Reading, Writing, Revising

September Reading Recap

2026-10-06T14:13:50.574-07:00

My September reading was mostly the excitement of brand new novels!

→ WICKHILLS by Premee Mohamed: Ferec has many years of experience as a Seaborne agent, and he knows the city of Wickhills better than anyone, but his latest mission makes him question everything he thought he knew about both the agency and the city. Wickhills, like the world's other cities, is surrounded by walls. Land travel between cities is impossible, and sea travel carefully controlled. Ferec's handler assigns him to retrieve an asset from an incoming ship, but nobody is to know about this assignment, not even the rest of the agency. The asset turns out to be a stowaway scientist who has come in secret from another city, bringing knowledge and a device that he won't explain, but that he says would be dangerous in the wrong hands. The more Ferec learns, the more complicated the situation becomes.

This is an exciting spy story with a Cold War vibe, set in an unusual fantasy city. In Wickhills, among other oddnesses, pillars and glass churches sprout from the ground and must be handled by the Defective Architecture Eradication Division. Though some of the setting details seem like random whimsy, there's an overall sense of logic and deep history to the worldbuilding. I enjoyed exploring Wickhills with Ferec as my guide, and I was caught up in the twists and turns of the espionage thriller.

This is my first time reading a book by Mohamed, but she has published more than a dozen others in a range of speculative genres. While Wickhills is a standalone, I wouldn't be surprised to see more set in this world, and I'd definitely read on.

→ EXIT PARTY by Emily St. John Mandel: When Ari is released from a lengthy prison sentence in 2031, she emerges into an unfamiliar country. The United States has collapsed, and after a series of secessions, battles, and attacks, a tentative peace has settled in Los Angeles and the Republic of California. To celebrate the lifting of the city-wide curfew, Ari and her new roommate attend a party. It's a wild night, and a strange one: During the evening, a duplicate version of one of the guests appears and addresses Ari by an odd name. Later, the host steps into the kitchen, and then he's never seen again. Only much, much later do these events begin to make sense to Ari, when she meets another double who knows a different version of herself.

The way this story unfolds is constantly surprising, and I was excited to follow Ari and the other characters in every new direction. I would have been happy to learn even more about each person and thread, but by the end, I was satisfied enough by the amount that's revealed. I've now read all of Mandel's previous novels, and though the stories are quite distinct, she often writes about topics that are prominent in this book: crime and wrongdoing, investigation, the creation of art. She also reuses characters, and though it's not necessary to know or remember the other appearances, it adds a fun extra layer. I recommend this, and all Mandel's work, to readers who appreciate unconventional novels.

→ TAIPEI STORY by R.F. Kuang: Lily is a college student spending the summer in Taipei to study Chinese in an intensive language program. Like many of her fellow students, she has a familial connection to the language, but none at all to Taiwan. Lily was born in mainland China before immigrating to the US as a small child, where she forgot most of the Mandarin she'd known. Though she still has family she could visit in China, it's a less convenient or hospitable travel destination than the more open Taiwan. So she's seeking a connection to her culture in a place with a different culture, and she's aware of this irony as she visits popular landmarks and tries to make sense of Taiwan's complicated history. Lily struggles more with her language classes than she anticipated, and the relationships with her roommate and new friends also become unexpectedly difficult. The story follows Lily through her increasingly challenging summer as she learns about language, Taiwan, herself, and her own family's history.

This is a far quieter and more personal novel than Kuang's others. The story seems heavily drawn from the author's own experiences at a similar language program, so the book often reads like a memoir, with the narrative shaped around day-to-day activities and details. Because the other Kuang novels I've read are propulsively plotted, I was surprised by how few big events happen in this one, but I mostly enjoyed this book for what it is: a close look at a place and a style of language study I knew nothing about.

→ GOOD DAYS BAD DAYS by Emily Bleeker: Charlie returns to her hometown for the first time in over thirty years. She's been estranged from her parents ever since she was removed from their home as a teen due to her mother's hoarding and her father's enablement. But when her father, Greg, calls and asks her to finally help clear out the house, Charlie agrees. Her mother, Betty, is suffering from dementia and has been moved to a memory care center. Charlie discovers that the "good days" when her mother can remember their difficult history are actually worse than the "bad days" when Betty relives an earlier, happier past. Charlie knows nothing about that version of the past, and as she seeks to uncover her parents' secrets, alternating chapters from Greg's perspective follow the complicated early years of Greg and Betty's relationship.

Early on, I was interested to see where the story was going, and particularly to understand how Charlie's parents ended up in the situation that led to her removal. But the psychology of Betty's hoarding turns out not to be the novel's focus. Instead Greg's storyline sets up different mysteries for Charlie to wonder about, and I found it at first too slow, then unnecessarily sensational. None of the characters every really came to life for me, though some emotional moments rang true.

I read this for book club, and it was arranged for author Emily Bleeker to speak to our group. Though I wasn't the biggest fan of the novel, I appreciated hearing the details of how she came to write it.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Joel Pinckney at Defector asks, What Do Booksellers Make Of "The End Of Reading"?: "There's much that can and should be said about this onslaught of post-literate panic, but it's also worth noting who is and isn't being asked to contribute to the conversation. Notably absent from these essays is one group of people who might have real insight into the situation: booksellers. The prognosticators wring their hands over the demise of reading, but ignore those whose very livelihood depends on the selling of books. Perhaps they might have something to say on the subject."

August Reading Recap

2026-09-04T17:34:32.510-07:00

I had another great month of summer reading, and now I can begin on my anticipated fall reads!

→ CRUX by Gabriel Tallent: Dan and Tamma are best friends in their last year of high school, and all they want to do is climb rocks together. Every evening that they can get away from troubled home lives, they make another attempt on the boulder that's at the limit of their skills. They climb without the safety of ropes or crash pads—not for the challenge, but because they can't afford any gear. When they aren't tackling the boulder problem, they're struggling with the unsolvable problems of home. Dan's parents expect him to live out their dreams of college and career, while Tamma's family doesn't expect her to make anything of herself, until they expect too much. Only on the rocks, risking their lives, do they feel in control.

This novel is so harrowing and so good. Dan and Tamma are complicated, original characters. Though they often relate through ridiculously vulgar banter, their friendship is deep and loving. Their family situations are also complicated, involving a range of difficult material. Tallent writes the climbing sequences with effective, jargon-laced description that powerfully conveys what's happening both physically and emotionally. The threat of death hangs over the story, and some scenes are so intense that I was barely breathing as I read. I recommend this to any readers prepared for the intensity, particularly anyone with an interest in climbing.

→ COOL MACHINE by Colson Whitehead brings the Harlem Trilogy to a satisfying close. It's the 1980s, Ray Carney has reached middle age, and he's proud that the success of his Harlem furniture store has earned him recognition as Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month (August). Carney hardly ever engages in his side business as a fence anymore, except sometimes when he does. And when he does, just like in the past, those shady dealings can entangle Carney and his associates with more complicated crimes, dangerous situations, and violent characters.

This final installment is just as good as the first two, with a familiar style, tone, and humor. There's an appropriate sense of the time that's accumulated over the course of the trilogy (the first book opens in 1959, and this one concludes in 1986). Carney and the other characters are frequently aware of their advancing age and reflecting back on previous exploits. The 1980s portrait of a gentrifying New York City is also often depicted through memories of what was there before.

If you like reading about conflicted criminals, the details of heists and shakedowns, and stories where the setting is another character, I recommend this series. A television adaptation is now in the works, and I think it will also be great on screen.

→ WHAT AM I, A DEER? by Polly Barton: A young woman from England has recently moved to Frankfurt for a translation job at a video game company. The big life change is exciting, but she constantly feels out of place: She doesn't care for video games, and while she's fluent in the Japanese she's translating to English, her German is poor. A shift in her Frankfurt experience begins when a stranger returns her forgotten umbrella as she steps off the tram. She discovers he works in another department at the large game company, and though they have no further interactions, she develops an obsessive crush. She's unable to shake the fixation, even as she enters a relationship with a different man who works at the company, forms friendships with her coworkers, and indulges in her love of karaoke as a way to sing out all her feelings.

I found this novel compelling, delightfully odd, and frequently funny, but it's not going to be for everyone. The narrative follows the protagonist's stream of consciousness in disorienting directions, the lengthy sentences require close attention, and not much happens. What pulled me in and kept me interested was that the character and her situation felt so real and specific. I wanted to find out how her various relationships (and non-relationships) were going to pan out and what she'd figure out about herself. And I wanted to know all her thoughts about translation and karaoke!

→ GHOST CITIES by Siang Lu opens with the story of an emperor who gains the throne after his father dies choking on a chicken bone. Among the emperor's first acts are to outlaw the eating of poultry, to execute the imperial taster, and to appoint the taster's three-month-old baby to the role. The continuing tales of this empire feature more of the ruler's absurd edicts and cruel treatment of his court and subjects. In alternating chapters, a modern-day story unfolds: Xiang Lu has been working as a translator for the Chinese consulate in Sydney. Problem is, he doesn't speak any Mandarin and has been doing all his work using Google Translate. Once he's caught, his firing goes viral and attracts the attention of a film director who hopes to attach Xiang's questionable fame to his own infamous projects.

