Books I Read in 2025

My reading goal for this year was to get better at not finishing things. Life is too short to finish books you don't like, nobody was going to give me a personal pan pizza if I read the most books, and as of late December in 2024 I had two very young children. I figured I could cut myself some slack.

It wasn't an easy year. I don't have to tell any of you that, do I – it wasn't easy for any of us. But I did read a lot. I spent the first three portion of the year at home with a newborn, as unable to sleep when she slept as I was with my first, and so I had quite a bit of reading time. I also read to her, many books that she of course could not understand, but she likes the sound of my voice and I liked the way she would furrow her tiny brow and stare when I read, as if she was listening intently. I'm sure she was.

Another goal this year was to spend less time on the internet, which left more time for reading. I mostly succeeded in this one. Which means that I read nearly sixty books this year; fewer than I've often read, but more than I honestly expected. I count audiobooks. I know not everyone does.

I won't give favorites or least favorites this time, as I find myself unable to think of any of them quite that way. I liked a lot of them, loved a few, hated a few but tolerated them enough to finish them. My thoughts as I finished follow each book on the list. As per usual, anything with an asterisk is a reread.

The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky*: I’m glad I reread this; I don’t think I will again for a while. Each time I do, I have more sympathy for Ivan’s worldview in a way I find a bit alarming; I think becoming a parent has a lot to do with it. I, too, am ready to turn in my ticket. I’m not sure what that says about me. I did wish, as I always do, that Ivan was the whole book - or that the whole book was him arguing with people. I enjoy him so much and I don’t care for the courtroom drama sections.
Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires - Douglas Rushkoff: This was kind of a dud. I was hoping for…dirt, to be honest. Stuff about billionaires’ bunker plans and surrounding insanity, with some analysis on why they are the way they are. Instead it’s a book of all of Rushkoff’s problems with capitalism and big tech. And I don’t disagree with any particular point (maybe with some of the degrowth stuff). But it was a theory of everything book, and that made it kind of unnecessary. I already hate big tech. I didn’t learn anything.
Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver*: I do like this book very much; there are times early on when you think it’s a little too clever by half, in the way it hews to the inspiration. But it ends up able to stand on its own, and in some ways improve on the original. Demon is a more compelling voice than David in a lot of ways, and Kingsolver is far less sentimental about children, poverty, and children in poverty, than Dickens ever was. Less sexist too. It’s terribly sad, though. A few people in this novel manage to make it through the opioid epidemic, more or less, but so many others don’t. And so many in real life didn’t. It was a crime that won’t ever be paid for, because it was a crime compounding decades of other crimes.
Q: A Voyage Around the Queen - Craig Brown: this was a lot of fun, as all Craig Brown books are, and finally very sad, as they also all are. He’s very good at writing about people whose lives are circumscribed or made significant by history, regardless of their own ordinariness. He always reminds you how easily things might have been different. He’s not sentimental about this woman, but he also doesn’t have contempt for people who are. It’s a difficult line to walk.
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller*: I haven’t read this book in years, I think since high school. It’s funny in the ways I remember, and sad in the ways I remember. It dates, of course - the ambient misogyny especially. But there’s so much of it - especially everything to do with Milo - that I wish wasn’t as timely as it still is. I wish those parts were more dated; I wish I could understand them less.
Wild Seed - Octavia Butler*: I think this is my least favorite Butler, but I do love it a lot, partly because it is extremely Butler. She was always interested in how people negotiate positions of powerlessness, and in the relations between a master and a slave. She was interested in working out where the dependence really lies, and in the erotic potential of that knowledge. It’s a fascinating topic, and she always examines it well. She’s also interested in how communities form, how they grow out of couples and families – the different ways they can work, with or without hierarchies. The thing about this book, however, is that it’s so concerned with the simple mechanics of all this; that can make it a little dry. But it’s still Butler. I wish she’d written a dozen, twenty more books.
