis, Fascists, communists, impovrished aristocrats, scholars (Jessica Mitford wrote The American Way of Death), travelers. Whether you know all about the sisters, or know nothing, this book is a great way to meet the sisters and encounter history.

Mother Mary Comes to Me , Arundhati Roy. The relationship between Roy and her mother almost defies description: tumultous doesn’t begin to do it justice. Written after her mother’s death, in an effort to make sense of her mother’s achievements (she started a school, advocated for female equality, stared down patriarchal governments) and her mother’s cruelty (Roy left home at eighteen to avoid her mother’s fury), this book catalogs Roy’s growing advocacy on behalf of India’s poor, the wild and unexpected success of God of Small Things, and the feuds and fissures in her own family. Unflinching, passionate, and incredibly alive, Roy’s book is the story of a relationship, a writer, and a country.

The Hour of the Wolf, Fatima Bhutto. Another memoir of a family and a country—in this case, Pakistan and the Bhutto family. Bhutto was a child when her father was murdered, a loss that sent her into a tailspin. The book focuses primarily on Bhutto’s relationship with an unnamed man, whom she loves passionately—which she resists seeing the toxicity and abusiveness of the relationship. Countering this human relationship, Bhutto talks about the relationships that exist between humans and their pets. I’m not a dog person, but the way she talks about her dog, Coco, made me reconsider.

NOVELS

The Keeper, Tana French. The world is going to hell in a cheap handbag, but hey, Tana French has a new book out, like a liferaft carrying me across the turmoil of the shitty news of the day. The third book set in Ardnakelty and featuring quasi-retired Chicago cop Cal Hooper, this one starts with the death of a young woman and goes deep into real estate deals, local politics, and the question of how we find community. There’s a bit too much “local color” dialectic in this one, I think, so it takes a while for the plot to get moving, but as always, the characters are fantastic and the mystery very twisty. The ending was satisfying—and a bummer, because it meant the book was over.

The Once and Future Queen, Paula Lafferty. If you’re An Old, you’ll recognize this title as a play on TH White’s Once and Future King, a re-telling of the Arthur myth. This novel is yet another re-telling of the Arthur myth…by centering on Guinevere, who, in this story, has been recovering from a traumatic injury in 21st-century Glastonbury, courtesy of Merlin, who shows up one day to bring her back to the Arthurian court. Complications, as they say, ensue. This book was the perfect company after an incredibly long week: I sat in my comfy chair and sped through the entire thing in an afternoon. Would be a great vacation book, which I mean as a total compliment.

FOR KIDS

The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Brian Selznick. When my younger son started kindergarten in New York, we took the 14D bus—crowded, slow, slogging through morning traffic—to his school. This book got us through the first month of that commute: a brilliant book designed to replicate the experience of a silent movie, which amazing illustrations and a plot that even a little person can follow. A must-have for any kid’s bookcase.

CLASSIC

The Bone People, Keri Hulme. Set in New Zealand, told in poetry and prose, Maori and English, splicing together scenes of horrifying brutality and incredible beauty, this novel is about Kerewin Holmes, who lives in a tower on the seashore. Estranged from her family and her artistic energy, she is shocked to discover a small, mute, Anglo child hiding in her tower—and even more astonished when it turns out he’s been informally adopted by a Maori named Joe. This unlikely threesome broke my heart the first time I read this book in 1986 and although now it seems a bit sentimental, it’s still brilliant.

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Extra treats!

Do you live near Cranford? If you do, then you should drop into The Cranford Bookstore, for all your indie-book needs.

Looking for a cozy mystery series featuring a smart heroine and a quirky rotating cast of characters? Check out the Erica Duncan books by Laura Shea. (I’m partial to Murder at the People’s Theater, which seems a lot like New York’s Public Theater…)

Middle-school readers rejoice: here’s a great book, just published, by Rebecca Morrison: The Blue Dress, about body image, family, and learning to love the skin you’re in.

In case you need even more suggestions for your TBR list, here’s NPR’s list of the six shortlisted novels for the International Booker Prize.

And, finally, what goes better with a book than a drink? Here’s a podcast that does exactly that! Authors, conversations, libraries, cocktails. Some of my favorite things.

Thanks as always for subscribing and recommending this (always free) newsletter to your friends (and your favorite bookstore: what’s your favorite indie bookshop? Post it in the comments below and next month we’ll run a whole list of faves!)

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March is Women’s History Month, so this month’s books are all by women writers. Next month’s books probably will be too, come to think of it, as were most of last month’s. Anyone would think it might be a theme.

Another theme: these books are available via Bookshop, which supports indie bookstores across the U.S., but they’re also at your local library or your local indie bookstore.

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Novels

The Frozen River, Ariel Lawhon: I realize I’m late to this party (the novel was published in 2023) but this novel, based on the life of a Maine midwife named Martha Ballard, in 1789, offers a great story and deep insights into the lives of women in the late 18th century, including the laws governing out-of-wedlock children and rape. Kept my attention from the first page to the last, and I was delighted to see that Lawhon credits the pioneering work of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, editor of A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, 1785-1812. Ulrich’s book was a mainstay of women’s studies class and US history courses when I was in grad school, and I’m so happy to see it be re-animated in Lawhon’s novel.

Nonfiction

Pearls, Tracy Crisp: A memoir-in-stories, written by a dear friend who is now back in her beloved Australia, but who I knew in Abu Dhabi. My first friend in Abu Dhabi, actually, and also the mother of two boys, and also a writer, and also one of the funniest, wryest, wisest humans I’ve ever met. Most, if not all, of this material was originall performed as monologues at various Fringe festivals and are an amazing exploration of love and grief and parenthood and all the stuff that comprises a life.

The Art Spy, Michelle Young: The amazing-but-true of Rose Valland, a female museum curator at the Jeu de Paume (who was consistently refused promotion because the man who oversaw such things refused to take her seriously), who spied on behalf of the French Resistance even as the Nazis took over Paris and used her museum as their base of operations for trying to pillage all the art in French collections. Due to her meticulous record-keeping, much of the art that was illegally taken to Germany was able to be recovered. As a spy and a lesbian, Rose was courting danger on all fronts, but she survived and this book finally sheds light on her daring, essential actions.

Classics

Mama Day, Gloria Naylor: In the late 1980s, Gloria Naylor was everywhere, it seemed: “The Women of Brewster Place” was a mini-series (as they used to be called) based on her novel; she and Toni Morrison were often mentioned in the same breath. I don’t hear about Naylor as much any more, but I loved this novel, set on an island off the coast of Georgia, about a modern-day woman encountering her history and her ghosts, through her relationship with the powerful Mama Day. A love story gets twined in there, too, and some wonderfully evocative writing about the island landscape.

For Kids (and everyone else)

Not a Stick, Annette Portis: pure joy, pure imagination: what else can a stick be besides a stick? Pretty much anything and everything—fishing pole, paintbrush, sword, telescope, you name it. And for those who aren’t interested in sticks, try Not a Box, which when my kids were little was pretty much the only reason I ordered groceries from Fresh Direct. Those boxes were trains, beds, forts, platforms, building blocks, you name it.

And Also:

This essay by Ted Gioia, about the publishing industry these days…

And this show, “Ponies,” a spy caper/comedy series et in 1970s Moscow is a great escape from the world hellscape and (for those of us of a certain age) the soundtrack is a total banger … and for a thriller that is not an escape but is super fun, “The Capture,” which others have found before me, but I’m almost done with Season 1 and it’s super twisty, almost-too-close-to-home, about deepfakes and the dangers of Big Brother. And last but not least, I found out that they’ve renewed the wacky, twisty, funny, feral show “Deadloch,” about mismatched female detectives in New Zealand. (What can I say? I read a lot; I watch a lot of TV; I have no real hobbies).

Thanks for reading, thanks for recommending, thanks for subscribing, thanks for leaving a comment about what you’re doing to escape the hellscape.

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This month’s recommendation list is heavy with historical fiction, I suppose because I’m looking for both precedent (people surviving horrifying episodes in history is of particular comfort right now) and escape (let me live somewhere that’s not now).

These titles are available on my shelf at Bookshop (which has e-books, so now you have no reason to buy your words from the man who has single-handedly wrecked Katharine Graham’s Washington Post), or from your library.

Thanks for reading and subscribing: I promise I send these newsletters only once a month, so you’ll have lots of time to digest this list before the next one arrives.