This is a strange, entertaining novel. The two storylines are both full of absurd situations and memorable characters. These become connected through an increasing number of parallels and cross-references, though there's no tidy explanation for the pairing. I wanted a bit more from the end of this novel, but I enjoyed reading it, and I'll definitely be interested in more of Lu's work.

→ THE ECHO WIFE by Sarah Gailey: When Evelyn is honored at a gala for her research into human cloning, she tries to keep focus on her professional success, not the recent ending of her marriage. If anyone knew the details of Nathan's betrayal, it would be not only embarrassing, but damaging to the reputation of her work. Nathan left her for what he imagined was the perfect woman: a clone he created using Evelyn's methods, and her genetic material. Martine is a double to Evelyn physically, but her personality was designed to be docile and accommodating. Legally, she isn't supposed to exist, and so Evelyn has been attempting to pretend she doesn't. But after something horrific occurs, Martine calls Evelyn in desperation, and the two must work together to hide ever-larger secrets.

This science-fictional spin on a domestic thriller kept me engaged. I enjoyed the scientific worldbuilding around Evelyn's research, and wished for even more detail to set the context. The thrillery escalation of plot complications kept the story surprising, though I occasionally questioned the logic of events or character decisions. At the center of the story is the evolving dynamic between Evelyn and Martine, and that was consistently interesting. Gailey especially does strong work with Evelyn's narration, which increasingly reveals how her perspective is skewed by past trauma.

Releases I'm Ready For, Fall 2026

2026-08-27T18:09:42.527-07:00

This fall promises the publication of so many exciting new books! These are the ones I'm most looking forward to, from authors I've enjoyed reading:

→ TAIPEI STORY by R.F. Kuang (Sept 8): Kuang writes in multiple genres: I've read the alternate-history-with-magic BABEL, the publishing-world-thriller YELLOWFACE, and the grad-students-visiting-hell KATABASIS. This next book seems firmly planted in reality, focusing on a college student at a summer language program who grapples with her family history and identity.

→ EXIT PARTY by Emily St. John Mandel (Sept 15): I've read all of Mandel's novels, and I love seeing how certain concepts and even characters recur throughout her work. I'm anticipating more of those echoes in what sounds like a fresh and yet very Mandelian story: EXIT PARTY involves a near future American civil war, multiple possible realities, crime, and art.

→ PLY by Hernan Diaz (Sept 29): My introduction to Diaz's work was TRUST, a fascinating reading experience through nested narrative layers. I'm intrigued that his next novel is science fiction set in a far future dystopia, described as "Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller."

→ A WALL IS ALSO A ROAD by Annalee Newitz (Oct 6): I'm a fan of Newitz's science fiction novels, which vary widely but are all inventive and thought-provoking. I am beyond curious to read their latest, about a graduate student who is also a slime mold and visits Earth to do fieldwork in ancient Pompeii.

→ THE OCCIDENTAL BOOK OF THE DEAD by T. Geronimo Johnson (Oct 6): WELCOME TO BRAGGSVILLE was the sharp and darkly funny story of college students who plan a mock lynching as a form of protest, a poorly conceived scheme that goes terribly wrong. I've been eager to see another book from Johnson, and this is going to be a big one: 672 pages about a Black cop, a violent confrontation with a white teenager, and the disputed facts of the highly publicized case.

→ LIFE OUT OF ORDER by Audrey Niffenegger (Oct 6): I have a lot of fondness for THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, which came out back in 2003. The first surprising news of a sequel was announced in 2013, so I was surprised all over again to learn it's finally arriving this fall. While I'm trepidatious, I will definitely be satisfying my curiosity about the life of Alba, the time-traveling daughter of the original couple.

→ OFF THE RESERVATION by Stephen Graham Jones (Oct 13): This is another unexpected (though less surprising) sequel, to the incredible and grisly THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS. This story focuses on different characters, five years after the events of the first book. I'm ready for more disturbing horror, more great dialogue, and more reckoning with the past.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Madelyn Johnson explores how the role of book cover design has changed in the age of social media: "A cover no longer simply needs to communicate genre or tone. It must also construct an identity that a reader of that book can inhabit. If book covers once translated text for their readers, they now operate in reverse: translating readers for their audiences. In this context, the old adage has been inverted from don't judge a book by its cover to judge a reader by the covers on their books.

July Reading Recap

2026-08-06T14:59:18.685-07:00

I'm doing so much summer reading!

→ THE LANGUAGE OF LIARS by S.L. Huang: Ro has trained as a Linguist, and he's determined to prove himself by becoming the first in generations to make a jump. The empathic sense of his species, when combined with a deep understanding of languages, allows the rare individual to jump across the galaxy into the body of a Star Eater. That species, so alien in body and mind to Ro's, lives in the vacuum of space and has the unique ability to find and mine the meridian element. Meridian is crucial for every world in the conglomerate, but the Star Eaters and their skills are poorly understood, so the possibility of jumping provides a secret advantage for Ro's small moon against the galaxy's larger powers. Once, the Star Eaters were cruelly exploited, but now they are full members of the conglomerate who participate willingly in meridian mining. Or at least, that's the claim. Ro discovers that this idea, along with so much else he's been taught, may be lies.

This story introduces so many fascinating concepts and explores them all well in a surprisingly small number of pages (about 160). I was immediately drawn in by the focus on linguistics, and thrilled by the continuing language innovations in the story and how important a role these play in the plot. I was also delighted by the alienness of this story without humans, featuring characters who are physically nothing like humans. Huang's skillful writing made me feel immersed in the unfamiliar bodies and worlds. But it was still easy to connect with Ro as a character, because Huang wisely gives him recognizable personality traits and flaws. This is a wildly creative and clever novella, and I recommend it to science fiction fans, especially those interested in language.

→ FOUNDLING FATHERS by Meg Elison: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams are teenage brothers growing increasingly curious about the world beyond their secluded island. They've been taught about the new nation of America and every scientific innovation of the 18th century, but they've never been permitted to see more of the world. Then one fateful day, the brothers find a mysterious device that shows far more of the world than they're prepared for, including the revelation that the year is 2026. While they make plans to confront their mother with this information, the Antediluvian Society meets to discuss when to introduce their family of clones to modern America and get the country back on the right track.

This entertaining novella establishes its tone immediately with an opening line about Benjamin Franklin discovering internet porn. From there, it's a wild and bawdy ride that speeds right along. Well-handled POV shifts offer the perspectives of the naive clones as well as the informed adults, with appropriate diction for each. I expected the story to play out over a longer period of time than it does, but what's here fun to read, and Elison clearly had fun developing the absurd premise of a new American experiment gone wrong.

→ SANDWICH by Catherine Newman: For twenty years, Rocky and her family have been renting the same house on Cape Cod for a week every summer. Her kids are now young adults living away from home, so spending this time together brings Rocky a special joy. It also brings on memories of every past vacation, all the laughter and tantrums and fights with her husband and love, and the painful memories of long-ago pregnancy loss. As the family visits their favorite spots on the Cape, Rocky deals with her memories, with menopause symptoms, with her children's adult drama, and with the health of her elderly parents.

I enjoyed the balance of breezy summer read and thoughtful family story in this novel. The humor worked for me, and I laughed often at the family conversations and Rocky's commentary. It was great to see writing about menopause that's both frank and funny. The dynamics between the characters, especially the conflicts, felt realistic and sometimes familiar. There's not much to the plot, and it took a little time for me to adjust my expectations to the slice-of-life style, but I was content to hang out with Rocky's family, and I may continue on to the sequel, WRECK.

→ HOW TO READ A BOOK by Monica Wood: Violet is nearing the end of a prison sentence for manslaughter, after her reckless choices caused the death of an older woman. Harriet is a retired teacher who volunteers at the prison, running a book club that provides a weekly bright spot to Violet's life inside. Frank is the widowed husband of Violet's victim, who is moving past his complicated grief with a job at a bookstore in Portland, Maine, where Harriet often shops. When Violet is released from prison, she finds her way to the bookstore as well. The first meeting between the three comes as a surprise to them all, and it doesn't go well. But with time, new connections form that change everyone's life for the better.

This is a gentle and heartwarming story, a bit too much for my taste. Violet encounters unwavering kindness from most of the other characters, except for the villains, who are relentlessly awful, and I wished for everyone to be more complicated. Still, the characters are portrayed with enough depth that I developed affection for them. The novel contains an unexpectedly large amount of detail about research into language and cognition in African grey parrots, and I found that fascinating, though it didn't entirely fit with the rest of the story.