The House Next Door - Anne Rivers Siddons: This was an odd and interesting novel. Compelling, for sure. Some of it was so dated that it became difficult to tell how much I was meant to trust the central couple; they were just off in a genuinely fascinating way. Their life together was so insular and selfish, they both drank constantly, they were both so frivolous; I could buy them as a pair of crazies. This honestly made the book much more interesting than it might have been - everyone was just so weird. They’re weird about gay people, they’re weird about Jewish people. They’re weird about their neighbors’ secrets. Not one person was normal. Was it on purpose? No idea. The titular house wasn’t especially convincing as a haunted house, the scandals of the three families who lived there all felt a little flat and mundane. But the narrator and her husband were disturbingly convincing as two bored drunks who drove each other insane. That’s horror enough, even if I didn’t buy into the story about the evil house. I’m glad I read this; it was a lot creepier and more disturbing than I expected, even if not in the way the author intended.
Four Futures: Visions of the World After Capitalism - Peter Frase: This is very much a typical Verso Books, Jacobin-adjacent, baby’s-first-leftism kind of book (I sound like an asshole, I know) but I liked it in spite of that. I think I liked the final section, in which Frase acknowledged how these hypothetical futures could bleed or feed into each other, the best. I’m not as confident in the inevitability of full automation as he is, but that’s not the point. The idea makes for interesting thought experiments, and the book makes for a good reminder that the technology itself will not necessarily ensure any particular social change; what’s needed is power and political will. And that’s true no matter what.
Delicate Edible Birds - Lauren Groff: Groff, man. She is it. She’s the one. Every single short story here was excellent, some as good as any I’ve ever read. The first, “Lucky Chow Fun,” was killer - sad and weird and funny and compassionate. Every story after was just as good. I can think of few writers who are so kind and so merciless at the same time. It’s a very rare gift she has. I think “Blythe” and “Majorette” were my favorites, neither went where I expected.
Come Closer - Sara Gran: This works as a novella, and I’m glad it was one. The action started right away, no time wasted. It was a remarkably disturbing story; didn’t reinvent the wheel or anything, but was very effective for what it was. The descent into madness was well-conveyed, and frightening. I’d like to read more by Sara Gran.
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories - Susanna Clarke: I liked this very much. I wish Clarke would write more, though I understand why she doesn’t - it’s not like I manage to write as much as I would like. But her particular style and her way of writing this particular world are so compelling. I think “Mrs. Mabb” was my favorite story, though I liked “On Lickerish Hill” as well - both were about young girls who were cleverer than they first appeared. I do love fairy tale variations in general, and these were all very clever. Clarke has an interesting twist on magic realism that I like a lot.
The Custom of the Country - Edith Wharton: I’m not sure how I feel about Undine Spragg. She’s such a recognizable type in fiction, and you can find versions of her in novels from both sides of the Atlantic. She’s a cousin of Becky Sharpe and Lizzie Eustace, but also of Scarlet O’Hara. She doesn’t believe in anything or really love anyone, she’s ambitious and amoral, and she defeats her more honest but ineffectual rivals. Yet she’s not clever like Becky, nor as hilariously appetitative as Lizzie or Scarlet, nor is she a scrappy survivor like any of them. She’s a rich girl who wants to be richer. As ever with Wharton, the social mores are intelligently and richly observed. The book is clever and interesting, even if Undine is not. But I’ve liked versions of this character better elsewhere, and I’ve definitely preferred other Wharton novels.
Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party - Lily Geismer: Pretty good, though I liked Geismer’s other book better. I liked the approach of doing a dense analysis of one particular suburban liberal area and the people there; describing this trend nationally would have been overwhelming. Geismer is very good at examining the failures of well-meaning liberals, though she’s not obnoxious about it. She acknowledges that they are well-meaning.
Dark Matter - Blake Crouch: I’m stealing this idea, but there are smart dumb guy artists, and dumb smart guy artists. Smart dumb guys don’t have any ideas but have an intuitive sense of what works and what doesn’t; they don’t waste your time on anything that doesn’t matter. They know their own limits. Dumb smart guys have a ton of ideas, they have things to say, they have themes. They think their ideas are more profound than they are. I can’t say I care for either, really, but if I had to choose I’d pick the first one. This book is a work by the second one. I was bored stiff. There is the appearance of something to say but nothing to actually say. All I could think was that it was written only to be adapted, which of course it was recently. No interest in watching that adaptation. Don’t waste your time.
A Pale View of Hills - Kazuo Ishiguro: This was the only Ishiguro book I hadn’t read, and now I’ve read everything he’s written. So I felt melancholy the entire time reading it, if only for that - like Alexander the Great with no more lands to conquer, I have no more Ishiguro to read. And of course it’s a melancholy book anyway. It is, I think, very much a first novel but obviously still better than almost everyone else’s first novel. Beautiful, and terrifyingly sad, and often funny. He’s the best writer alive.