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Current Reads

The Feeling Of Iron, Giame Alonge, translated from Italian by Clarissa Botsford

A dual time-line—Central America in the 1980s (think Reagan and the Contras) and the Nazi regime in East Prussia, where a German scientist is testing “Lysergsaurediethylamid,” which we know as LSD. The tests are not the larky Timothy Leary electric kool-aid parties of hippy lore, but brutal “research” carried out in an effort to find a tool that will create a superior warrior class immune to exhaustion. Two survivors of those tests find each other decades later, in the Honduran jungle, each of them, in his own way, searching for revenge on the German scientist, now re-named and working for the good ol’CIA.

The novel works as a thriller—but its also an investigation into the nature of vengeance and the question of whether we ever really learn from history.

Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li. “That a mother can do all things humanly possible for her children and yet cannot keep them alive—this is a fact that eschews any adjective. Children die, and parents go on living—this, too, is a fact that defies all adjectives.” In spare, elegant prose, this book details a set of facts that defy all adjectives: Li’s two sons, each of whom commits suicide (one at 16, one at 19). There is no adjective for that abyss and, as Li writes, no way out, either, not really. There is no metaphor or analogy or faith story that can “explain” what happened, or why. She writes with extraordinary detail and love about her children; it is a beautiful, heart-shredding book that should be read, even as it is almost impossible to read.

Prophet, Sin Blaché and Helen MacDonald. A friend recommended this book to me and it was (as the kids say) a banger. You might know MacDonald’s name from the beautiful memoir, H is for Hawk, but this novel is about as far from that book as hawks are from spaceships. Try this comment (from an interviewer in the UK) as a way to explain the genre of this book: “queer sci-fi romance horror espionage techno-thriller [written] with someone I met in Doctor Who fandom and I want it to read like fanfic and the acknowledgements will end by thanking “the fic writers of AO3 and the internet.” What would happen if some sci-fi compound made people create objects infused with nostalgia…and then those nostalgic objects got weaponized? And then what if the weapons got scarier, and the two men investigating are both terribly flawed but also a little bit falling in love and then… and then you will realize it’s 2AM and you really should go to sleep but just a few more pages…

The Correspondent, Virginia Evans. A epistolary novel (shades of Clarissa) that I was initially skeptical about because it seemed so twee and precious: letters? written by an old lady? That skepticism lasted for about three pages, and then I was entranced. Sybil Van Antwerp writes letters, every day, to ordinary people and extraordinary ones (Dear Joan Didion…), to friends and family and occasionally, acerbically, to the president of the garden club. The mistakes and mysteries of a life surface—both hers and those of her correspondents—as does love (yes, even for The Old Folks), and loss. As a novel, the book is great; as an exercise in voice, it’s an amazing lesson in craft. If you haven’t read this one yet, move it to the top of your list.

CLASSICS

Speaking of bangers, have you read (or recently re-read) Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ 1967 novel about how the madwoman in Jane Eyre’s attic got there? Brontë’s Bertha Mason, the Creole madwoman, is a “hyena,” who howls and wails; we never hear her speak. Rhys’s dual-voiced novel, which she said she wrote in order to “give the poor lunatic a life,” shows us how the beautiful, fragile Antoinette Cosway gets turned into Bertha, and at the same time, shows us how patriarchy and colonialism are not two sides of the same coin but are, in fact, the same coin. (For a brilliant contemporary take-down of patriarchy, see this thread from Gabrielle Blair, ). Sargasso Sea is perhaps a bit over the top in some ways, but it still packs a wallop, particularly since we seem to be living in such over-the-top times.

Another classic, newly released from Warbler Press: The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith’s mid-twentieth century novel, with a new introduction by the brilliant pioneering feminist studies scholar, Catharine R. Stimpson. This is the novel that was the basis for the film “Carol,” about a lesbian relationship in 1950s America.

KIDS

For the reader who has moved past easy chapter books, what about the Miss Bianca books, written by Margery Sharp (who, for a long time, I thought was Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Spoiler: not the same person, but Sharp did also write books for adults). The intrepid mystery-solving, child-rescuing white mouse, beloved by the ersthwile Bernard, and “owned” by an ambassador’s son, was a huge favorite of mine when I was a little girl. Miss Bianca traveled the world and found ways to help people along the way, whether a princess doomed to be trampled by elephants, or a child imprisoned by a terrible duchess, or a Norwegian poet locked in a grim prison. The books are best savored in editions that preserve the illustrations by Garth Williams (and avoid the movie, in which Bianca is voiced by Eva Gabor).

That’s all for now, my dears. Happy reading, stay warm, fight facism, support indie bookstores and libraries, share this newsletter with your reading friends!

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I’m happily in London right now, teaching, which is lovely except for some reason I seem to be locked out of my Bookshop account. So the links to the books this month will be to Barnes & Noble, rather than the giant choking anaconda of online merchandising. And isn’t it funny to think that back in the day (waaaay back), Barnes and Noble was the threat? Now it’s (sort of) the plucky underdog.

Anyway. London is cold and damp and marvelous; the museums are free; the food is good; the walking is splendid, and my students are themselves quite plucky: female Emirati students from a business college in the Emirates, many of whom (maybe all of whom) have never experienced cold like this—and who were thrilled at the brief hour of snowfall earlier this week.

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I ended up reading 65 books last year. Word to the wise: life is too short to finish books you don’t like. Give something 75 pages or so and then…

But the books here are very much worth finishing:

FLASHLIGHT, Susan Choi: This novel got rave reviews, was nominated for all kinds of prizes. I started it once last year, didn’t like it, and returned it to the library. Then with the push of being a better person in 2026, I started it again and holy cats what a story. The history of a family, an unhappy marriage, living with a chronic illness, the history of North Korea, and of Koreans living in Japan during and after World War II. Amazingly woven together and bravely told—not the subject matter, exactly, but the two female characters are not particularly nice people. In a word “unlikeable.” And yet understandable, relatable, and all too human. The praise for this book is well deserved.

A MARRIAGE AT SEA, Susan Elmhirst: A true story of a marriage pushed beyond endurance. Maurice and Madelyn—an unlikely couple under the best of circumstances—get married and a few years into their marriage decide to sell their possessions, buy a boat, and sail around the world. In 1972, they set sail and everything goes swimmingly (as it were) until their boat is smashed by a whale. After months afloat in a rubber raft, they are rescued, near death, and their tragedy makes them (briefly) famous, which is almost as surreal to them as their time lost at sea. How they survive, both their adventure and their relationship, is the substance of this odd and gripping tale.

FOR KIDS: I met a marvelous twelve-year-old at a party over the holidays and was struck by the difficulty of finding good books for those years when even precocious readers aren’t quite ready for super-heavy YA but have outgrown early-reader chapter books. And that thought, plus the utter trash-fire of the world at the moment, makes me want to live with The Borrowers: a family who lives in the walls of a house, “borrowing” objects with which to make their own domestic space. When I was young, I loved the tininess of it all, and the creative re-purposing of everyday objects.

And finally, A CLASSIC, which because I’m in London (and because dumpster-fire of society, most of which I lay at the feet of patriarchy and unchecked capitalism), has to be Virginia: A Room of One’s Own. There is of course her famous comment that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” but this long essay is so much more than that (although it is about that, absolutely). In gorgeous prose, Woolf talks about the power and necessity of education, the freedome of the imagination, the incalculable loss of female-authored work because women didn’t have the luxury of imaginative space (giving rise both to the famous invention of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, and the comment that “anonymous was a woman”), and her request that “you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”

And finally! A new book, just launched, from my friend Andromeda Romano-Lax: What Boys Learn , a thriller that is also totally hooked into the current conversations about masculinity. It’s a great story and will spark many conversations. Order your copy now!

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Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter and for sharing it with your friends. I’d love to know what’s at the top of your reading list for this year!

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Not to be left out of the list-making fun, here is a list of all the books I read this year. I read a lot, and I read fast. When I was kid, I used to choose the book I was going to read on our long drives to Northern Michigan (a solid eight hours) by how thick it was. So it would last the length of the drive. That meant a lot of big ol’ bodice-rippers, but thank god those were the glory days of Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. Shanna, The Wolf and the Dove, and other vaguely inapproriate paperbacks were my company in the back of our big station wagon. These novels also explain, at least in part, my sometimes fuzzy ideas about historical facts.

Woodiwiss aside, here are some of the books I really liked this year (although they weren’t all written in 2025) — and as always, the links will take you to my shelf at Bookshop, which supports indie books. Books always make great gifts (no batteries needed!) and if you don’t already have one, make 2026 the year you get a library card—and encourage your friends to do the same. Billionaires hate libraries, which is why we should all love them.

