Who needs another list, another batch of recommendations, more opinions? Probably nobody. But I have been treating chronic stress and seasonal malaise with copious amounts of reading, and it’s been good medicine. Here’s a chronological overview with brief commentary.
January
V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère Emmanuel Carrère is one of our greatest living writers. This book—the material product of his reporting on the 2021-2022 trials of those accused of facilitating the 2015 Paris attacks—is a remarkable feat of humble and compassionate journalism.
West by Carys Davies This novella reminds me of the dioramas I loved as a child: succinct, luminous, each detail carefully selected.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney Even when I don't love a Rooney book, I love Rooney, and I will read anything she writes. But her latest actually delighted and consumed me, in part due to the essential tenderness and sincerity demonstrated by her characters, each in their own idiosyncratic way.
Banal Nightmare by Halle Butler Hectic, angsty, hilarious. Halle Butler is so skillful in her depictions of the endless loops created by self-doubt and self-loathing, and the social fragmentation that occurs when insecure egos reign supreme.
Bear by Julia Phillips A well-balanced novel, albeit not terribly memorable. I was amazed by her first novel, Disappearing Earth, and enthusiastically recommend it.
The Most by Jessica Anthony Surprising, transgressive, quietly furious.
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver I picked up We Need to Talk About Kevin after hearing Charlotte Shane rave about it on one of my favorite literary podcasts, Reading Writers. It is indeed brilliant. The question at its core—whether the potential for violence emerges out of nature or nurture—creates an atmosphere of primal horror that steadily intensifies over the course of the narrative.
February
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe I don't tend to seek entertainment, or even necessarily amusement, in my reading life, but I'm pleasantly surprised when this ends up being my experience. Thorpe is funny (our narrator specializes in rating OnlyFans users' penises according to Pokèmon cosmology, for example) and possesses a strong sense of fairness and justice, so much so that this decidedly adult novel often read like speculative YA.
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel I’m curious about this burgeoning family of texts that illustrate the masochism made possible by life on the internet (Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte and The Shame by Makenna Goodman belong therein). The chopped-up form of I'm a Fan juxtaposes the protagonist's personal anguish with observations on art, critiques of class and consumer culture, and analyses of how power functions through gender and race stratifications. Brutal and sophisticated.
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher There are many aspects of The Coin worth mentioning—its paranoid mood, its surrealistic aesthetic, its political symbolism—but what remains most salient for me is the strength and intensity of the unnamed narrator's voice. She is not "likable" or "relatable" in the conventional sense, she is morally ambiguous, and there is a coarseness to even her more benevolent actions. This complexity, and its resistance to the predictability that comes along with characters crafted to fit specific notions of goodness, enlivens and unsettles the reader.
The Employees by Olga Ravn Each page of The Employees looks and sounds like a performance art piece. I was willing to be haunted by its strangeness, but couldn't penetrate its surface.
The Wilderness by Aysegül Savas The quote and its source escape me now, but I recall hearing a statement about how we would have more literature and art about caregiving if the caregivers themselves had the time to make it. We're lucky that Savas had the opportunity to write about the first forty days of motherhood, and we're lucky that she focuses not so much on clarifying what is an essentially mysterious process as she does on making its elliptical and slippery nature more vivid.
Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin Gorgeous! Loss, grief, estrangement, obsession, history, intergenerational trauma, Lacanian psychoanalysis, sex and love as objects of philosophical perseveration, the serendipitous undercurrents of city life: Elkin braids all of these strands together with such discipline and elegance.
Jillian by Halle Butler It's been said that most writers are really only ever writing the same story over and over again, and in this case I would consider Jillian, Butler's first novel, to be in service of Banal Nightmare, her third. Most of the same components can be found in both, Banal Nightmare being the more refined iteration. I'll read her sophomore novel The New Me later this month.
Long Bright River by Liz Moore Liz Moore's The God of the Woods is so in-demand at our local library that I've been in the queue for a copy since July 2024. I started out at #900-something, and now that I'm only #140, I decided to warm up with Long Bright River. The plot unfolds according to an expertly calibrated tempo, Moore's characters are fully imagined, and there's just enough emotional gravity to ground the story without it feeling overwrought.
My First Book by Honor Levy I cycled through waves of bafflement, irritation, recognition, sympathy, and despair while reading this 200-something-page collection of stories. I finished it less than one week ago and currently have no memory of its contents.
Currently Reading
Doppelgänger by Naomi Klein If you feel any need to deepen your already profound dread of present and future techno-fascist potentials, please read this. Klein uses her own absurd entanglement with fellow journalist Naomi Wolf to map out the degree to which the hysterics of online discourse have warped real life, with real consequences.
Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth A vortex of rumination and grievance! So of course I'm into it.
Hunt Gather Parent by Michaeleen Ducloff This is my second reading of Ducloff's excellent anthropological take on the parenting manual, and I'm sure I'll return to it again. The first time I read it, my son was an infant; two years later, I still find it to be one of the most practical sources of encouragement for taking a low-anxiety, low-pressure, low-control, low-interference approach to living with and caring for a very young person.
To Read in March Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self by Jay L. Garfield Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett Love Junkie by Robert Plunker Wellness by Nathan Hill The New Me by Halle Butler