Everything That Rises Must Converge - Flannery O’Connor*: I do love O’Connor, but I have to say her work seems more racist every time I read it. It’s tough - I think she got inside the head of mundane southern racism more than anyone, which means I think her portrayal of it is cringingly accurate. But I don’t know that she realized how monstrous it was; she understood the way that nice white southerners saw Black people as sort of sleeper agents living among them, who might be activated at any time. There’s a weird paranoia (probably guilt induced) that’s so disturbing and even more so that it seems so natural to them. Like Faulkner, O’Connor was disturbed by racism herself but believed that what was at stake was the white soul, and that the sin of slavery was partly a sin of bringing the two peoples unnaturally together. All of this is to say: O’Connor is tough for me to read, now. Brilliant, always, but tough. I do prefer, on the whole, the stories in A Good Man is Hard to Find, but these are still good. “A View of the Woods” and “Parker’s Back” are probably my favorites.
Victorian Psycho - Virginia Feito: Well, this was a page turner and very silly. I think I sped through it partly because I wanted to be done with it; I wouldn’t call it great literature. Well done, for what it is. But god, so silly. More campy than really scary, just because it was so over the top. I don’t know that there was much to it, but I guess I enjoyed it. The idea isn’t as clever or subversive as Feito seems to think – I found myself saying “come on” more than I was genuinely shocked.
The Fifties - David Halberstam: This book was a vibe. It was interesting; it didn’t really have an overarching argument or through-line, but instead presented a bunch of different histories and vignettes. Elvis, Lucy, Truman, Eisenhower, etc. But also some maybe lesser known figures (to me anyway), like Grace Metalious and E. Frederic Morrow and Ray Kroc. It was a very easy book to flip through, so you could focus on whatever you’re most interested in. In the end, you’re left with as good an exploration as I’ve read of how America became what it is now. You don’t always (or I don’t) think of the 50s as a decade of change, but it really all happened then. We stopped being workers and started being consumers, and now we’re here. Very grim, in retrospect.
The Shadow of the Torturer - Gene Wolfe: I’m finding that I really like the sub-genre of whatever this is, where it starts off as fantasy and you slowly realize you’re reading science fiction, that the unaccountable magic described by the protagonist is actually fairly comprehensible technology. This is where most of the interest in this book was, for me; in thinking about a world that had progressed to the point where nobody understood the tech that made everything possible. It’s frightening, the possibility that people could get there. I wish the rest of the book (the plot, the characters) was as interesting, but I mostly found the protagonist irritating and a little dull. Maybe I’ll read the next ones, maybe I won’t; I’m in no hurry to do it.
The Overstory - Richard Powers: Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, and I only kind of liked it. I tried! I loved parts of it. I loved some of the characters, Patricia especially, and Dorothy, and I wish that the whole novel could have been just about them. It’s something I think about a lot, what we’re doing to the world; it’s so hard to be optimistic about it. Powers himself is optimistic, in the end, which is something. There’s a sense of humility, before nature and before the facts of our own lives. We get to control so little, and the only wisdom comes from accepting that. I once wrote that the most frightening phrase we’ve got is “it’s too late,” and the most hopeful is “it’s not too late.” Powers achieves a kind of synthesis by the end of this novel, like he’s saying “it’s too late to go back to what came before. Everything gone is really gone. But maybe it’s not too late for something else.” There’s a lot of hope in that.
A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories - Flannery O’Connor*: She really was the best at what she did – this collection, of course, shows that off better than the other I think. Every story is a small masterpiece, to the point that it’s easy to overlook because that’s just how short stories are now. “The Displaced Person” is, I think, my favorite for everything it does. But I’ll go to bat for “A Stroke of Good Fortune” which I know most critics think is middling. I love it, and I find it stronger and more terrifying now that I’ve been pregnant. There’s not much else that will prove to you that Cartesian dualism is a lie the way carrying and parenting a child will – though I suppose having a chronic illness like Lupus comes close. So Flannery knew, even if Descartes didn’t. She really was the greatest to ever do it.