Some Faves

The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami: A woman is detained at LAX because her dreams suggest she might want to murder her husband. She’s sent to a retention facility in California and kept there until…well, that’s the question. Until when? And who is making these determinations? Reading this novel, I had the same feeling I did waaaay back in the early 1980s, when I thought The Handmaid’s Tale was too dystopian to ever come true. And while this book, like Atwood’s, is really grim, it also illustrates that even in dire circumstances, dissent and resistance are possible.

The Good Liar, Denise Mina: Mina is one of those writers, like Tana French, whose thrillers go beyond just plot (not that there’s anything wrong with “just plot”). In this novel, a woman who has clawed her way to the top of her profession with a revolutionary crime-solving technology must confront the very real possibility that she’s made a huge mistake. Would you admit your mistake, if it meant that your entire professional life would crumble beyond salvage?

Love, Sex, and Frankenstein, Carolina Lea: I love Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and I’ve noticed that when I teach it, students are initially put off by the 19th-century prose, and then they find it fascinating. If you’ve seen the recent remake of “Frankenstein” (now streaming on Netflix, of course—aren’t we all eventually going to have our lives streaming on Netflix?), then this novel is for you: it creates an entirely new narrative around the now-legendary time that Mary Godwin (not yet Shelley, due to the inconvenient fact that Percy Shelley was still married) spent in Switzerland with Dr. Polidori, Lord Byron, and Percy, and Mary’s half-sister. There’s some heavy-handed stuff about repressed female rage, but overall, it’s an interesting and convincing perspective about this iconic text and its iconic writer.

Other books I’ve loved this year but have already written about:

A Training School for Elephants, Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Wild Dark Shore, Counting Backwards, We Do Not Part, In The Distance

A GREAT GIFT FOR KIDS

For some weird reason, this book has come up several times in the past few weeks, reminding me of how much my kids loved this book—first as a read-aloud, and then on their own. A great addition to any kid bookshelf:

D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths: Lots of stories, color illustrations, an introduction to some of the Western classics.

Also let me recommend The Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner. Set in a fictional world, these books are mythic, political, romantic, and full of intrigue. So much fun.

And finally, some nifty things:

Have you pre-ordered your copy of What Boys Learn, the newest thriller (and moral predicament) from Andromeda Romano-Lax? Right now, she’s running a fun pre-order that lets you put your fave indie bookstore on the map - check out her newsletter for info (and maybe a free gift!)

Maybe you don’t want New Year’s Eve to be all glitter and guzzling, but would instead like to be surrounded by beauty? Then St. John the Divine has the answer: A Concert for Peace, featuring Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Tickets and info here.

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Thank you for reading and subscribing and sharing this newsletter! I’d love to know what you’re going to be reading in the New Year… put your TBR in the comments below!

In celebration of managing to not run a marathon—a challenge in which I’ve had 100% success—I thought I’d mention a few books that I never managed to finish, but am sure I will. Someday.

As always, all the books I mention here are available through Bookshop, or you could sprint to your nearest local bookshop and get your books there. Or stroll to your local library and see what’s lurking on the shelves.

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UNFINISHED MARATHONS

New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson. New York is flooded. Every skyscraper its own little village. There are airships and coders and mysterious happenings . . . and I will never know how it ends because the book is 656 pages in paperback and I just…ran out of energy (which seems appropriate for a novel about climate catastrophe). In my defense, I did finish Richard Powers’ Overstory, and Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, both of which weigh in at 500+

War and Peace, Tolstoy. I know, I know, everyone should read the Russians but . . . nope. Not this one. It felt like I was in the Napoleonic Wars and not in a good way. I made it through Anna Karenina, and have dabbled in Dosteyeksky, but that’s as far as I got. If you finish W&P, let me know what happens, ok?

Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon. This one is embarrassing because we were going to have a “family read” this summer, and my son chose this novel. Nothing like starting small, eh? Reader, I tried. I really, really tried. But this Pynchon was one of his baggy monster pastiche books…for eleven hundred pages. And somewhere in the 600s, I gave up. Nor am I going to read the newest Pynchon, sorry. But I will say that if you haven’t read the early (and very short) Crying of Lot 49, you should, because it’s tight, crisp, funny, prescient, and brilliant.

So what have I read, lately?

CURRENT READS

So Far Gone, Jess Walter. I didn’t read Beautiful Ruins, which apparently “everyone” loved, but this book was great. Funny and sharp, a great capture of our MAGA moment. An off-the-grid dweller finds his grandchildren on his doorstep one morning because his estranged daughter has run away from her MAGA marriage—and complications, as they say, ensue, as Rhys Kinnick tries to protect his grandchildren, find his daughter, and survive the wrath of the evangelicals whose church his daughter has also rejected. The book reminded me, in fact, of The Crying of Lot 49: lots of perfect comments about contemporary life, a whodunit that gets twistier and twistier, and a very satisfying ending.

The Impossible Thing, Belinda Bauer. Eggs. Egg collectors, egg hoarders, egg thieves, murders committed for eggs. All of these things exist, and they’re at the heart of this mystery novel that is much more than that. The novel shifts between early 20th century Yorkshire, where people make money dangling off cliffs to gather the rare eggs laid by shore birds, to the present day where a burglar has stolen a red egg from a family who didn’t know the egg was such a treasure—I was skeptical about the premise when I started reading, and then couldn’t put it down.

The Rose Field, Philip Pullman. This novel is the third in the trilogy that Pullman started almost twenty years after he’d finished His Dark Materials trilogy. This second trilogy is Lyra Silvertongue’s story—first her infancy (the prequel, in a sense, to the first trilogy) and then, in this third book, her life as a young woman, well after the events of His Dark Materials. Like the first trilogy, this book is full of magical creatures (including daemons), and conversations about theology, metaphysics, and imagination; it’s also political, densely plotted, and full of wildly named characters who exist in a world that echoes our own. I loved those first three books so much that none of these three subsequent books have quite measured up. The Rose Field feels a bit imitative, as if Pullman had a bit of a checklist—theology, check; mysticism, yep; witches, got it; and so forth. The points that the novel makes about politics, imagination, creativity, and the environment are all right on target — perhaps even too on target. Regardless, however, it was wonderful to see Lyra’s story come to a close—and even middling Pullman is still a significant pleasure.

CLASSIC

You might have read this book when it first came out, but in case you missed, it, put it on your list: The Weight of Ink, by Rachel Kadish. Can a book published in 2018 be a classic? Or is a classic in the mind of the reader? A bit like AS Byatt’s Possession, this book is split between eras: London, in the 17th century, where Esther Velazquez becomes a scribe to a blind rabbi; and in the 21st, where a historian of Jewish history has been asked to authenticate a newly discovered cache of Jewish documents written by “Aleph.” Each story is compelling in its own right and together, they create a novel that is mysterious, detailed, and unputdownable.

KIDS

It’s autumn, which means its chrysanthemum season…which means tis the season for Kevin Henkes’ wonderful book: Chrysanthemum, about a little girl being teased for her “funny name.” My kids loved this book—and Henkes’ other books, as well, particularly Owen, about a boy who loves his blankie. (As the mother of a child whose binkie was pretty much surgically attached, the blankie-love hit home.) These books are funny, beautifully illustrated, and not at all preachy.

OTHER THINGS!

If you’re a writer, or you want to write but aren’t sure how to start, here are two great ways to energize your writing practice with the (free!) support of Allison K Williams, one of the best freelance writing coaches in the biz.

Here is a link to sign up for a series of prompts and suggestions for memoirists and here is a link to sign up for a series of prompts and suggestions for novelists.

Music! If you live in NYC, then you’re familiar with the usual rotation of classical music venues, but do you know about the Fort Green Orchestra? They often perform in St. Joseph’s Co-Cathedral, in downtown Brooklyn—great music, magical setting, and reasonable ticket prices.

Thanks for reading, thanks for subscribing, and for sharing this newsletter with anyone who is always wondering what to read next . . . drop a note in the comments about what book(s) you haven’t ever finished!

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And of course, it’s always reading season. Here are some things I liked this month—and remember, all these books are available through my shelf at Bookshop, where your book dollars will help support indie bookstores, instead of Jeff Bezos buying another yacht or sending more movie stars to space or whatever. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share!