→ FIVE WEEKS IN THE COUNTRY by Francine Prose: The nine children of Charles Dickens are worried their father doesn't love them anymore, and that he's also lost interest in their mother and in their country home. Into this time of family strain enters another burden, in the form of an awkward and demanding houseguest named Hans Christian Andersen. He's apparently a renowned author in Denmark, maybe even as famous as their father in England, but the children have never heard of him or his fairy tales. Though Andersen is a great admirer of Dickens and eager to be included in the household, nobody returns the enthusiasm as his visit drags on and on for weeks.

I was excited to see how Prose would fictionalize this true case of an intolerable houseguest. She mines a lot of humor from both real and imagined details of the situation, and that makes for some fun scenes. I was also intrigued by the potential of the POV shifts, with a section narrated by the children, then Dickens, and then finally Andersen, a structure I expected to keep revealing new surprises. But this aspect disappointed me, with too much rehashing of scenes and not enough that reframed the reader's understanding. I appreciated the portrayals of these writers and their lives, but I wanted more out of this story.

→ LAST NIGHT IN BROOKLYN by Xochitl Gonzalez: Alicia is proud to be not just living in Brooklyn but a Brooklyn native living in the borough in 2007, when newcomers and gentrification are changing the city around her. Among the new arrivals to the trendy neighborhoods are her rich cousin Devon and his wife. Soon after Alicia reconnects with them, she's invited to one of the notoriously glitzy parties thrown by her neighbor, the fashion designer La Garza. It turns out La Garza isn't only being neighborly: She wants Alicia's help getting back in touch with Devon, who she had a passionate relationship with in the past.

I found this story very slow to get started, with a long stretch at the beginning where Alicia mostly attends various bars and parties in a way that seemed aimless. Gonzalez's descriptions provide a portrait of the place and time, but I wasn't sure to what end until La Garza's request brought the plot into focus. It took me a still longer stretch to recognize that Gonzalez was riffing on THE GREAT GATSBY. I was sorry I hadn't known sooner to look for parallels in every character and plot event, which did make the novel more interesting for me. But only to a point, because I still thought this was a pretty slow book, and not that compelling. (I'm not a GATBSY fan, either.) I far preferred Gonzalez's previous novels, OLGA DIES DREAMING and ANITA DE MONTE LAUGHS LAST.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Slate, Laura Miller interviews Jon Krakauer about the thirtieth anniversary of the Everest disaster he recounted in Into Thin Air: "I was convinced when I wrote the book that all my friends who were guides were going to hate me because I had certainly destroyed guiding on Everest forever. Nobody would now want to climb Everest with a guide. Well, of course, it had the opposite effect. It was the best advertising the guides ever had. That bothered me, and also, I added to all this crowding. This guilt just doesn't go away."

Complexities

2026-07-30T15:16:30.904-07:00

I recently read a wondrously creative scifi novella, THE LANGUAGE OF LIARS by S.L. Huang. I loved it, and that detailed recommendation will be included in my next monthly roundup. Even past the end of the story, a sentence appeared that resonated with me. In the book's acknowledgments, Huang writes, "This book had such tight complexities that I sometimes despaired I could ever make its many fragile gears fit."

This puts into words exactly what I'm struggling with most every writing day. Yes, tight complexities! Yes, fragile gears! Yes, despair, so much despair! It's inspiring, of course, to recognize that Huang made it through the same struggle as me with the parts successfully assembled into a great story. So did all the other authors of all the other books I love for their clever intricacies. Inspiring, but it doesn't solve any of my self-inflicted novel problems.

I've given myself so many challenges with this story: the future setting, the invented technologies, the amount of science in this fiction, the number of characters, and the several plotlines that need to intersect and affect each other. It's way too much, really, and I've had to scale some of it back, but if I remove too many pieces, it all falls apart. Decisions and changes in one area create repercussions elsewhere, and I keep thinking up new questions and ideas that make me want to rethink everything. Particularly my choice to write this novel, or any novel.

But I persist. Because abandoning this novel would surely pain me more than continuing. And because the difficulty level of the complexities is what excites me about the story and makes me believe it's worth finishing. And because, despite all the despair, I must enjoy doing this work, since there are zero outside forces driving me.

Sometimes, though, I do fantasize about setting this novel aside for a while and turning to a more manageable one that I could complete first. Something simpler, maybe something about... time travel. Then I sigh at myself and get back to work.

June Reading Recap

2026-07-07T15:29:55.075-07:00

Someday I'll write another blog post that isn't book reviews, but for now, I once again have so many books to talk about!

→ In the world of SUBLIMATION by Isabel J. Kim, throughout history, whenever people migrate, they might leave behind a duplicate version of themselves. At the moment of instancing, the selves are identical, but from that point, each instance develops separately. Soyoung was ten years old when her mother decided the two of them should leave Korea and move to America, and they both split at the border. Consequently, Soyoung stayed in Seoul to grow up surrounded by Korean family and culture. Meanwhile, her instance took on the name Rose, acculturated to the US, and eventually became a New Yorker. After their grandfather dies, Soyoung asks Rose to travel to Seoul for the funeral. The instances meet for the first time in a reunion that raises questions about their futures. The possibilities become more complicated with the announcement of an instancing technology that may have global implications.

This is an inventive work of speculative fiction that succeeds at character, plot, and worldbuilding. I was engrossed from the beginning by the premise and the personal stakes of Soyoung and Rose's situation, then thrilled by the way the story gradually expands outward. By the end, the plot is action-packed, but there's still a strong emotional core. Kim has imagined many logistical details around instancing and presents these in fascinating ways, especially through the use of alternate versions of old texts. (For example, in this world, Odysseus left an instance back in Ithaca when he set out for Troy.) I'm excited to recommend this book widely, read more of Kim's many short stories, and continue following her career.

→ WHISTLER by Ann Patchett: When Daphne is middle-aged, she reunites by chance with Eddie, who was her stepfather only briefly, when she was nine years old. Daphne and her sister adored Eddie, and he made their life better during the short period he was in her life, but then their mother abruptly divorced him. Daphne never understood why, though it seemed connected to an accident that Daphne and Eddie were in together. She's overjoyed to have him back in her life, and as they quickly reestablish the bond created by their shared experience, Daphne can finally ask for details about what happened all those decades ago.

Patchett excels at writing about complicated family relationships with believable specificity, and this story is full of terrific examples. The center of the novel is Daphne's unique connection to Eddie, first as a child and then as an adult. But along the way, Patchett also develops Daphne's relationships with the rest of her parents, her sister, and her husband, explores Daphne's own experience as a stepparent, and shows a variety of other marriages and family ties. I was captivated by all of it, and I went through a range of emotions with this story, including a lot of laughter. Another delight from one of my favorite authors!

→ THE NIGHT SWEEPS THE MOUNTAINS AWAY by Tanvir Ahmed: In a desert town, Sado makes his living as a water carrier and keeps his past to himself. When he meets Mina, he recognizes a tattoo that marks her as a fellow exile from a failed rebellion. Mina lives a reclusive life, but she gradually opens up to Sado, telling stories of her marriage to a dangerous man. She tries to make Sado understand why she is also dangerous, and yet he falls in love with her, despite the curse she carries.

This compact novella drew me right in with its smooth storytelling. I was rooting for Sado and Mina to have a chance at happiness by overcoming the dark forces they face. Ahmed's evocative descriptions, informed by his background as a scholar of medieval Islamic history, bring the setting to life. This is a beautiful, haunting tale.

→ YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke: Natalie has constructed the perfect life for herself, and she shares it daily with her millions of followers. At Yesteryear Ranch, she and her husband raise their expanding brood of children on homegrown food and traditional Christian values. Of course they're aided by modern appliances, farmhands, and a couple of nannies, because Natalie is less concerned with following a traditional lifestyle than with creating a polished and lucrative online brand. But one day, she wakes to find herself apparently transported to the 1850s, somehow trapped in a pioneer version of her life. She doesn't understand if she's time-traveled into this nightmare, been kidnapped into a horrific reality show, or what, but she's desperate to figure it out and escape.

This is a great concept, and I appreciated that the story is more complicated (and much darker) than that basic premise, but a lot of it didn't end up working for me. Since the book's structure alternates chapters of Natalie in the pioneer world with the backstory of how she became a tradwife influencer, I was often impatient about having to switch away from the more compelling mystery, and both timelines felt too slow to develop. There is eventually an answer to the question of what's happened, and while it's sort of clever, I didn't think it was set up plausibly enough. Where the book succeeded best for me was Natalie's character and voice, and how the narrative continually changes our understanding of her as the story goes on. Despite my complaints about the structure, I found the writing good at a sentence and scene level, and I'll be interested in reading whatever Burke writes next.

→ THE RIDE OF HER LIFE by Elizabeth Letts is a biography of Annie Wilkins, who decided in 1954 to journey across the United States on horseback, or die trying. Annie was in her early 60s, in poor health, with no family left except her loyal dog, and she no longer had the money or energy to run her farm in Maine. Faced with the prospect of ending life in a charity home, Annie chose to seize her own destiny instead. She bought a horse and set out with her dog and the dream of reaching California, and not much plan beyond that. Her journey was made possible by her determination, the generosity of strangers, publicity from the media, and plenty of luck.