The Dystopia Triptych - edited by John Joseph Adams, Christie Yant and Hugh Howey: God save me from sci fi writers with a message. I don’t want to be mean, some of these stories were alright. But god, most were so obviously written from a place of either paralyzed anxiety or smug anarchist superiority, or both. I think the only sequence I really liked was the one by Cadwell Turnbull, partly because he was the only writer who seemed grounded in something material and historical, and because he was thinking of dystopias in terms of workers and not consumers. Some actual class consciousness, incredible. The rest were pretty forgettable, but I appreciated the reminder to read more Turnbull. Whenever I see him in a collection his work tends to be my favorite, so I should just pick up some of his stuff directly one of these days.
Babel, or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translator’s Revolution - R.F. Kuang: I really loved this, despite it having a lot of elements I don’t always like. It’s a little more YA-ish than I typically enjoy; self-consciously didactic, and full of characters all but addressing the reader to say what kind of communist they are. But I like how ambivalent it is, remarkably so, and in a way that leaves me questioning some of my own assumptions and biases as well. I don’t know, really, who was right – and I don’t think Kuang wants you to pick one side or another. Maybe revolution needs the violent and the non-violent. The subtitle is a question without an easy answer, and I like that. I grew terribly fond of the characters; again, they’re so young in a YA-ish way, and generally I don’t care for that, but Kuang doesn’t spare them suffering, which is appropriate. She raises the stakes and then follows through the only appropriate way. I respect that. For a very long book, it was a fast read, and I did want more; I don’t know that she plans to return to this world, and the ending is satisfying, but I’d enjoy more. I’ll read more of her stuff, she’s quite good.
Going Postal - Terry Pratchett: Terry Pratchett is one of those writers I wish I liked more than I do. A little goes a long way – a quote from a Discworld novel can always get a nod or a chuckle out of me but I can never sustain the enjoyment for the whole book. This is likely a problem with me; I have nothing against the man and I can’t even really pinpoint what I dislike. I don’t dislike it, and I didn’t dislike this: it just didn’t do it for me. Pratchett never does. I’ll keep trying.
The Handyman Method - Nick Cutter and Andrew F. Sullivan: Meh. It was scary enough, certainly – Cutter and Sullivan came up with a genuinely scary concept. It was very broad, though: it’s definitely a book that started out with Something To Say about Toxic Masculinity and it’s not that I didn’t agree, but I like my horror themes to be just a touch subtler. Cutter is definitely very good at horror, he knows what he’s doing.
Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors - Adam L.G. Nevill: Nevill is very English, in a way that I like and that differs from a lot of the horror writers I’ve been reading lately. He’s quite good at finding the weirdness in English suburbia in particular; this is different from American suburbia in several key ways. It always threatens to tip over into folk horror, which American suburban horror cannot do. Nevill is very aware of his influences in British weird fiction, I think Machen is a real presence in his work. He’s quite good.
Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA - Richard English: What this makes you realize, more than anything, is how miraculous the Good Friday Agreement really was, and has been. So many things like it haven’t worked; the fact that all sides could come to the table in good faith, all of them giving up something, and that the people could then take a chance on it knowing it might not work but willing to try anyway: it does give you hope. Because if that can happen, after everything that came before, then anything can happen. English is very fair to all sides; he is interested in why someone with real principle could become a provo but he doesn’t minimize any of the harm done. And he also doesn’t minimize any of the gains: this book doesn’t make any anodyne statements about violence not working, because sometimes it clearly does and has. This is a very good account of a genuinely complicated subject.
The Hollow Man - John Dickson Carr: For the kind of thing this is, it’s very good. No characterization worth a damn, and it doesn’t have much to say other than just an exploration of its own cleverness. But the cleverness is really very clever; it’s a very well done mystery, and it doesn’t hinge on hiding things from the reader – every clue the detective uses was there for the reader too, it’s just the solution wouldn’t occur to you. Some of it dates, of course, in the way that golden age mysteries can; lots of sexism and weird racism. But it is very, very clever and elegantly constructed.