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Katabasis, RF Kuang: A new novel from the infinitely productive RF Kuang, about a PhD' student’s voyage into the underworld. My husband summed up the book with: “grad school is hell, literally,” which is a truth to which any doctoral student can attest. The novel is set in an alternate university that teaches Magick, and Alice Law is a grad student who wants to work with the most powerful professor/magician on the faculty. Complications, as they say, ensue, and Alice finds herself on a quest in the underworld that she thought would be solitary, until someone else shows up, who is not entirely welcome. I thought the book was totally enjoyable, maybe a little overcomplicated—Kuang seems always to want us to know that she’s done all her homework—and with an ending that I knew was inevitable, even when things seemed at their most dire. I spent a delightful afternoon racing to the book’s conclusion, so while it might not be perfect, it’s a lot of fun.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones: No, that title isn’t a typo. If you’re a fan of revisionist Westerns, or horror stories, or stories within stories, or stories in which Native Americans take revenge for all that’s been done to them: this novel is for you. When a manuscript from 1912 is found in the wall of an old building, an about-to-lose-her-job historian begins to transcribe it, thinking the manuscript might save her career. What emerges is a horrifying, gory confession as told by a Blackfeet named Good Stab to a Lutheran pastor. Some of what happens here makes Cormac McCarthy sound like Jane Austen—Graham Jones often out-gores McCarthy, but the story is incredibly compelling and the ending was perfect.

Woman in Suite 11, by Ruth Ware. Last month, I read The Woman in Cabin 10 … and I could barely remember anything about it when I finished it. I had to go back and check what happened before I could write about it in an essay about endings for Present Tense, the thriller newsletter written by Andromeda Romano-Lax and Caitlin Wahrer. Suite 11, though, is much better, even if some of what happens strains the bounds of credulity almost to the breaking point. This book features the same heroine, Lo Blacklock, and some of hte same characters from Cabin 10, and if you find yourself on a long plane ride, check into Suite 11, and time will fly by. When you’re done, you can ask yourself what’s next: Chamber 12? Closet 12?

Florenzer, Phil Melanson. A debut novel that imagines Florence in the age of the Medicis—and Da Vinci, before he was Da Vinci. Melanson imagines Leonardo as a young man attracted to other men, a significant danger in Renaissance Florence. The novel juxtaposes three worlds: the Medici family, the Vatican, and Da Vinci’s. The result is a textured, sexy, immersion into a time brimming with intrigue, violence, and creativity.

FOR KIDS. . . A CLASSIC

At a time when women’s rights are being attacked (although really, when haven’t they?) we need a serious dose of Pippi energy: Pippi Longstocking! Astrid Lindgren’s red-haired heroine, who lives alone in Villa Villekulla with a pet monkey named Mr. Nilsson, and whose actions both shock—and tempt—her well-behaved next door neighbors, Tommy and Annika. Pippi does what she wants, rules be damned.

Something nifty:

A timely, moving, wildly creative piece of writing about the horror of a school shooting: When We Were Gun, by Deborah Schupack, is a narrative cycle of poems that focuses on a group of parents waiting outside the scene of a school shooting. It sounds impossible, but it works, balancing us on the line of the abyss—a place with which way too many people are familiar. You can order the book here.

What’s next on my list?

A few things waiting in the queue at the library: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, The Good Liar, Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me (a graphic biography)

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So here are a handful of thrillers, a memoir, and a book for kids that offers my own current mantra. As always, thank you for reading (this newsletter, and books in general) and I hope you’ll share this newsletter with your reader friends. All the links here go to bookshop.org, which is a welcome alternative to the Bezosphere.

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CURRENT READING

S.A. CROSBY, King of Ashes: a gangster story, a family story, a love story, set in rural Virginia and alive with local details. The successful son of the Carruthers family returns to his small town because his younger ne’er do well brother is in trouble: but is that trouble responsible for the car accident that’s put their father in a coma? Family secrets roil beneath the surface here and although the brothers want the secrets to stay buried, their sister is determined to know the truth. A great absorbing read with a kick-ass ending.

Ruth Ware, The Woman in Cabin 10: Ware’s take on the locked-room mystery: Lo Blacklock is sure that she saw a woman disappear overboard from the cabin next to hers, on board the luxurious yacht Aurora—but the crew insists that the cabin has been empty for the entire voyage. Lo’s certainty that something is amiss puts her on a collision course for. . . well, I can’t tell you. Suffice to say, there’s a big ol’ twist and a satisfying payoff. Not Ware’s best book—but it’s bound to be a hit all over again, when the Netflix launches their adaptation, starring Keira Knightley

Daniel Silva, An Inside Job: The twenty-fifth book starring former Israeli spy/brilliant art restorer Gabriel Allon. This book, unlike many of the others, doesn’t dip into Israeli politics or feature any of the team that Allon usually assembles to solve his cases, but instead stays within the art world, which expands to include the Vatican and a global array of corrupt billionaires who seem eager to buy a rare painting, regardless of its provenance. Unlike some of the other books, in this one, Allon seems to have all the answers, which gets a little tiresome, but the details about the Vatican and about art are fun, as are the lovely locations, and the details about Allon’s family life in Venice. Seems that even an international spy struggles with teenage children.

Tia Levings, A Well-Trained Wife: For anyone who has wondered about the world of the “trad wife” or thought about why unhappily married women “don’t just leave,” this book will answer a lot of questions. Levings, raised in an evangelical Christian family, marries young, to a man who seems perfect: former military, handsome, deeply Christian. Gradually, however, her husband’s faith becomes more and more extreme, as do his rules for how wives should behave—and his punishments when he thinks she’s deviated from his rules. Increasingly isolated and being told to follow the teachings of a religious sect that said women should agree to be beaten—Levings decides she has to flee, for her own life and the life of her children. That journey is as tense and exciting as any thriller.

FOR KIDS

Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, Going on a Bear Hunt: I read this book to my kids approximately 10,000 times and they loved it every single time. The family decides to go on a bear hunt: “going to catch a big one, we’re not afraid.” And then they encounter obstacle after obstacle—mud, wind, dark forests, tall grass—all of which have requisite sound effects. The mud “squelch squerches,” the grass is “swishy swashy.” But the important message, not that your kids will notice, but you will, is: “We can't go over it. We can't go under it. Oh no! We've got to go through it!” Yep, it’s a book that tells us the only way out is through. Which is perhaps a message we all need right now: just keep going, swishyswashysquelchysquerchy, and maybe we’ll get through it.

CLASSIC

Given that everyone is talking about generative AI these days, which is apparently either going to save us all or hasten our inevitable doom, seems appropriate to go way back to this play, from 1920: Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti, by Karel Čapek, a Czech writer. The title translates to Rossum’s Univeral Robots—and in fact, it was this play that introduced the word “robot” to English language. In the play, an inventor (Rossum) had created an organic-like substance that he wants to use for good, but his nephew sees it only as a money-maker. The nephew locks up Rossum, begins producing robots, and by second half of the play, set in the year 2000, robots are everywhere, doing manual labor. What with one thing and another, there is a robot revolution that comes to Rossum’s Island, along with an ongoing debate about whether the robots have souls, and complications ensue—particularly after two robots appear to fall in love. Sound familiar? As a play, RUR isn’t fabulous—but it’s worth reading, given the current debate we’re having about the human relationship to the non-human, and our apparently endless attempts to create machines that replicate ourselves.

OTHER BITS AND NIFTY PIECES

Several readings are happening in October that feature people near and dear to me: My uncle, Jim Lenfesty, will be reading and talking to Sarah Ruhl, 14 October at Poet’s House. Admission is free.

A good friend, also named Deborah (but I like her for other reasons, too) has a beautiful short book that’s just out from Duke, about spiritual journeys and spiritual homes. She’ll be reading and talking about Taking Leave (which I’ll write about next month), at two different venues: Stanza Books, in Beacon NY, on 3 October; and at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, on 7 October. Come support indie bookstores, indie presses, and great writing!

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The Confessions, Paul Bradley Carr. Emphatically not St. Augustine’s confessions, but nonetheless preoccupied with guilt: what if an AI (machine? algorithm? monster? program?) became fully sentient, fully aware of the types of questions that people were asking it (now a “him”) to answer? In Carr’s novel, LLIAM is the sentient AI that begins to feel guilt—and then decides to act on that guilt. It’s a better-than-usual techno-thriller, with some nice twists. Doesn’t quite stick the landing, but it’s a great read for the dogdays of summer (which I doubly enjoyed because one of my kids works in AI-related fields and is named . . . Liam).

Heartwood, Amity Gaige. Everyone seems to love this book and now I understand why (although I was a little underwhelmed by this ending, too). A woman is lost in the woods of Maine, at the end of hiking the Appalachian Trail. Where’d she go? Will she be found? Why did she set off on such a quixotic quest, anyway? Through multiple narrators and beautiful prose, Gaige gives us answers to these questions in ways that satisfy both the need for a page-turner—but also for a meditation on the human connections that serve as our inner compass points.