This was a book club pick that I never would have read on my own, and though I did become engaged in the drama of Annie's journey with her animal companions, I would have preferred reading about it in a different form. Letts did extensive research that fills in details of the places Annie passed through and the people she met, as well as context about how America was changing in the 1950s. While some of that is interesting, it's not really what I was curious about. And these reported sections sit oddly against the scenes Letts depicts novelistically, describing thoughts and actions that couldn't possibly be verified. At the end of the book, I learned Letts drew heavily on Annie's memoir, LAST OF THE SADDLE TRAMPS, and I was sorry I didn't get the story from the perspective of the person who lived it. Letts also drops the revelation that she chose to call her subject Annie, "instead of the name she called herself, Mesannie," and that doesn't sit right with me.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lincoln Michel makes the case for why There Are More than Five POVs: "It's not that the categories are wrong exactly. But they are rooted more in grammar than narrative. Grammatically, 'I' and 'we' are both first-person pronouns. Narratively, there is a dramatic difference between an 'I' narrator and a collective 'we' narrative voice. An I is a single character and the story is limited to one perspective. A we is a group, which can provide a plethora of perspectives or else a sort of consensus chorus perspective. That opens up entirely different storytelling opportunities and restrictions."

May Reading Recap

2026-06-08T17:24:39.483-07:00

My May was packed with books:

→ SPENT by Alison Bechdel is a delightful self-parody of Bechdel's previous work, focused on the contradictions of existing in late-stage capitalism. The main character of this comic (in both senses) novel is Alison Bechdel, a cartoonist best known for the strip Lesbian PETA Members to Watch Out For and the graphic memoir Death & Taxidermy. Alison's memoir has been adapted into a successful prestige TV series that she doesn't enjoy watching, though she does enjoy the financial comfort it provides. She and her wife, Holly, have been able to buy a farm in Vermont where they raise goats and pursue their artistic careers. But life in 2022 has proved too distracting for Alison to complete her next project, a memoir about money called $um: An Accounting, and funds are getting tight. In case this all isn't meta enough, Alison and Holly's friends are a household of characters who will be familiar to readers of the real Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For.

I had so much fun with this, and I definitely recommend it to Bechdel fans. Readers with no prior knowledge will miss out on some of what charmed me, but can probably still find much to appreciate in the characters and their adventures. The story deals with relationships (including polyamory), money, activism, and other concerns of the current era, from the perspectives of both middle-aged Alison and friends, and a group of younger characters. I love Bechdel's drawings, especially the small details and visual jokes in the panel backgrounds.

→ PLATFORM DECAY by Martha Wells: In the eighth installment of the Murderbot Diaries, SecUnit has to travel through a gigantic space structure that's somehow even worse than a planet. It's there to rescue a family unit—a child, parent, and grandparent—who prove themselves to be good teammates when the mission keeps growing more complicated. As the group stays ahead of the corporates who want them dead, they navigate a variety of unusual settings, often thwarted by incompatible or nonexistent mass transit systems.

I continue to love this series, and I recommend any interested readers start at the beginning. I enjoyed rereading all the previous books over the past half year, and I was glad to have the context fresh in my mind for this new story, which builds on everything SecUnit has already been through. That includes a lot of trauma, which it's now starting to get help processing. There are some new disturbing events in this book, but overall, it's a fun adventure.

→ RADIANT STAR by Ann Leckie: In the city of Ooioiaa, worship of the Radiant Star plays a prominent role, though rival sects follow different practices. Even thirty years after ships from the Radchaai arrived to occupy the planet, the local religion continues to thrive. When one of the most powerful residents of Ooioiaa decides he'd like to dedicate his afterlife to the Radiant Star by becoming a saint, it sets in motion a series of events involving his family members, religious leaders, and others. And when a far-away conflict disrupts communication and shipments to the planet, a more dire crisis develops.

This is an unusual, complicated story about characters who are preoccupied with their personal concerns while a global crisis unfolds around them. As always in an Ann Leckie novel, the characters are distinctive, they inhabit fully imagined cultures, and there's plenty of focus on what's considered proper behavior within each culture. This novel also features a particularly inventive setting and evocative depictions of food. I was curious about all of it, but I didn't connect with the story as quickly or fully as with the rest of Leckie's work, I think because so many of the characters are deliberately unsympathetic. It's still an impressive book that I'll be interested to discuss with other readers.

→ THE DEVIL IN SILVER by Victor LaValle: After Pepper gets into an altercation with the police, he's committed involuntarily to a mental hospital. There's nothing wrong with Pepper's mental health besides some poor judgment, but once confined and drugged, he finds it impossible to convince anyone of his sanity. This situation is horrific enough, but what's even more terrifying is that Pepper believes a monster is stalking the hospital halls. Other patients believe in the monster as well, though the staff refuse to acknowledge it. Gradually Pepper finds allies in his quest to prove the monster is real, or to simply escape.

This is a good story that I thought took too long to get going. Pepper and the other characters are great, and I enjoyed the wry humor of the narration, but I was impatient with the slow pace. LaValle has adapted the story for TV (season 3 of the anthology series The Terror), and I'm eager to watch—I expect the show moves more quickly. I preferred LaValle's balancing of mundane and supernatural horrors in his more recent novels, THE CHANGELING and LONE WOMEN.

→ ATMOSPHERE by Taylor Jenkins Reid opens in 1984 as astronaut Joan arrives at Mission Control to serve as CAPCOM for a shuttle mission already in progress. The crew members are all people she's formed close relationships with over the past few years of training and missions. When disaster strikes, it's up to Joan to provide a calm voice at the other end of the line for Vanessa, the crew member who's closest to her heart. The narrative then jumps back to the start of Joan's time with NASA, to show how the relationships with her fellow astronauts evolved.

This novel has many compelling elements, but they could have been assembled into a better whole. I enjoyed all the details about astronaut training and the shuttle program. I was invested in Joan's experiences with friendship, family, and falling in love, but while I found certain scenes emotionally moving, many were marred by clunky dialogue or implausible reactions. The novel's structure also creates some pacing problems, and I felt as though certain sections were mostly fillers to pass the time until the next inevitable and more interesting event occurred.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Reactor, Leah Thomas ponders the therapeutic power of Katamari Damacy: "Of course, we could all clean up our houses instead of playing, and find our lives better served: 'You don’t need cleaning in a video game, son: we have cleaning at home!' But that's not the point. The point is that even the dullest, simplest chores in life can be reimagined and transformed into something playful.""

April Reading Recap

2026-05-08T18:34:00.000-07:00

Another month, and another batch of fascinating books!

→ NONESUCH by Francis Spufford: Iris is a modern young women living in London in 1939, as the threat of war looms. She works in a stockbroker's office, but the only role she's allowed there is secretary, though she aspires to more. She's happily single, and happily not a good girl, dating men who treat her to illicit nights in fancy hotel rooms. When Iris goes home with a terribly innocent young man, she knows there will be trouble, but she's expecting lovesick moping. Instead, the trouble that comes her way is an inexplicable menace. As the war begins and London prepares for rationing and attacks, Iris finds herself facing a dark magic, wielded by a mysterious order with fascist tendencies. Though she's fed up by having to deal with any of it, she's determined to do her part.

This is a compelling mix of historical and magical fiction, animated by a delightfully multifaceted protagonist. Iris is opinionated, clever, competent, and flawed. I loved following her through all the story's adventures, and through her, getting to know the other well-developed characters. The book starts out more historical than magical, portraying Iris's reality in rich and fascinating detail. The magical layer grows more complicated and dangerous along with the mounting horrors of life during the Blitz, and both layers are engrossing. I'm as excited about recommending this novel as Spufford's previous, and very different, CAHOKIA JAZZ.

NONESUCH will be followed by a sequel, ARCADY, expected in 2027. This first book reaches a conclusion for one part of Iris's story, but leaves her at a point of more uncertainty.

→ CHERRY BABY by Rainbow Rowell: Cherry has been separated from her husband for long enough that she's ready to move past grieving her marriage and have fun again. Fun appears in a chance meeting with Russ, a college friend who Cherry always had a crush on. To Cherry's surprise, Russ reveals that he always lusted for her as well, and things get more fun from there. An additional wonderful surprise is that Russ doesn't know anything about the uncomfortably popular, uncomfortably autobiographical comic drawn by Cherry's ex, Tom. But with a movie adaptation of the comic coming soon, Tom and his characters are showing up everywhere Cherry turns, complicating even her promising new relationship.

This novel is all about how complicated relationships of every kind are, and Rowell does an excellent job developing characters and situations that are realistically messy. It takes a little time to reveal much of the messiness, and early on, I was less interested, but once the story pulled me in, I tore through the rest of the book. This is also a book about how complicated it is to be fat in the era of GLP-1 drugs, and that had me interested and appreciative from the start. I recommend this satisfying, thoughtful, and often funny relationship story.