Liberation Day: Stories - George Saunders*: I like Saunders so much. I read this collection just a few years ago, but my life has changed so much since then that it was like reading it for the first time. I think “Mom of Bold Action” is still my favorite in the collection, but I appreciated it and recognized myself in it even more; I didn’t quite recognize myself in “Mother’s Day” but it made me a lot sadder. I think every story in here is good; “Love Letter” is perhaps the most reflective of its era, but is sadder now than it was in 2021. At that point it seemed dated, like Saunders was freaking out about something that was actually only transitory. Now it seems sadly prescient. The title story reminds me of Beckett, of his play Catastrophe in particular. I want to read more Saunders. I like everything by him that I’ve read.
Red Plenty - Francis Spufford: an unusual book that I liked very much. It was, I think, very fair, even if its perspective was not quite mine. They were all just people, even the ones who did terrible things. They weren’t a collection of liars and dupes – they believed in what they were doing. They thought it could work, and they tried their best to make it work. It was, finally, very sad. If only so many things had been different.
Billy Budd, Sailor - Herman Melville: every time I read Melville I wish I was back in school. His work is so academic, so apt for academic analysis, and so rich and intricate that I feel ill qualified to analyze it all on my own. He probably was the greatest American writer, for better or worse; I’ve never read a book by him that I didn’t consider a masterpiece. I think this might be my favorite. Its short length means I could just enjoy the language, which is dazzling of course. And there’s so much there; the religious subtext doesn’t negate the homoerotic subtext; the two reinforce each other in interesting ways. And I like the very modern use of multiple accounts; it makes everything weirder and sadder. What a strange, sad and very gay book. Melville, man.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This - Omar El Akkad: shame, shame and eternal shame. What else is there to say. This was so beautiful, despite being devastating. Where people can create beauty I suppose there is some hope. But god. It’s all been for nothing. All this death, and for nothing.
The Bostonians - Henry James: Christ, this was good. I think I like it more than any James I’ve read other than Washington Square, and for similar reasons. It’s so difficult and sad and ugly, and like WS has a last line that’s so killer you have to laugh. The last sequence is like the climax of a horror movie, and you can’t tell me that James didn’t know how awful it would seem. He knew; even if he didn’t know he knew, he knew. It’s a great tragedy, a tragedy of compulsory heterosexuality, every force in Varena’s life is pushing her towards marriage with this horrible guy and she can’t stop it, and even though she goes willingly you can tell, at the end, she’s trapped and she knows it. It’s horrible. This book is so great.
Capitalism, a Horror Story: Gothic Marxism and the Dark Side of the Radical Imagination - Jon Greenaway: This was great. I’m a fan of Greenaway’s podcast, so I knew he was a smart and insightful guy already (meaning, of course, that he roughly likes the things I like and thinks about them in similar ways). I expected to enjoy this, and did. It made me want to read Ernst Bloch, who is evidently Greenaway’s intellectual lodestar. Maybe that will be an upcoming project. I always want to read more horror criticism that looks at it from an angle other than gender/sexuality, which is of course important but not the only thing.
Isolation: The Horror Anthology - edited by Dan Coxon: I think this might be the best of this kind of anthology that I’ve read. It was, apparently, inspired by the early days of the Covid pandemic, and Coxon was smart in picking not the virus itself as the theme, or even viruses in general, but isolation, which is of course how so many of us experienced it. It’s a very rich idea for horror, and it took these writers in many different directions: there’s so many different kinds of ways isolation and loneliness can be frightening, but what was unexpected were the ways some writers saw potential in it. The potential for unexpected connection is there; Ken Liu and MR Carey explored that characteristically well. All of the stories ranged from “pretty good, actually” to “outstanding,” and I have a couple new writers whose work I want to explore. This was really, really good, and I’m glad I read it.
The Old is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born: From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump and Beyond - Nancy Fraser: it’s funny, sometimes, to read books about politics that were written during the first Trump administration now that we’re in the second one, and of course by “funny” I mean “it makes me want to throw up.” This book is already dated, sadly, and it points to something that is a real weakness about much of the American left in that – without even realizing it – they take for granted the liberal assumption that history is largely over, and the project now is just about tweaking things so that they get better, just redistributing the gains more fairly. Nobody could have anticipated Covid, but the thing is, nobody ever seems to anticipate that anything will happen. They are so used to America being on top that they can’t really imagine that changing or what it might look like. So at the time, a lot of people on the left did view Trumpism as an opportunity – they thought that Clintonism had failed, and surely something else could be tried. Trump was understood as a populist outburst rather than a petite bourgeoisie outburst, and the left just needed to figure out how to redirect the anger. It’s not the feeling you get when you talk to liberals or leftists now; everybody is convinced things will get worse before they get better, and who knows how or when. Anyway. There are some points here, and I’m always up for Clinton bashing I guess, but in retrospect it’s all a little trite and makes everything seem far too easy. As if organizing a multiracial working class can happen overnight in a society as alienated as this one. I’d like to read what Fraser has to say about any of this now.