How to Lose Your Mother, Molly Jong-Fast. Everyone is talking about this book, too, and Jong-Fast seems to be everywhere —podcasts, talk shows, magazines, social media. She’s smart and thoughtful and as funny as you’d imagine the daughter of Erica Jong to be, even though the book itself is the document of a terrible year: mother and step-father sinking into dementia, husband diagnosed with cancer, Trump’s election. Jong-Fast looks at her childhood (being the daughter of a famous mother isn’t quite so fabulous) and at what it means to be a writer, and what it means to be a parent. It’s a really good read—honest without being bitter, sad without being sentimental.

FOR KIDS

Well, we have a president who speaks pretty much entirely in word salad, so it seems only fitting that this month’s read-aloud is the fabulous Amelia Bedelia, shown here having “drawn the curtains.” The first Amelia was published in 1963 and it’s been making people laugh ever since.

CLASSIC

And if you’re in an elegiac mood (and truthfully, who isn’t these days?) but would also like to revel in gorgeous landscapes and the equally gorgeous language of one of the US’s best writers, may I suggest The Professor’s House, by Willa Cather (a contemporary of Edith Wharton, although they never met). In this novel, Professor St. Peter, who lives in Michigan, with a lovely wife and two grown daughters, confronts his life and career and wonders what it all means. The middle of the novel gives us the story of Tom Outland, in the mesas of New Mexico; it is Outland’s story that has stayed with St. Peter for years. Cather said once that she wanted the New Mexico section to operate like a window in a Vermeer painting: from the slightly claustrophobic interior you see a slice of the vaster world.

Dawn in New Mexico, high on the mesa: “The bluish rock and the sun-tanned grass, under the unusual purple-grey of the sky, gave the whole valley a very soft colour, lavender and pale gold, so that the occasional cedars growing beside the boulders looked black that morning.”

And St. Peter’s malaise: “Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”

It’s a gorgeous novel.

Either to avoid the tragedies, or fill your summery days, here are some reading suggestions for you. I was in the delightful position of all my reserves at the library coming in at the same time:

But in keeping with my promise not to write bad reviews, I’m not going to show the titles because—oh, my friends, there were some serious duds in this pile, including the latest in a hugely popular romantasy series that is nothing but plot—or rather, it’s every plot you can imagine, plus magic and some torrid sex scenes. I made my way through the first two books, wondering why they were so popular, but the third? I returned it after getting about a hundred pages in. (Reason number gazillion why libraries are great: I didn’t have to buy the book.)

As usual, all these recommendations are available on my Bookshop shelf. And as always, thank you for subscribing to this newsletter — and for sharing it with your readerly friends.

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Current Reading

Doppelganger, Naomi Klein. True confessions: I was one of those people who had originally confused “the Naomis,” Klein and Wolf. This book is Klein’s investigation into having a social media double of sorts, including all the times on social media when Wolf’s increasingly right-wing theories got attributed to Klein (and, with less frequency, Klein’s critiques of globalization, fascism, and capitalism, were pegged to Klein). Wolf, Klein reminds us, was initially taken seriously, with the publication of her 1991 book The Beauty Myth, but has more recently appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast and other Trumposphere outlets. How did that happen? And how does social media lead us to make doppelgangers of ourselves—and once we’ve started down that path, can we ever get ourselves back?

Counting Backwards, Binnie Kirshenbaum. It might be hard to believe that a novel about a childless, long-married couple grappling with the husband’s diagnosis of Lewy Body dementia could be a pleasure to read—but it is. The wife, Addie, is an artist working towards a gallery show; her husband Leo, is a scientist. They adore each other, but when Leo starts hallucinating (swans in the street, gives dog biscuits to their cat) and then commits an utterly uncharacteristic act of violence, he needs to be committed. There isn’t enough money, Addie can’t manage Leo and her art, their friends drop out of sight. The solutions, when they arrive, are unexpected and sometimes funny, and it is a pleasure to spend time with Addie, even in her anger and her grief. Kirshenbaum’s own husband died from the same disease, and in some ways the novel has the force of memoir, even though she says “there’s so much in it that never happened to us.” It’s a beautiful, powerful book that reminds that art and love are two of our most powerful weapons in the face of loss.

Wild Dark Shore, Charlotte McConaghy. On the fictional Shearwater Island (based on real-life Macquarie Island), the Salt family—Dominic and his three children—are the only people left to tend to the world’s largest underground seed vault. Dom’s wife died giving birth to their third child, and he does his best to be a good father to his children, even as their island is slowing disappearing due to rising sea levels, and the research station that had once provided them with companionship (and radio transmissions to the mainland) has been deserted. With only six weeks left on the island, the family is stunned to discover a woman washed up on shore after a tremendous storm. Rowan’s arrival on the island sets in motion a slowly unfolding set of puzzles that lead to shocking twists and a powerfully emotional ending. With multiple narrators relaying snippets of interlocking secrets, the novel is a tightly woven story about family, romance, climate catastrophe, and new beginnings.

Last month, I mentioned The Naming of the Birds, by Pariac O’Donnell, a great mystery set in Victorian England. His other two books, The Maker of the Swans and The House on Vesper Sands (which introduces the characters we meet in The Naming of the Birds) are equally fun. Great settings, nicely complicated mysteries, interesting characters. Perfect vacation books.

For Children (and all of us)

I just got back from a magical, amazing, once-in-a-lifetime (but I hope not the last time) trip to the Galapagos, where I saw blue-footed boobies, frigate birds, giant tortoises, iguanas, and penguins. Here is a Galapagos penguin for you:

Shearwater Island, in Wild Dark Shore, is also inhabited by penguins (different species from the Galapagos penguins).

In honor of those penguins, one of the great read-aloud books (or a great middle-grade chapter book): Mr. Popper’s Penguins. A marvelous and ridiculous story from 1938 about a house-painter who is sent a penguin by Admiral Drake, and then another penguin (a female), and then ends up with a houseful of penguins. Complications, as they say, ensue. My kids laughed when I read this book to them, and laughed even more when they read it for themselves.

Classic

Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazzard. First published in 1980, this novel follows the lives of Caroline and Grace Bell, orphaned sisters who leave Australia to start new lives for themselves in post-war England. Perspectives and chronology are slippery, almost to the point where it’s occasionally not quite clear what’s happening, but the narrative gathers speed as it moves and the final pages are unbelievably beautiful. Hazzard’s other novel, The Great Fire (2003), is equally gorgeous but perhaps even more tragic: it tackles the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nifty:

Even if you can’t get to Bath to visit the amazing Persephone Book Shop, which stocks beautiful reprints of books by women writers, you can subscribe to their newsletter.

Did you know that Stephen Colbert has started a book club? His first pick is Orbital, doubtless because I mentioned it in my newsletter for April: “Six astronauts from different countries, all residing on a space station that’s orbiting the earth at 17,000 miles an hour: could be the start of a Netflix horror movie, but it’s not. It’s a quasi-poetic meditation about being very, very far from home, and what the “big blue marble” looks like from space.”

And although I am not a podcast person myself (there are already too many voices in my head to add more), other people are, and this one from the BBC sounds great: THE ESSAY. The BBC describes the series as “Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.”

What’s on your summer reading list? What have you read recently and wondered why everyone else loved it except you? Add your thoughts in the comments below.

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Most of the history I know comes from historical fiction, just like most of the science I learned from Miss Frizzle and the Magic Schoolbus. Which is to say that I’m a little sketchy about the particulars, in both contexts.

In any case, here is your start of summer reading list (and as always, these books can be purchased from my shelf at Bookshop, or go to your trusty library).

NOVELS

We Do Not Part, Han Kang (translated by E Yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris): South Korean Nobel Laureate’s novel about a friendship, grief, and the way that trauma passes through generations. Buried in the story—literally, figuratively—is a massacre that happened in Jeju, off the coast of South Korea: harrowing and little known outside of that country. I don’t read Korean but the English translation is full of stunningly beautiful images and gorgeous sentences.

The Shadow King, Mazaa Mengiste: Moving back and forth in time, but focused on Italy’s 1935 attempt to invade Ethiopia during Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy, Mengiste’s novel tells the story of Hirut, who along with a group of other women, devises a plan to resist the Italian army. I didn’t want this book to end.

The Naming of the Birds, Pariac O’Connell: A juicy thriller set in Victorian England, about violence, power, and revenge. I didn’t realize that this is the second novel featuring the taciturn Inspector Henry Cutter; Gideon Bliss, his apprentice and a former divinity student; and a female journalist named Octavia Hillingdon, a female journalist, but the book stands on its own; it’s big fun, with some great villains and a very satisfying resolution. I’ve already ordered O’Connell’s other books from the library.