→ KIN by Tayari Jones: Vernice and Annie have been friends since they were infants together in a small Louisiana town, both motherless. Niecy's mother is dead, so there's a tragic finality to the grief that Niecy grows up with. Annie's mother ran off, and her status is unknown, leaving Annie always wondering and longing. As the girls come of age, they know that being Black women in the Jim Crow South presents many constraints, but both have ambitions. Niecy enrolls at Spelman College in Atlanta, where she encounters wealthy Black families living in a comfort she never knew to dream of. Annie heads for Memphis, where she believes her mother may be living, and her adventures take her into far less elevated circumstances.

This novel has received high praise from most of its readers, but my feelings were more mixed. Jones brings the historical setting to life, with strong portrayals of different areas of the South, different class experiences, and the racism and activism of the time. I didn't always find the characters as vividly lifelike as I hoped. At times, their actions (or lack of action) felt more motivated by plot needs than by realistic behavior. I was also disappointed by how the book ends, though other readers found it more emotionally resonant.

→ THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS by Ursula K. Le Guin: As an envoy to the planet of Gethen, Genly Ai is tasked with convincing the world's governments to join the alliance of the Ekumen. But even after two years on Gethen, he hasn't figured out the politics and people well enough to make progress, or adapted to the frigid climate. Genly especially has trouble reconciling his Terran understanding of men and women with the Gethenians, who have no biological or cultural gender distinction except during the monthly fertile period. His limitations and misunderstandings leave him vulnerable when his only advocate in one of the dominant nations falls out of favor. Genly leaves the capital city to seek knowledge and allies elsewhere. In time, his task becomes more perilous as he faces grave danger, from cruel governments and from the deadly cold.

I first read this 20 years ago, but remembered very little, and it was fascinating to revisit now that I'm familiar with more of Le Guin's work, which gave me greater context for and appreciation of the story. The worldbuilding and politics are dense, and I didn't mind that too much, but I found the story more absorbing in the second half. The events that form the emotional core of the novel don't emerge until late, and I was shocked by how late as I reread, since that's the part that lasted in my memory, so I thought it was the main scope of the book.

I read this with my book club, and it led to a great discussion. Some supplemental material also enhanced my reading experience:

→ "Is Gender Necessary? Redux", a 1976 essay by Le Guin with 1988 updates that can be read side-by-side or inline

→ Afterword to the 2019 edition by Charlie Jane Anders

→ Clarification about a confusing typo on the novel's final page (spoiler alert!)

→ "Coming of Age in Karhide", a 1995 story by Le Guin that focuses on domestic life on Gethen

The Future Is Now

2026-04-30T16:02:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I spent many long years working on a now-abandoned multigenerational family novel with storylines set in three time periods. I knew the date of every scene, and those dates were all locked together by the timeline of both the fictional family and real world events. One setting was pure history as far as I was concerned, one was a recent past that I'd lived through, and one was the near future. When I wrote the first draft in 2007, the familiar past era was closer than the imagined future. As I embarked on repeated revisions, on and off for more than a decade, the near future setting grew nearer and nearer. The year it took place (you can guess where this is going) was 2026.

It's a little strange to be in 2026 for real now, after spending so much time in my fictional version. (Of course, existing in 2026 is strange enough on its own.) But the strangeness is mainly numerical, and not from writing any vividly bold predictions about what life might be like now. In early drafts, most of my worldbuilding extrapolated from technologies I thought were cutting-edge. That tended to mean I accurately predicted how those technologies would be used about 18 months out, often before I finished a given draft. As my actual timeline barreled toward my near future, I gave up on any science fictional inclinations.

The major worldbuilding in my 2026 storyline was about a significant earthquake striking the Bay Area, something I never wanted to be predictive about. (But to make sure I'm not psychic, for the record: November 4, 7.5 on the Hayward Fault.) I also wrote the almost-throwaway but important-to-me line "The president was on her way to Oakland" way back before there was any particular woman (from Oakland, no less) who I hoped would be in the White House now. Sorry this game isn't more fun!

Anyway, that novel hasn't been in play for a long while, for many reasons, and that is even less likely to change in a future that's become its past. I only bring it up again to commemorate the weird space 2026 occupies in my writerly mind. And as a cautionary tale for other slow writers planning stories set at a particular point in the near future.

At present, I'm applying my slow writing to a different project. It's the novel my recent blog posts refer to, for some value of "recent" and "refer". I know I haven't said anything about it for months, and I've never shared many details. (Another thing that's strange is having a decade of blog posts about a novel that never went anywhere.) But I've been working steadily away, writing sentences and scenes that may eventually cohere into a finished novel.

This one is set entirely in the future. I've repeated the possible mistake of specifying a year, but I think I'm safe for not catching up this time, since the year is 2132. Spending imaginary time in that farther-out future is fun, and challenging, and definitely requires more meticulous extrapolations than I've ever made before. Not that I'm honestly trying to predict what I think the world of 2132 will be like. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in an often-echoed sentiment, "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." She wrote more about the idea than just the pithy sentiment, and I recommend the rest of her 1976 Author's Note to THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS.

I reread Le Guin's classic novel this month, and my book club had a wonderful conversation about it. Also in April, I turned 51 and had some delicious birthday celebrations, including a cake that I enjoyed baking. I got to show the world the sweater I've been knitting since last summer. And early in the month, early in the morning, I was woken up by a nearby earthquake that didn't result in anything besides the rude awakening. That can be my quake for 2026, thanks.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ At Literary Hub, Miranda Shulman describes What Knitting Has Taught Me About Writing: "When I say that every stitch, every word, is progress, I mean that every stitch, every word, is a valuable learning experience, not that they are permanent. When I'm knitting, I'm often following a complicated pattern translated from Dutch to English. It usually takes a few tries to understand what's being asked of me, and if I'm knitting in a dark room (like a movie theater or a dimly lit restaurant) I'll probably make a mistake. Then again, when I'm knitting on my couch at home, I'll also probably make a mistake. There's no way to knit a sweater faster than the time it takes to create the right stitches and understand the pattern. You have to make all the mistakes and be okay with re-doing it until it’s right. That's the process of making. That's dedication to craft. That's discovery."

March Reading Recap

2026-04-02T13:26:00.000-07:00

I've still been reading away, enjoying an excellent selection of books:

→ THE SHAMSHINE BLIND by Paz Pardo: Agent Kay Curtida of the Psychopigment Enforcement Agency is investigating a strain of counterfeit Sunshine Yellow pills. This "Shamshine" has infiltrated the local market, causing harm to Depressives who need the real medication. Curtida is glad to have a case with potential for once, because the criminal underworld operating in Daly City and the ruins of San Francisco is small-time compared to the big cities of Boise or Iowa City. (The US's previous big cities were destroyed almost 30 years earlier, when the Falklands Conflict escalated to a world war and Argentina became the dominant superpower through the use of weaponized psychopigments.) But Curtida is out of leads to follow, so she has to turn her attention to a minor case of suicide at a psychopigment pharmaceutical company. As the new investigation continues, she discovers the death involves an unusual pigment she's never seen before, and that this case is more complicated, and more sinister, than it initially seemed.

I was so impressed by the imaginative worldbuilding and well-paced plotting of this speculative detective story. Pardo has constructed such a fascinating world, between the color-based drugs that control emotions and the alternate history that reshapes politics and culture. Details of this world are dispensed gradually, at points that work naturally in the story, as when Curtida listens to the radio while driving around following leads. Curtida is an excellent character who narrates with a distinctive spin on the hardboiled detective style. Her fellow agents and the other characters are great as well, and there's plenty of real emotion in this story where feelings are sometimes manufactured by psychopigments. If you're at all curious about this literally colorful noir novel, I hope you'll check it out.

→ GOOD PEOPLE by Patmeena Sabit is presented as excerpts from a series of interviews conducted with friends and acquaintances of the Sharaf family, or witnesses who encountered them during a significant weekend. The family and the events of that weekend are under investigation by law enforcement, but the reason is kept as a mystery from the reader at first. Before understanding what's happened, we learn about the lives of the Sharafs in the years before. As a young family, they arrived in Virgina as refugees from Afghanistan. The local Afghani community helped them out through hard times, and eventually they thrived, earning a level of wealth that brought envy and scrutiny. The family is close-knit, but there's been trouble with the teenage daughter, who chafes against the strictures of her parents' traditional Muslim expectations. All this background comes into play in understanding the tragic events that are eventually revealed, explained, and then reinterpreted.

This engrossing, carefully constructed novel kept me guessing and pondering. Every time I planned to read just a few of the short chapters, I found it hard to stop. Sabit brings the voices of the interviewees to life, giving the characters distinctive speech patterns and concerns. The scenario is full of ambiguity, and each new perspective nudges the reader's understanding one way, then another, to great effect. There are no clear answers here, but much to think about, and this would be a great book to discuss with a group.