The Ebony Tower: Stories - John Fowles*: I do love John Fowles. I’ve now read all of his works but one, and I’m almost afraid to read it because then there will be no more Fowles to read, and it isn’t like Ishiguro who at least is still alive and still (presumably) capable of writing a new book. Each story in this collection is a gem, and they’re all very Fowles: very concerned with the ways that men fail women, and fail to even realize they’re doing it. I like the suggestion of connection between each story, though you’re never beaten to death with it, and Fowles himself teases that those connections might actually mean even less than they appear to. So much is beneath the surface, as there always is in his work. And he’s so moving, often without letting you realize how moved you were until the end. He was so, so good.
The Cambridge Companion to American Horror - edited by Stephen Shapiro and Mark Storey: I really enjoyed this. I do think the focus was almost too broad and too narrow at once; it’s a big topic but the various writers kept returning to the same books and films over and over regardless of the topic. That’s not a crime; there’s a reason “Young Goodman Brown” is still read today, and I’m sure that Get Out will still be watched and talked about decades from now. But there’s a lot of overlap between “occult horror” and “folk horror,” and it meant the volume when read from cover to cover got a little repetitive. Stands to reason; horror is about crossing boundaries, after all – there’s always overlap. I liked the first half of the book, which dealt with horror and historical/political themes, better than the second half which explored various sub-genres. Still a good volume.
Embassytown - China Mieville: This was really great. It reminded me, very strongly, of the work of Le Guin in terms of thinking through how a biological change would influence culture and have ripple effects into politics. Mieville is very good at that kind of science fiction; his ideas are very bizarre but the way he teases out their implications is very grounded and rooted in the material. This was probably my favorite book of his that I’ve read, and I’m glad I did.
The Golden Key - Marian Womack: This reminded me of some of Sarah Waters’ books, except not as good. It’s too bad; I picked it up because I read a story by Womack in an anthology and loved it, so I thought her other work would be worth reading. Maybe she’s better at short stories, and I plan to pick up one of her collections at some point. But this wasn’t much.
I Who Have Never Known Men - Jacqueline Harpman*: This book makes me so terribly sad, and it made me sadder on this reread. There’s nothing that breaks the heart quite like loneliness, I think – and there’s all kinds of loneliness in this book. You can be lonely with people, too. I want to think more about the emphasis on the absence of men, specifically, because she did know and love other people. Was that enough? Would men have meant a future? Hard to say how I feel about that. But this is really a beautifully written work. I like that it never relents. It doesn’t let you look away from what a life like that would be like.
Glyph - Percival Everett: well, Everett is just the best, isn’t he. I loved this book a lot, as I love all of his books. His brain, man. It was so damn funny but still so loving; I really ended up loving this kid and it sounds trite but I’m so glad he loved his mom. I’m so glad that finally, that was what was most important. It is the most important thing.
Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales - Stephen King: alright I know I said last year that I was done giving King a try but this time I really mean it. Some of these stories were…fine. “1408” is pretty good. “The Man in the Black Suit” is quite scary, as is “The Road Virus Heads North.” I had read all of those before, however, so they were not surprises. The others were not riveting – fine, but nothing special. I just don’t have the King gene.
What Happens at Night - Peter Cameron: I did not care for this, and I wanted to like it, because apparently Scorsese is adapting it. It doesn’t really strike me as a typical story for him, but I suppose Age of Innocence wasn’t either. This was a very quiet, slow novel. It was well-written, certainly. It wasn’t quite horror, and wasn’t quite drama: it was a little like a novel version of Last Year at Marienbad, which is a film I love, so why didn’t I like this very much? I’m not sure. Reading it was like wading through molasses. Maybe I can accept things in film that I can’t in novels, which I suppose bodes well for Scorsese’s version. I’ll see it when it comes out.