In the Distance, Hernan Diaz: Diaz wrote Trust, which is one of the best novels I’ve read about capitalism or writing, and in this novel, he tackles the myth of the American frontier. A young Swedish boy, Håkan, travels to America with his brother in the mid-nineteenth century, and in a series of misadventures ends up in San Francisco, alone and not speaking a word of English. Knowing only that he must find his brother in New York, he sets off east, encountering a cast of characters—and violence—that reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Unlike McCarthy’s novel, though, there is real tenderness in here too, but it is primarily a study of loneliness, written in gorgeous mind-blowing prose.

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KIDS!

Someone was asking about middle-grade books, which always tricky, because even if kids are really good readers at that age, they might not be ready for the plots of YA fiction. Joan Aiken to the rescue!

Wolves of Willoughby Chase: set in England, it’s the story of how two cousins, Bonnie and Sylvia, and their friend Simon, the boy who tends the geese, thwart the nefarious plans of the terrible governess Miss Slighcarp, and the wicked Mrs Brisket, who runs the boarding school. The novel is set during the (fictional) realm of King James III; there are wolves and chase scenes and thrilling escapes—if your kids like this book, they’ll also like Black Hearts in Battersea and Nightbirds on Nantucket.

CLASSIC!

In honor of Trump’s ghastly press conference with Cyril Ramaphosa, it’s time to read or re-read Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, a short novel that when it was published in 1981, was speculative fiction because it imagined a possible ending to apartheid. Now, it’s historical fiction, and offers a kind of double lens, in which Gordimer examines the marriage of Maureen and Bam Smales, white South Africans who tell themselves they’re “good” because they go to all the right protest rallies against apartheid—but when crisis comes, and they and their children are rescued by their “house boy,” July (a grown man in his forties), who takes them to his small village outside of Johannesburg, they are forced into an uncomfortable examination of their own privileged assumptions. It’s an amazing, powerful book, and incredibly relevant for our present moment. (Shameless self-promotion: I wrote an essay about this novel a few years ago.)

NIFTY STUFF

For anyone you know who thinks that Trump’s attack on international students who want to study in the US isn’t a big deal, here is an interactive map that shows how much money these students bring into the country, state by state.

Have you seen the documentary “Quilters,” on Netflix? At a maximum-security prison in Missouri, a group of male prisoners are taught to quilt—and they make quilts for kids in the foster care system. It’s enough to make you reaffirm your hope for humanity.

It’s PRIDE MONTH and in honor of that, spend some time looking at this exhibit from the Library of Congress, thus doing two things that would piss off the Taco-in-Chief.

And finally, if you find yourself in New York this summer, book yourself at the Silent Disco, part of Lincoln Center’s Summer in the City programming. What could be weirder or more fun than putting on headphones and dancing—alone but in community—with hundreds of other people?

As always, thanks for reading — and for sharing this newsletter with any of your reading friends! In the comments below, let us know what you’re reading, what you’re doing for fun this summer, or share your favorite online oddities!

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But I digress. Here is a batch of spring books for you! All the links will take you to my bookshelf at Bookshop.org, the online retailer that supports indie bookstores. (And remember, Bookshop now sells ebooks, if that’s your jam).

Currently Reads

A Training School for Elephants (Sophy Roberts): A story that defies belief, of King Leopold of Belgium’s plan to import Indian elephants to Africa, so that he could use them to carry “his” plunder from Central Africa to waiting Belgium ships. King Leopold, you’ll remember, laid waste to the Congo, killing millions in the process. Leopold hired an Irishman named Frederick Carter to bring Indian elephants and their trainers from India to Zanzibar and then Lake Taganyika, and back. Roberts recreates this journey (without elephants), following Carter’s diaries and letters, and in the process takes us through contemporary landscapes, drawing into conversations with everyone from nuns to a fez-wearing chieftain who looks at her maps while they eat Chinese food in Dodoma. It’s a brilliant travel narrative—and a heartbreaking story about the ravages of colonialism.

The Reformatory (Tanarive Due) A supernatural horror story along the lines of Beloved, reminding us (again) that there is no rational way to “explain” the history of racisim in the United States: we have to move into the realm of impossibility to grasp the actuality. A young boy is sent to a “reform school” on a trumped-up charge, and encounters horrors both in this world and in the beyond. His sister and others work feverishly to engineer his escape—I won’t tell you what happens, other than to say you probably shouldn’t read this book alone at night, because you might not sleep that well. It is, however, a fantastic novel—and would make a hellishly good companion to Ryan Coogler’s movie “Sinners.” You can’t bury history, is the thing, or erase it: it haunts us, no matter what we do.

Enter Ghost (Isabelle Hammad) Another double-layered ghost story: this time, the ghost is the ghost of Hamlet’s father, as a make-shift acting troupe attempts to stage a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Sonia, a Palestinian actor living in London, comes to Haifa to visit her sister Haneen, and finds herself cast as Gertrude, under the direction of the charismatic Mariam. Still aching from the end of a disastrous love affair, Sonia is trying to sort out her life—but returning to Palestine seems, initially, to make things more complicated. The novel is a portrait of modern Palestine—and the restless ghosts of what it means to be Palestinian—but it is also a family story, as the sisters reckon with their family’s history, and an illustration about the power of art to speak to better selves.

Isola (Allegra Goodman) Not entirely a ghost story, this novel is inspired by a sixteenth-century heroine, Marguerite, an orphan and heir to a fortune, whose guardian forces her to sail with him to “New France” (Canada). When Marguerite falls in love with someone the guardian disapproves of, the lovers are punished by being put ashore on a deserted island with no provisions. It’s a remarkable story (and reminded me a bit of Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wild)—and in this case, while the novel is not a ghost story, it is the power of Marguerite’s memories that help save her.

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CLASSIC

Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson): Hopkinson, a Caribbean Canadian writer, likes to say that speculative fiction is a way to turn the trope of “white savior” on its head (see: Octavia Butler, NK Jemison, Nnedi Okorafor, and others). In this novel, a young woman, Ti-Jeanne, must save herself and her child as they combat evil forces (some from this world, some from the spirit world) in dystopian post-apocalyptic Toronto. The scenes of climate catastrophe and urban decay are wove through with Caribbean spirituality and folklore, which Ti-Jeanne must learn to navigate in order to save herself, her child, and the city itself. Ghosts, magic, a little humor, and climate crisis: what could be more fun for spring?

KIDS

Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O’Dell) The junior version of Isola, in a sense: the story of a young girl, Karana, whose father and other men were killed by Russian fur trappers, and who is then left behind when missionaries take away the other villagers. Loosely based on a true story, the novel describes Karana’s efforts to survive. When I was little, I loved the descriptions of the cormorant-feather cloak she made for herself, and I cried a bit at when her dog Rontu dies. An adventure story for the ages.

The Saturdays (Elizabeth Enright) Another sort of adventure story, but this one is of the urban sort. Set in New York in the 1940s, the book is about the four children of the Melendy family: Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver. The children decide to pool their allowance so that each of them can have a “big” outing (on their own) every Saturday. The price point and some of the descriptions of the city will be seem dated, but the joy of being out on your own is something that even contemporary kids will understand.

SOME NIFTY THINGS

I’m sending this newsletter out on 4 May… so may the fourth be with you, as they say. And in honor of that, it would be remiss of me not to mention my husband’s great book about Star Wars, Lucasfilm, and philosophy. He’s mulling over an idea for another book, about Shakespeare and Star Wars, which I’m hoping he calls “ShakesStar”… stay tuned about that!

Another nifty: For a little global perspective, try this link, which gives you the true size of countries, rather than what you see on a map. I got that link from the great newsletter, “Recommendo,” which is exactly that: personally generated lists of cool stuff.

New York readers, you should be subscribing to Gotham City, which lists all the funky cool stuff that doesn’t make it into the mainstream listing services.

And I’m excited to say that my friend Andromeda’s thriller, The Deepest Lake, just came out in paperback and is Barnes & Noble’s May featured title! If you haven’t read it, you should—plus in the back of the paperback is a teaser for her next thriller, “What Boys Learn,” due out this winter. Andromeda doing a free virtual event with Erin Flanagan on 8 May: register for it here.

There’s your reading for May, sorted! What are you reading this month? What books are you looking forward to?