→ ALL THE WORLD CAN HOLD by Jung Yun: September 16, 2001, is a strange time to board a cruise ship, but with travel plans made long in advance, the passengers in this novel embark on a trip to Bermuda. The story follows three characters who all start out feeling conflicted about trying to enjoy themselves during such a terrible time, and who all have personal dramas that keep them from enjoying themselves anyway. Franny is determined to follow through on celebrating her mother's seventieth birthday, with all the traditional trappings of a Korean chilsun, whether or not the rest of the family agrees. Doug, once an actor in a show filmed on this very ship, is appearing as a celebrity because he needs the money, but he has no desire to be back at the site of his drunken past. Lucy was invited on the cruise as a last-minute replacement, but she's afraid she made a mistake in accepting for so many reasons, including that she's supposed to be interviewing for jobs this week. As the cruise's regular schedule of festivities proceeds, the characters grapple with their own concerns, aware of how cut off they are from news of much larger misfortunes.

I was intrigued by the setup of this novel (inspired by the author's real experience) though unsure what to expect. But it didn't take me long to get invested in all three characters and their problems. There's complexity and surprise to how the storylines develop. At times, the story could have been about any cruise, but that felt realistic to the circumstances. Whenever the context of 9/11 returned to the forefront, I found it thoughtfully handled. I liked the writing and the character portrayals, and I may check out Yun's previous novels.

→ LAKE EFFECT by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney opens in 1977 in a well-to-do neighborhood in Rochester, New York. The Larkins and the Finnegans live across the street from each other, and the families are close, each with two teenage children who grew up as friends. Also, Nina Larkin and Finn Finnegan are having an affair. When Nina and Finn decide to take steps to bring their relationship out into the open, they know it will shake up the lives of their families. But they aren't prepared for just how many relationships will be torn apart. Two decades later, there are still more consequences to reckon with.

Sweeney is always skilled at writing about family relationships, and this novel is another strong exploration of characters with complicated and shifting dynamics. Every Larkin and Finnegan family member spends some chapters as a viewpoint character, revealing secrets and grudges that the others don't know about. Not everyone gets the same amount of page time, and I was sorry not to follow some characters in more depth, especially after the time jump. So I would have been happy for a longer version of this novel, but I enjoyed all the story threads and scenes that appear in this one.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Lois Lowry is publishing a new dystopian YA novel this fall, as reported in an interview with People: "For Lowry, this book felt necessary to write for the same reason The Giver's themes — and the themes in Building 903 — resonate so strongly with readers today. 'These are tough times that we live in, with lots of questions about the future,' she tells PEOPLE. 'I'm extremely old, so I lament the fact that I'm not gonna be around to see how this turns out. However, my imagination does that for me.'" (Thanks, Book Riot!)

February Reading Recap

2026-03-06T11:03:00.000-08:00

Great books this month, and great variety!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Stuff Out There:

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

Releases I'm Ready For, Spring 2026

2026-02-26T16:22:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Stuff Out There:

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

January Reading Recap

2026-02-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Stuff Out There:

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

2025 By The Books

2026-01-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December Reading Recap

2026-01-06T16:44:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Stuff Out There:

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

Oh-So-Clever Title

2025-12-18T17:23:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

Good Stuff Out There:

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

November Reading Recap

2025-12-03T16:14:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Stuff Out There:

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

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

October Reading Recap

2025-11-05T15:54:00.000-08:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Stuff Out There:

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

Fall's Back

2025-10-30T19:35:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

While none of my recent work has warranted photographing, I can offer some pictures from a cool bookstore I visited in early October while on a great family trip. The Last Bookstore in downtown Los Angeles is a huge store with a labyrinthine level of shelves, nooks, and book sculptures. I shared additional photos on Bluesky.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Celia Mattison at Literary Hub asks, What’s With All the Sheep on Book Covers?: "I clocked the new ovine ascendence because of a longtime friend and book industry colleague, Jordan Bascom. Once a week, she looks at the covers of dozens of forthcoming titles and we compare notes on what is in vogue, identifying covers with shared motifs, fonts, or images. Our shared affection for the animal kingdom means that we pay special attention to any cover vaguely zoological (outside of birds, which have remained ubiquitous cover fodder for decades). When she sent me the third sheep cover in a calendar year, I asked her what she thought these covers might be trying to say. 'This is not your grandmother’s pastoral fiction,' Jordan replied wryly." (I found this article particularly interesting because I hadn't noticed the trend, though I had spotted the previous wave of rabbit covers.)

September Reading Recap

2025-10-03T13:52:00.000-07:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August Reading Recap

2025-09-03T15:18:00.000-07:00

Last month's reading was a great mix of science fiction and stories grounded in the real world:

→ METALLIC REALMS by Lincoln Michel takes the form of a volume of annotated science fiction stories compiled and analyzed by Michael Lincoln. This delightful metafictional premise is established at the start of Michel's novel by the title page of Michael's book (you with me so far?) indicating that we're about to read The Star Rot Chronicles by the Orb 4 writing collective. Also established at the outset, in a footnote to the epigraph, is that this tale will end in tragedy. In a foreword, and then an introduction, Michael explains his connection to the Orb 4: He's not a member, but rather a scholar of their work (and passionate fan) who witnessed their turbulent creative history firsthand, by virtue of sharing an apartment with the founding member. Michael is determined to present these brilliant stories to the world, along with commentary providing a definitive account of all that transpired from the collective's beginning to its premature end.

This is a very funny novel about a character who takes himself and his subject far too seriously. Michel, the real author, has given himself several challenges with the book's inventive format, and he handles them all wonderfully. In particular, the humor demands that the Orb 4's stories not in fact be "the greatest achievements in science fiction imagination of the twenty-first century," but they have to fail to meet that bar in a way that's still enjoyable to read. Not only does Michel find the right balance, but he keeps the stories fresh by changing up the style for each one and paying homage to various science fiction authors and subgenres. I had so much fun reading this novel, and at the risk of sounding too much like the main character: I want everyone else to experience the greatness as well.

→ FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane: In 1952, Penelope makes an onerous journey from England to Mexico with her six-year-old son, leaving behind her husband and small daughter for an unknown number of months, in hopes that this extreme venture will pay off financially. Penelope and young Valpy have been invited to Mexico by two elderly widows with a distant connection to her family who suggest that perhaps they will leave their considerable fortune to the boy. With the money, Penelope and her husband could escape a life of poverty, continue funding the prestigious yet struggling literary magazine they edit together, and perhaps stop him drinking away their meager income. When Penelope and Valpy arrive in Fonseca, they discover the widows are also heavy drinkers who show little interest in their invited guests. The mansion is filled with a motley collection of other visitors, all apparently there attempting to win the inheritance for themselves.

I loved reading this story of a character who finds herself in a strange situation and observes it with a writer's eye. Kane conveys Penelope's perspective with a wonderful dry humor and crafts a compelling drama among the characters thrown together in Fonseca. What adds a fascinating layer to the novel is that it's based on truth: Penelope Fitzgerald was a real, acclaimed writer, and she actually made this trip to Mexico with her son, though the circumstances surrounding it are unclear, even to the family. Kane started with details from a 1980 Fitzgerald essay that alludes to the trip, and Fitzgerald's children provided some additional insights, but most of the novel is delightfully imagined fiction. I wasn't familiar with Penelope Fitzgerald before this, but I'll be checking out her work now, and I'll continue looking forward to Kane's stories.

→ AUTOMATIC NOODLE by Annalee Newitz: When four robots who staff a San Francisco restaurant discover that the owners have abandoned them, they begin scheming to reopen on their own terms. As bots in the new nation of California (still recovering from a war of secession), they are granted limited rights to autonomy but aren't permitted to operate a business, and most are indentured until they can buy out their own contracts. So while their new restaurant begins earning attention for the quality of the hand-pulled biang biang noodles, they're trying to avoid focus on the dearth of humans involved, until a malicious campaign of bad reviews puts that fact into the spotlight.

This delightful story presents great characters along with thought-provoking ideas about how society might handle robotic intelligence. I liked the balance Newitz strikes between cozy food escapism, a bit of harrowing adventure, and serious issues such as discrimination and PTSD. Each of the four robot characters is developed fully as an individual personality, with a distinctive body type and corresponding backstory. This is a short book, so I wished for more time with the characters, but it's the right length to tell the story.

→ THE BLUEST EYE by Toni Morrison opens with the news of a young girl, Pecola, who is pregnant with her father's baby. The story then moves backwards and depicts events in the lives of Pecola's family members and neighbors in the months and even years before, only returning directly to Pecola and her tragic situation near the end. Sections of the book shift between different perspectives and styles, but one recurring narrator is Pecola's friend Claudia, who observes with a child's limited but curious perspective. Claudia rejects the idea that as a Black child, she should worship white, blue-eyed baby dolls and actresses, while Pecola is dangerously enamored of blue eyes.