A Creature Wanting Form: Fictions - Luke O’Neil: This was a very strange and strangely beautiful collection. Like slices of life from the ground floor of a dystopia, not too far off from the dystopia we’re in, where things just get slowly worse and worse all around and in all ways. These stories all give you a very surreal, off-kilter feeling, like you can’t quite trust reality. Very unnerving. Yet there’s some comfort, I suppose, in seeing that this is apparent to other people too. O’Neil is a very good writer.
Ghosts: Edith Wharton’s Gothic Tales - Edith Wharton: I never think of Wharton as a horror writer but she did return to the genre often, and like Henry James I think she was particularly suited to it. She was interested in guilt and repression, the most important gothic feelings. These stories were apparently the ghost stories she considered her best, and I won’t disagree. They are all good; they’re all Wharton. Much is left unresolved, which is also appropriate. It’s interesting; she actually explains less than a contemporary writer would. Less of a compulsion to identify the themes, maybe - she doesn’t feel that horror has to be a metaphor for something else. Ghosts are scary enough on their own.
His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae - Graeme Macrae Burnet: I keep striking out, lately. I liked this, but not as much as I wanted. I did not find the central mystery especially compelling, and would have liked either more conflicting narrators or fewer; it seemed like a device that wasn’t explored as fully as it could have been, so it would have been better to do without it.
Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata: I never would have picked this up if it hadn’t been for my book club, and I’m so glad I read it. It’s rare to read a book about an honest to god weirdo who is just weird for no real reason, not because of trauma or upbringing or in any way that needs to be fixed, really, or even in a way that’s remarkable. Some people are just odd, and it’s honestly moving that Keiko accepts herself and what she’s good at, in the end.
More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave - Ruth Schwartz Cowan: This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. It was fascinating. The only fault I can find is that it’s a trifle dated, being written in the mid 1980s, but that just means I would love to sit down with Cowan and pick her brain about things like trad wives, social media, MLMs, delivery apps, all of the ways housework and the appearance of housework has been changed in the last quarter century (or not). Some of what she writes about I already knew; that “labor saving” devices for the home are better understood as “productivity increasers,” and that we’d understand that if they were in a traditional workplace. But a lot of it was really revelatory; the ways labor had been saved, just not women’s labor, which was just changed to something less physically intensive but no less time consuming (and often more mentally taxing). And that there were other options, but people mostly didn’t take them, because people tend to choose privacy and autonomy if they have any option at all, even if it’s less efficient or more onerous. It’s pretty interesting. And as ever, the solution is not going to be technological. Men will just have to step up.
Horror Classics Collection - Various Writers: Fine. Most of these stories were ones that I’d read before, and stories that are already anthologized all the time or in the public domain (probably makes for a pretty cheap edition to put out) so the juice has gone out of some of them a bit. But a classic is a classic. Poe is still king of weird, Lovecraft is still himself, they’re still fun to read. But I maybe wouldn’t have included quite so much Bierce or Balzac, and the thing about Stoker is he had one good book and that’s it. Still, a good collection to read around Halloween.
Goblin: A Novel in Six Novellas - Josh Malerman: Middling. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the connecting device was only there because the stories themselves were each too weak to stand on their own, but they weren’t really strengthened by being strung together either. It just didn’t add up to much; the style was overwritten and a little florid, which I can accept in horror if it's scary enough, and this wasn’t. The town didn’t ever really come alive, and despite some attempts none of the horror seemed particular to the town. It was boring, which horror should never be.
Howls From the Dark Ages: An Anthology of Medieval Horror - edited by P.L. McMillan and Solomon Forse: good, for what it was. I picked it up because Christopher Buehlman wrote the forward, and he’s always good. I don’t think these stories really lived up to his level, but they were fine. An attempt was made in each to get inside the head of the characters in a real way, to portray the horror as a pre-modern person would experience it. I think Brian Evenson’s story was my favorite.
The Rose Field: The Book of Dust Volume Three - Philip Pullman: I took my sweet time with this book, I think because I didn’t want it to end, and I get the impression that Pullman didn’t want that either. It feels strangely, interestingly, unfinished, and I’ve read some reviews that complained about that, but I don’t know – I think that’s how it had to be. Because Lyra, who is a character that I’ve known for over half my life, is not a child anymore and she knows, as I must, that nothing ever really ends. She’ll have more adventures, tell more stories, fall in love and out of it and in again, do important work, and I won’t see it. I liked that, the idea that her story would go on, somewhere, but Pullman won’t be writing it anymore. The world he created is too big and too complicated to be wrapped up easily, and these books were always about learning that. He was telling us that even the things we learned from him might not be true, and that we’d have to figure it out on our own. Whatever Lyra does now, we’ll have to imagine it. How brave of him, to leave things this way.