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Given the recent (and continuing) news cycle, you might be looking for some escapist reading, so here are some suggestions! (As always, these books are almost all available on my bookshelf at Bookshop.org)

Current Reading

ORBITAL, Samantha Harvey. Six astronauts from different countries, all residing on a space station that’s orbiting the earth at 17,000 miles an hour: could be the start of a Netflix horror movie, but it’s not. It’s a quasi-poetic meditation about being very, very far from home, and what the “big blue marble” looks like from space. The book lasts for sixteen sunrises, each of which gives us flashes of life in space—floating, eating, laughing, and yearning. If you’re looking for fast-paced plot, this book is not for you, but if you want to leave the earth and plodding prose behind, get this book from the library (or your favorite indie bookshop).

NOTES FROM DEEP TIME: A JOURNEY THROUGH PAST AND FUTURE WORLDS, Helen Gordon. From deep space to deep time. This nonfiction book (which will remind some of you of Robert McFarlane’s Underland), which is beautifully written, takes a close look at very ground under our feet—from an earthquake-monitoring system in California, to fossils in London, to volcanoes in Italy. I loved this book because—as all the best writing does—it helped me think about and imagine our world in entirely new ways. Here is a link to an early chapter.

RED SONJA For straight-up escape and propulsive action, try Red Sonja, written by legendary comic-book writer Gail Simone. Red Sonja is a warrior on the run, the ferocious “She-Devil of Hyrkania,” who when the story opens, is fleeing the wrath of her lover, a warrior queen from whom Red Sonja has stolen a priceless bracelet. Now the queen wants revenge, unnamed others want the bracelet, and Red Sonja’s nightmares seem to want her dead. Available at libraries or indie bookshops.

CARELESS PEOPLE: This book, written by Sarah Wynn-Williams, isn’t escapist but it is a fascinating (terrible) view of the people who run Facebook, which will make the latest iteration of Mark Zuckerberg seem a lot less surprising. Libraries have it in print and e-book or you can order your own, and revel in the knowledge that Zuck & Co really really don’t want you to read what she has to say.

CLASSIC: The original, the one-and-only, no sparkles, no fancy cars, no wry sense of humor: DRACULA, by Bram Stoker. If you’ve not read the original, you owe it to yourself. At this point, of course, there’s no surprise factor in who Count Dracula turns out to be, but it’s wild to see how the various elements that Stoker more or less invented have become lore. A student once asked me what Dracula was really about, and I said “everything,” because it is: sexuality, queer desire, homosexual panic, immigration, disease, technology, industrialisation, anti-Semitism—pretty much you name it, it’s in there.

KIDS:

One of my husband’s favorite picture books when he was little, SMALL PIG became one of our kids’ favorites too. Even now, “sit down and sink down in good soft mud” is something of a catch-phrase in our household. Arnold Lobel is also the writer of the beloved Frog & Toad books, but Small Pig isn’t as well known. I promise your little kids will love it.

NIFTY:

For those of you in New York (or planning a visit), The Skint is a great listing of free or almost free events around the city. Sign up here.

And if you’re wondering what to read next (and don’t like anything on my lists), try the Literature Map! Type in the name of a writer you like, and see what other writers constellate alongside.

Thanks for reading! Support your libraries! And feel free to share this newsletter!

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Currently Reading

Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional finally became available in the US, and it’s beautiful. Written in short chapters—I’m tempted to almost call them prayer-length—it’s narrated by a woman who leaves her life as a species conservator in Sydney and joins an enclosed convent in New South Wales. Overcome initially by despair at the state of the world, eventually the narrator joins the nuns in their quiet routines of cleaning, praying, and singing—and then in their efforts to survive not only of the Covid-19 pandemic but even worse, the plague of mice that swept through NSW during Covid (which actually happened). The mice cover everywhere, are everywhere, and trying to ward them off is almost impossible. Wood’s eye for specific, sometimes harrowing details, makes the mice plague into the stuff of horror stories. But even with the mice, this quiet, powerful book speaks to the power of survival, community, and forgiveness.

I might have been predisposed to like Stoneyard Devotional because as a kid, I stumbled on Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede (1969), about an affluent middle-aged businesswoman named Philippa who joins a cloistered Benedictine convent. Back then—I was probably ten—it amazed me that a book about women could have nothing to do with romance or marriage. I re-read Brede recently, and while it’s not as magical as I remember it as a kid, it’s still quite satisfying. And then, of course, a few years ago, I read Matrix, by Lauren Groff, a mesmerizing fictional account of Marie de France, a 12^th century mystic, whose flourishing abbey became a threat to the patriarchal community outside its walls.

If nuns aren’t your jam, then try Kailiane Bradley’s Ministry of Time, a “what if” novel about time-travel: what if time-travel were possible, and what if some historical figures from the past were brought into the future (slightly ahead of where we are now)? The time-travelers are known as “refugees” and “expats,” by the British government that extracted them, and much of the novel is about how these figures negotiate the modern world: what do they make of smart phones and weaponry and dating apps and public exercising and climate crisis? The novel ultimately takes a turn that is both sinister and romantic, leaving us to wonder what we would do, if we landed in another reality—or if we were charged with helping someone to acclimate to our own?

The classic I’m recommending this month is really a duo: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (the 1818 edition, which is way more radical that her revisions) and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, which won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (a prize that brings along with it, ironically, translation into English). I like to introduce Shelley’s novel to my first-year students by asking them what they did on their summer vacation, given that Shelley wrote this book when she was 19 and it only gets more relevant, not less. Saadawi’s book doesn’t offer a direct response to Shelley’s, but it’s a wild, irreverent, magical, bitter commentary on life in Baghdad after the Americans “rescued” Iraq from Sadaam Hussein. A pieced-together creature called Whatsisname roams the city, eventually becoming a kind of ouroboros of vengeance, as he tries to revenge all the innocents who have been killed in the war and its aftermath.

For Kids (and the rest of us)

In honor of her March birthday, I’m suggestion The House of Dies Drear, by the brilliant mid-twentieth century writer Virginia Hamilton, whose novel M.C. Higgins the Great, won the Newbery Medal for Children’s literature, making Hamilton the first Black author to win the award. Dies Drear is about Thomas Small, whose family moves to Ohio from North Carolina so that his father can do research into abolitionist history. They live in an old house riddled with secret passages, and, perhaps, ghosts. At this moment in US culture, as the White House attempts to erase history, this book testifies to the impossibility of ignoring the past.

All of these books are available from my bookshelf at Bookshop.org (which now has ebooks!) or at your local library.

Something nifty:

I visited my mom recently in Northern Illinois, part of the world that us “coastal elites” sometimes refer to as flyover country. We had some great meals, and I visited a fabulous indie bookshop called Maze Books, where I found not only an old Madeline L’Engle book I hadn’t read but also a Bobbsey Twins book – I’m a sucker for 1930s-era series books—and got one of my kids a t-shirt that says “Read Books, Burn Fascists.” And while I’m not generally a fan of burning people, I am a big fan of reading books.

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Welcome to February, which in NYC has been damp and cold, or alternatively, frigid and windy. Good weather for sitting inside and losing yourself in a book while ignoring both the freezing temperatures and the erosion of the US democracy. If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere else—well, in my mind it’s always a good time to read a book.

I thought this month I’d give you lots of suggestions; last month’s newsletter seemed a little skimpy. Lots of people I know have more than one book going at a time. I can’t quite manage that, unless I’m in the middle of a research project, in which case I have a “work book” and a “fun book.”

At the bottom of the book list, you’ll find a few fun things I found on the internet, including an idea for Valentine’s that won’t break your bank or clutter your house.

Current Reads

The Alternatives, Caoilinn Hughes. If you liked Ann Napolitano’s Hello, Beautiful, you will love this book: four sisters in contemporary Ireland, each trying to overcome their tragic childhood in radically different ways. When one of the sisters disappears, the other three have to put aside their lives—and their tangled, angry histories—to try and find her. Their family relationships collide and evolve, against the background of contemporary Ireland and the global climate crisis. Even if you didn’t read Napolitano’s book, if you’re a person who has a family, moments in this book will resonate with your life.

Palestine, Joe Sacco: Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Palestine is hard to categorize: it’s a novel, a memoir, a travelogue, a news story. . . Sacco is sometimes known as a “comics journalist,” whose visual style is similar to that of R. Crumb. For anyone interested in “what it’s like over there,” this book might be a good place to start.

Cold Crematorium: Reporting from the Land of Auschwitz. I posted about this book on my Instagram feed but it’s worth adding to this newsletter. It’s the first-person account of the last year of Auschwitz, written by József Debreczeni, a Hungarian journalist and translated into English for the first time by Paul Olchvary into English. There are no glib morals, no Hollywood-style heroism, just a clear and precise detailing of how the Nazis and their enablers perpetuated mass destruction—and with that clarity, also the implicit admonition that it should never again happen anywhere. (The hardback is available in bookshops; the paperback will be released later this year.)