I've known the basic premise of this novel for years, but on finally reading it (prompted by an upcoming series on canonical books by the Book Riot podcast), I was surprised by the other threads it contains. The many narrative shifts as well as the content make this a challenging read, and a rewarding one. The edition I read includes a fascinating afterword written by Morrison in 1993, reflecting on her intentions with the novel and where she thinks the implementation fell short. Interestingly, Morrison calls out her dissatisfaction with the section focused on Pecola's mother, but I found it one of the most engaging.

→ BEAUTYLAND by Marie-Helene Bertino: Adina is born in Philadelphia in 1977 to a mother who is soon parenting alone and struggling to make ends meet. Adina also has an origin far beyond Earth, and at the age of four, she comes to understand that she's an extraterrestrial, sent to observe humans. Every night, she feeds her notes into a fax machine, and her alien superiors send back terse responses. Though Adina always carries her responsibility as an outsider trying to analyze human behavior, she grows up like any other misfit kid. She forms a couple of strong friendships, survives the perils of adolescence and the uncertainty of early adulthood, and eventually makes a life for herself in New York City. Whenever she chooses to reveal her extraterrestrial nature to others, they question whether it's a delusion or a metaphor—and Adina's story is basically the same regardless of what the truth is.

I guess I'm the alien on this one, because this widely beloved novel did not work for me. Much of the book is mainly a coming-of-age story that I found interesting enough but nothing special. Same for the depictions of life in New York City and the experience of grief. Adina's observations on humanity didn't illuminate the human condition for me in the way they were probably supposed to. And I really disliked the book's bleak ending, though I gather other readers went away feeling more hopeful.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Literary Hub presents How One Snail Inspired Two Novels on Two Different Continents, a conversation between writers Maria Reva, Jasmin Schreiber, and Ed Yong, about snails and storytelling. Reva explains, "Once Jasmin and I connected over email, we discovered that our novels were indeed linked, in a way I hadn't expected. Both drew from the same article, published in The Atlantic six years earlier: Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Ed Yong's 'The Last of Its Kind,' featuring George, the last known Hawaiian tree snail of his species."

Show, Don't Tell

2025-08-28T16:54:00.000-07:00

On most of my writing days, I don't have anything to show for myself in a literal sense: There's nothing visually distinct about my progress beyond a gradual amassing of words typed. But occasionally I reach a stage where it's productive to get away from my keyboard and screen in order to write nearly indecipherable notes on index cards or sticky notes or other convenient rectangles. And then you get photos!

I started writing this draft a year ago, which is what it is. And hey, look, in that post I foreshadowed that "Once I reach a certain point, I may need to stop writing for a little while and make decisions about some elements that remain vague." So I guess that's what I'm doing now, as well as determining structural changes and mapping out what's ahead.

First I wanted to reread what I've written so far. I also wanted to somehow see the entire work-in-progress at once. My solution for this was to print the manuscript with 16 pages on each piece of paper. That's too small to comfortably make out the text, but I reread on screen while following along on paper to notice things like how much space each scene takes up. I jotted down a lot of big picture notes, and the scale kept me from getting bogged down in individual sentences.

(Interested viewers can can click through and attempt to decipher my terrible handwriting, but I've reduced the image size on this and the rest of the photos, so you won't be able to zoom in to read everything.)

The reread went well, because A) it didn't leave me in despair, and B) it got me started on thinking about how to rearrange and expand the existing material to better set up what comes next.

I knew I needed to adjust the shape of the outline I'd been working from, and it was time to figure that out with visual aids. I grabbed a handy stack of paper rectangles (previously cut and left over from another project) and markers for color coding. Historically I've done my paper plotting on the rug, but my 50-year-old knees objected, so I brought in a table.

After a while, I ran out of room on the table and had to improvise an extension with a posterboard propped on a smaller table. (Some yarn was also pressed into service.)

When the first table's arrangement stopped being useful, I gathered it up and reclaimed the space for a new way to organize the plot.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so of course it should be perfectly clear what I set out to do with each stage of paper pushing and how much it helped. I now need to do some additional work to capture these plans back into the outline, and then I'll be ready to resume writing.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Emily St. James presents her tips for writing effective dialogue: "To state the obvious, good dialogue rarely involves characters simply saying what they're thinking straight out. Yes, sometimes, you just need to bite the bullet and write a line or two in that fashion, but for the most part, people are not just opening their mouths and letting their inner monologues emerge unscathed. It's important that your characters say interesting and unintentionally revealing things! But what really sets great dialogue apart to me is how someone says what they're saying. Every single person on this planet has their own rhythm and cadence to their speech patterns, and the more you can make your characters feel like their cadences are different, the more you'll be able to make them sound like different people."

July Reading Recap

2025-08-07T18:12:00.000-07:00

I read another wide variety of novels last month:

→ A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton: In 1998, three teenagers meet online, calling themselves Abraxa, Sash, and Lilith. They become friends through developing ASCII art games that build on the mythology from a popular video game series. Their connections develop over hours in IRC text chat, where anonymity lets them create new identities and experiment with gender. By 2016, they've lost touch, though they still think of each other often, with regret over how their friendship ended. While their lives have diverged, they've followed some similar paths and all ended up in the vicinity of New York City, where they're being pulled back into each other's orbits.

This is an impressive and immersive novel that initially drew me in with intriguing POV choices, a richly imagined online community, and an early section formatted as a remarkably accurate (even painfully accurate) IRC chat. After the time jump, I loved getting to know the characters as adults in all their complexity, and I felt constant suspense about when and how they would reconnect. The story portrays individual and collective experiences of trans women with care and honesty, which means a good deal of difficult emotional material. I was sad to reach the end and leave these characters behind.

→ ACTS OF FORGIVENESS by Maura Cheeks: With a bill moving through Congress that will finally grant reparations to the descendants of slavery, Willie is anxious for her family to gather the documents that will prove they qualify. In many ways, the Revels are better off than other American Black families: They own both a home and a small business, and Willie was educated at a fancy private school. But beneath the middle-class trappings, they are struggling financially, and Willie worries about what kind of life she can provide for her daughter. Willie's aging parents don't want to discuss either money or family history, so it's up to her to pursue the genealogy search that might provide answers about the past and earn them the funds they're owed.

I enjoyed all the threads explored in this novel, despite some uneven pacing. Willie is a well-developed character who has been shaped by years of competing pressures from family, work, money, and friends. The way the book is structured, there's more focus on Willie's personal and family life in the first half, while the second half is dominated by the implications of the reparations act and Willie's quest for genealogical records. Because the latter topics are what attracted me to the book, I wanted more of that plot sooner. I was glad the story goes deep on the details of genealogy research, and I wished for more time spent on the fascinating questions raised about how a reparations policy might be implemented.

→ SILVERBORN: THE MYSTERY OF MORRIGAN CROW by Jessica Townsend: In this fourth installment of the Nevermoor series, Morrigan Crow is approaching her fourteenth birthday and very much a teenager, both emotionally and in striving to take on greater responsibility. As a result of events from the previous book, she's expanded her magical abilities, and she's burdened with a weighty secret. It turns out the adults in her life also have big secrets, and Morrigan discovers that much about her past and her family have been kept from her. These revelations grant her entry to a wealthy enclave of Nevermoor society, where she witnesses a shocking crime. When the police fail to arrest the perpetrator, Morrigan and her Wundrous Society classmates are determined to solve the mystery themselves.

I like watching this series develop, with each book continuing to expand Morrigan's understanding of Nevermoor, Wunsoc, and her own position within these. I love the relationships between Morrigan and the people she's close with, and the main weakness of this book is that she spends considerable time away from any of them. The new cast of characters comes with a lot of plot complications and mystery, and I became invested in how these would resolve, even if some of it felt awfully peripheral to Morrigan's life. I remain interested in following where the story goes next, and I'm so glad for this wonderful addition to the magical schoolchildren genre.

→ WILD DARK SHORE by Charlotte McConaghy: Dominic and his three children live on a remote island located between Antarctica and Australia, and they're the only human occupants since the last batch of scientists left. The research station had to close due to rising waters and more frequent storms, but things also went horribly wrong at the end. The family will have to vacate the island soon, but first they're tasked with saving what they can from the failing seed vault. It's a shock when a woman washes up on the island from a shipwreck, badly injured but still alive. Rowan claims she reached the island by accident, thought in fact she was headed there for reasons she doesn't divulge to Dominic and his children. While she hides her intentions from them, they conspire not to let Rowan discover the truth about the terrible recent events.