At Least it Looks Good From Space: A Catalogue of Modern, Millennial and Personal Catastrophes - Carl Kinsella: Well. You’d think from the title that this would be a funny, wry memoir about life, fairly light and fairly disposable, if amusing. It is very, very funny, and by the end it made me sob with recognition. This might be the best book I’ve read this year, certainly the one I needed to read. My daughter was born just before Christmas in 2024. Over the course of 2025, my mental health went into what I’ll call a slow but steady decline, exacerbated but probably not solely caused by current events. I was very anxious, which I recognized, but for a while I thought it was a rational response to the increased pressure I was under. When I was up late at night researching how to grow potatoes in barrels just in case all of society fell apart I recognized that maybe I needed some help. I was eventually diagnosed with postpartum OCD, though as I got help I was better able to see the ways my anxiety had always tended that way during times of real stress. People hear “OCD” and they think it’s about being anal retentive and wanting everything to be clean and organized. It’s not that, at all. It’s been hard, the hardest thing I’ve ever lived through. I’m still very much in it. A large part of every day is devoted to getting better, still. Kinsella writes at length about his own OCD in this book, and I’m so grateful that he did. I’m so grateful I found this book when I did, because he puts into words what it’s like better than anything else I’ve read. One day I’ll write at length about what this year has been like for my brain. For now I’m going to recommend this collection of essays to people, and tell them “this, this is what it’s like. It’s so scary. Please be patient.” Kinsella has a real gift for writing so sharply about something so confusing and weird and awful. This book isn’t all about that; he also writes movingly about his parents, religion, culture, and being young in a world that feels chaotic. He’s very, very good. I’ll buy every book he writes now; I hope there are many more.
I, Claudius - Robert Graves* - I started rereading this because Bryan and I were watching the miniseries with Derek Jacobi (first time through for him). I forgot how funny it is; the series is funny but it leans into tragedy a little more. It’s mostly nonsense, historically, or probably nonsense as far as we know. We know so little about any of these people, which is the strange thing. So much was written about them but so much more was lost. It’s a terribly sad book finally, because it’s about people who believe that what they are doing is of vital importance, and it is, but not always in the way they think. Each character believes themself to be the protagonist of reality and of course none of them are, because there’s no such thing. They all believe they are subject to the whims of the gods, but none of them realize how they are subject to the forces of history. None of them realize who or what is really important. It’s pretty fascinating.
Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior - Kate Fox: This was interesting, and of course very English in tone in a way I found extremely annoying but was certainly on purpose. There’s diminishing returns with an examination this detailed, because it just boils down to the same thing: what Fox calls “the importance of not being earnest.” The English hate, more than anything else, caring about anything very seriously, and they care very seriously about keeping up the appearance that they don’t care. It’s an exasperating way to be. And there’s a kind of careless smugness that is pretty distasteful. So it’s an interesting book, but I ended it kind of despising the whole damn nation.
Doll Parts - Penny Zang: It was interesting to read this book; it was written by an alum of the small women’s college where I got my masters, and much of the book was directly inspired by that college. Which means we know a lot of the same people and I could recognize a lot of it (though no murders that I recognized, thankfully). I also recognized the portrait of an overwhelmed, isolated new mom in her late thirties who’s sure she’s being judged. That hit almost too close; it was very well done. The mystery was compelling as well, and the friendship was moving and well conveyed. I liked it.
The Message - Ta-Nehisi Coates: TNC has always been one of those writers I want to write like: I read him and I can see the technique, and I want it to be my own. He’s very good, and very honest, and ruthless with his own thought processes. He’s not afraid to be foolish, to admit ignorance, or to leave you with unresolved feelings. He displays in this volume a deep ambivalence in his own role as a writer and in the ways people have developed expectations around him. He knows people want answers from him and he wishes he had them but nobody does. I’m glad he got to the place he did in this book. I’m glad he grapples with how long it took him to get there. He’s just good at this.

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