Sister Deborah, Scholastique Mukasonga (translated from the French by Mark Polizzoti). I noticed this book sitting on the “librarian recommended” shelf at Jefferson Market Library because of the title—I had no idea that Mukasonga is a prizewinning Rwandan writer. The plot is thin: a young girl is healed by the mysterious Sister Deborah and then as an adult tries to determine how Deborah came from America to 1930s Rwanda—and then why she suddenly left the country. Within that plot, however, are explorations into faith, politics, colonialism and Rwandan women’s resistance to colonialism.

For kids (and grownups who like good books)

Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s novels, which are great choices for middle-school readers: Egypt Game, The Velvet Room, Witches of Worm. Snyder wrote a lot of books, but these are my favorites, all published in the late 1960s. The books might seem a little tame for today’s readers, but the books all take seriously the world as it looks to kids and were, for their time, quite progressive: Jessica’s anger and her destructive actions in Witches of Worm; the way an inter-racial group of friends come together to solve a murder and befriend an old man, in Egypt Game; and the Depression-era difficulties faced by Robin and her family, who find a temporary home as apricot pickers, in The Velvet Room, which triggered my life-long desire for a house with a turret with a velvet-covered window seat.

And, in honor of the recent death of Jules Feiffer, The Phantom Tollbooth (1961), written by Norm Juster and illustrated by Feiffer. Milo, the boy who pays attention to nothing, opens a mysterious package containing tollbooth—and then finds himself in the Kingdom of Wisdom, which has fallen into sad disarray because the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason have been exiled. Far be it for me to draw any comparisons between what happens when people stop paying attention, in this novel, to our own current situation. Let’s just say that without Rhyme or Reason, nothing works very well. Very young kids will love the drawings but miss most of the puns; on the other hand, reading it aloud is delightful because it’s so damn funny. And Feiffer’s illustrations deepen the book’s satiric wisdom.

The Terrible Trivium, ogre of wasted effort

Classics

In December, Bapsi Sidhwa, the brilliant Parsi Pakistani writer, died. She wrote in English and lived in the US for much of her adult life. Of her many novels, I like The Bride best (it’s published in the US as The Pakistani Bride). It was the first book Sidhwa wrote, but wasn’t published until 1983. The novel focuses on three central characters: Qasim, a young man from the harsh and beautiful country of northern Pakistan; Zaitoon, an orphan he adopts during the chaos of Partition in Lahore; and Carol, an American woman married to an American Pakistani, who comes to Pakistan full of romantic notions that collide with reality. If you’re interested in knowing a bit more about Sidhwa’s impact, you can read this essay by my friend Sabyn Javeri.

My final suggestion for the month is Seasons of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih, which is perhaps one of my favorite books of all time. Written in Arabic in 1966 and translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, the book tells the story of two men from Sudan, both educated in England, both of whom return to a small village on the shore of the Nile. The narrator, whose name we never know, becomes fascinated with the other man, Mustafa Sa’eed, whose return to the Sudan comes after a cataclysmic stay in England and a failed career as a preeminent economist. The novel not only critiques colonial rule (it was published in the aftermath of Sudanese independence), but also the greed of Sudan’s government, and the treatment of women, in both England and Sudan. Can any society consider itself civilized if it treats women as pawns? A good question—and one that you might hope would no longer be relevant.

A few nifties:

Great news! Bookshop.org now has ebooks!

Looking for a Valentine’s Day present? How about adopt a bird?

The Recommendo newsletter mentions this site, which is the Wiki of Enigmas. Such a cool idea.

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This inaugural edition of my book review newsletter should be arriving in your email the day before Inauguration Day in the United States, aka 20 January, aka my birthday. For many of us, this date has been a day of celebration (see Obama’s two inaugurations, which made my birthday an absolute delight) but 20-1-2025 will not be a celebration, for about 48.7% of us, anyway.

So if you’re among that almost 49%, it seems like Inauguration Day would be a really good day to read a book. If libraries were open, I’d tell you to go to your library, but it’s MLK Day and so libraries will be closed to honor MLK’s legacy of anti-capitalist, anti-racist revolution. Instead, go to your favorite indie bookshop, or order online from Bookshop, which supports indie bookstores.

This newsletter will arrive monthly and it’s free. I’d love it if you shared the subscription info with reading friends. Each month, I’ll let you know what I’ve been reading and liking; I’ll also include a kids book or two (some older books, some newer ones), and at least one oldie-but-goodie. I hope the comments section will turn into a book discussion, and swapping of titles and favorites. And a small note: the one thing I won’t post here will be reviews of books I didn’t like. You can ask about a title in the comments but as far as reviews go? It’s like that old saying: if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

So here are this month’s books. In keeping with my anti-inaugural sentiments, the list this month is mostly books by women writing about things that would be disdained by the new resident of the White House. All of these books can be found on my Bookshop Shelf.

CURRENT READS

Dervla McTiernan’s What Happened to Nina, a thriller set in Vermont that starts with a girl who goes missing while on a hiking trip with her boyfriend. That set-up makes it seem like just another “missing girl” novel, but McTiernan flips the narrative on its head by focusing on the parents—the parents of the missing girl and the parents of the boy who is the prime suspect. I found myself wondering what I’d do, in each instance: how far would I go to find my child and how far would I go to protect my child if he (or she) were accused of a crime? Into this complicated mix, McTiernan stirs class differences and the power of social media to shape perception. You might have read other McTiernan novels—I liked The Scholar a lot—but What Happened to Nina is one of her best. As for why the novel would be disdained by cream-faced-loon-in-chief: well, it’s about damage being done to a young woman, which seems to be almost a prequisite for any male member of his cabinet. But in this book, people care about the missing woman—and do something about it.

I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, by Lucy Sante, starts with Sante—then a man—experimenting with FaceApp during Covid and feeling a profound shift when the App turned then-him into a woman. Sante plays more and more with the app and then, as she writes, “the dam burst,” and the feelings she’s had her entire life, since boyhood and into adulthood, shift into focus. Sante is in her late fifties when she realizes who she is, after a lifetime of living and working in New York as a writer and journalist, chronicling the New York avante-garde in books like Low Life (1991). This memoir is a graceful and poignant account not only of her gender transition but also of aging—and of aging as a woman. Full of stories about 1970s-era New York and a childhood spent bouncing between Belgium and the U.S., this short, lyrical book is a marvelous example of what memoir can do: help us find connections with lives not our own. As for the Trumpian disdain: that should be self-evident, given the subject.

A CLASSIC

This month’s classic is from Edith Wharton, whose career includes some seriously fantastic novels (not to mention some great ghost stories, several collections of essays, an account of her travels through Morocco, and Ethan Frome, one of the most brilliant and depressing books in US Literature). It is Wharton’s birthday on 24 January, so I’m highlight The Custom of the Country, published in 1913. Some people think The Age of Innocence is Wharton’s greatest novel, but Custom is even better. I think the heroine, the inimitable Undine Spragg, is perhaps the first true bitch in US fiction: Undine, whose beauty is “as vivid and almost as crude” as electric lights, is pure appetite; she comes most fully alive when she’s being looked at. The novel is acerbic and furious, funny and tragic: every time I teach this novel, I tell my students that Wharton anticipated the Kardashians and social media influencers. It’s the novel for our moment.

FOR KIDS (and everyone else)

When I was a kid, I loved Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind-Family books, set at the turn into the twentieth century in the what was the exotic (to my small-town Midwestern self) Lower East Side of Manhattan. The first book was published in 1951, but the story is set in 1912. It follows the lives of five sisters whose father runs a junk shop. There’s very little money but a strong “can do” spirit; the family maintains their Jewish traditions—celebrating Purim and Sukkot, preparing for the sabbath—and incorporate new American celebrations, like the Fourth of July. Like the adventures of the March sisters in Little Women, the adventures in these stories are ordinary: a lost library book, a trip to the junk shop, deal with school rivalries and petty jealousies—and with serious illness. Some scholars have said that the popularity of these books (Taylor went on to write four sequels) paved the way, in fact, for Portnoy’s Complaint, published in 1969. (Frankly, I like Taylor’s books better.) Sisterhood, immigration, and the importance of history: what more do we need on this inauguration day?

Something Nifty

Syndetic published its graphic chart of the most popular 2024 library titles, compiled from data in US libraries. If you’re a book nerd (or just like charts), it’s fun to watch the titles move up and back, like a literary horse race.

Happy reading! Drop a note in the comments about what you’re reading now, or what you’re wanting to read: suggestions always welcome!

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