I was excited by the situation and mysteries this novel sets up, but I had such mixed feelings by the end. The intrigue about what's happening is heightened by the unusual setting, which McConaghy depicts with strong writing and fascinating details about the flora and fauna. And to be sure, the story is a page-turner. But I far preferred the tension created by what Rowan and Dominic aren't telling each other to the tension of what they aren't telling the reader. Having a point-of-view character avoid thoughts of a subject that's weighing on their mind is always awkward, and while it's managed reasonably well here, it eventually got old. I also felt increasingly unconvinced by the character choices, even for people driven by extreme circumstances and their various traumas. I wonder what a less thriller-y version of this story could have been.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Melanie Walsh presents a data analysis at The Pudding about animal gender in children's books: "After filtering the data to focus on animals who were explicitly gendered (she/her or he/him) and appeared in at least 10 different books, only a few animals were more consistently gendered female: birds, ducks, and cats. The rest—frog, wolf, fox, elephant, dog, monkey, bear, rabbit, mouse, and pig—skew male."

Releases I'm Ready For, Summer/Fall 2025

2025-07-29T17:29:00.000-07:00

The next few months promise a fascinating crop of new books from authors I love!

→ AUTOMATIC NOODLE by Annalee Newitz (August 5): I always trust Newitz to have an original, thoughtful take on whatever they write about, and I've especially enjoyed their previous fiction involving robots, AUTONOMOUS and THE TERRAFORMERS. So a Newitz story about robots running a noodle restaurant in a post-secession San Francisco sounds like a good time to me. Don't miss the charming retro website for the restaurant/book.

→ FONSECA by Jessica Francis Kane (August 12): This novel is based on real events from the life of a real person I've never heard of, the author Penelope Fitzgerald. But I was enthralled by Kane's earlier novel also based on real events I hadn't heard of, THE REPORT, so I'm on board. I look forward to more history and more of Kane's great writing about interpersonal dynamics.

→ LESSONS IN MAGIC AND DISASTER by Charlie Jane Anders (August 19): I follow Anders's excellent newsletter, so I've been hearing about her next novel for a while and getting excited about the premise: A trans witch teaches her grieving mother how to do magic, while also investigating the secrets of a book from 1749. It sounds like there is so much wonderful stuff woven into this story, and I can't wait to read it.

→ KATABASIS by R.F. Kuang (August 26): Kuang's BABEL was an ambitious, skillful alternate history about Oxford translators controlling the magic that powers the British empire. I'm intrigued that the new novel features more magical academics, this time at Cambridge, and they're journeying into hell to save a professor's soul, or maybe just to secure a recommendation.

→ THE WILDERNESS by Angela Flournoy (September 16): I admired Flournoy's debut, THE TURNER HOUSE, for depicting a large, complex family as well the city of Detroit over time. I'm expecting more strong portrayals of characters over time in this story about the friendship between five Black women as they figure out adulthood.

→ THE UNVEILING by Quan Barry (October 14): It takes impressive range and imagination to write a novel about a high school field hockey team performing witchcraft (WE RIDE UPON STICKS) followed by one about Mongolian monks searching for the next reincarnation of a great lama (WHEN I'M GONE, LOOK FOR ME IN THE EAST). I trust Barry with any subject and genre now, but I'm particularly interested in "a genre-bending novel of literary horror set in Antarctica"!

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Tom Comitta introduces People's Choice Literature, a project to create America's most wanted and unwanted novels, with graphs: "There are several survey results that might give you pause. For one, there's a glaring contradiction in responses to two answers. The most wanted activity for characters to experience in a novel was 'falling in or out of love,' but the most unwanted genre was romance. Given the popularity of romance novels, it's hard to square this until you consider their place in culture, with romance often seen as a form of women's literature, a category that historically has not been given as much weight and respect as literature written by cis men."

→ Laura Miller at Slate reviews the resulting book: "People's Choice Literature offers its readers two novels for the price of one. The first is a thriller whose heroine tries to prevent her boss, a new age–y tech mogul, from launching a quantum computing network that will bring about a total surveillance state. That's the most wanted one. The least wanted novel is much harder to summarize, encompassing such ostensibly despised elements as stream of consciousness, explicit sex scenes, an extraterrestrial setting, metafictional commentary on novel-writing itself, talking animals, second-person narration, and tennis.... Full disclosure: While Most Unwanted often made me laugh, it also put me to sleep five times."

June Reading Recap

2025-07-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

Last month, along with my usual novel reading, I read two powerful nonfiction books. Both are about not looking away from the death and destruction in Gaza inflicted by Israel during the present war and in the past. Both hope for a future that denounces these acts on the way to peace.

→ ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS, writes Omar El Akkad, and "this" refers to the devastation of Gaza. He opens by describing an injured child found in the rubble of her home, and throughout the book, he returns to stories of Palestinian children bombed, shot, killed, orphaned by the Israeli barrage. El Akkad is challenging the reader not to look away from these horrors, not to place the victims in a category that excuses the slaughter, not to soften the language used in discussing the genocide. I struggled with these challenges, and my starting point wasn't as far removed as many who I hope this book will reach, though their challenge will be even greater.

The book is not all dead children, although those stories could easily fill many volumes. El Akkad weaves accounts from the current war with observations from his own life as a Middle Eastern, Muslim immigrant in Canada and the U.S. and a journalist in other war zones. He uses all these episodes to frame sections that lay out his well-conceived ideas in powerful writing: "Every small act of resistance trains the muscle used to do it, in much the same way that turning one's eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come."

→ In BEING JEWISH AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF GAZA: A RECKONING, Peter Beinart approaches the current moment, and the history of Palestine and Israel, from a Jewish perspective. He also brings his perspective of a childhood spent partially in apartheid-era South Africa to consider how one people justifies oppressing another and how a country can move past that oppression.

I appreciated the amount of historical and cultural context this book includes, giving me a greater understanding of the histories of Palestine, Israel, and Zionist movements over the centuries. Beinart also draws from Torah and Talmud passages that help make his case for opening eyes and hearts to Palestinian suffering.

Beinart's arguments seemed persuasive and well-developed to me (plus well-cited: there are extensive endnotes), but I didn't need convincing. I hope the book will provide some clarity to readers grappling with complicated feelings about Israel, and I'd love to also see it read by those who only feel a single way.

→ DOWN IN THE SEA OF ANGELS by Khan Wong: In 2106 San Francisco, Maida starts her new job with the Golden Gate Cultural Recovery Project. The organization finds and documents artifacts from before the Collapse that upended society and halved the population. Maida is a psion, one of the minority with psychic abilities, and her power lets her sense the history of objects she touches. A jade teacup produces stronger visions than she's ever experienced, revealing the lives of two San Franciscans from the past. In 2006, Nathan is a designer who feels unfulfilled by his work in the tech industry but loves the community and creativity he finds at Burning Man. And in 1906, Li Nuan is an indentured servant in Chinatown desperate to escape her brutal life in a brothel. The teacup brings them visions as well, in a connection that provides hope. But Maida's power also shows her that an anti-psion movement is growing, stoking fear and threatening to round up people with abilities.

I enjoyed this ambitious novel. Each of the three storylines is well-developed, with a strong set of characters and a clear arc. Wong portrays every version of San Francisco with care, and I was delighted by the historical details, the familiar-to-me recent past, and the imagined future shaped by drastic climate change. The way the three stories fit together is interesting—there are no huge surprises, and yet the overall story adds up to something a bit different than I expected. I didn't love everything about this (a recurring problem of shifting verb tenses was a big irritation), but there's a lot that will stay with me.

→ THE MARTIAN CONTINGENCY by Mary Robinette Kowal: After gaining fame as the Lady Astronaut and participating in humanity's first voyage to Mars, Elma is now back on Mars with the second expedition. This time, the plan is to establish a permanent habitat, and Elma is thrilled to have her engineer husband as another member of the crew. At first, the habitat setup goes as planned, though Elma keeps encountering signs that there were problems on the previous mission she never learned about. But when one of the supply crates is found destroyed, it raises questions about the viability of the current mission, as well as more questions about what happened on the last one.

I was glad to return to the Lady Astronaut world and characters, but this fourth book felt slower to get going than the rest of the action-packed series. Since harrowing events didn't arrive at the usual fast pace, I had more time to grow frustrated by details and subplots that interested me less. But whenever the big problems did appear, they were as exciting as ever.

→ CURSED BREAD by Sophie Mackintosh: Elodie lives a small life in a small town, working every day at the bakery with her husband, who is driven by the desire to bake a perfect loaf but has no desire for Elodie. But when glamorous Violet and her ambassador husband move to town, Elodie's life is transformed. At first Elodie observes the couple from afar, catching glimpses of their passionate but disturbing relationship. Then Violet seeks out friendship, granting the attention that Elodie is starved for. Elodie's obsession with Violet, and by extension her husband, continues into a later narrative thread, when Elodie is writing letters to Violet in the aftermath of a strange tragedy that befell the town.

All I knew going into this book was that the marketing connects it to a real historical mystery involving tainted bread. That sets up the wrong expectation, because most of the story isn't concerned with that event, and while it does provide an explanation of the mystery, it raises far more unanswered questions. The novel primarily focuses on exploring obsession, creating unsettling vibes (sometimes both sexy and unsettling), and presenting a narrator who won't or can't commit to what really happened. I found it interesting to read, but not enough of the elements and questions resolved in a satisfying way.