I read three books this month. “Only” three, because the page count of one of the books triumphed over my ambition to get cozy and read anywhere between 5 and 43 books. Look, as you already know if you’ve ever wandered even accidentally into my writing, I am extremely busy. Doing what, you ask? Fretting about how busy I am, which is its own full-time job. It’s exhausting and inefficient, but it’s a living. Now, please mind your business (after you finish this piece, thanks.)
One of these books was Don Quixote. A famously long book (900+ pages! In a row!) about a person who reads too much and begins to confuse stories with reality. Any of you who are heavy readers probably relate.
My second read was Cultish, which is about how language creates meaning, belonging, and identity, and how quickly those things can curdle into manipulation.
The third was First Person Singular, a collection of stories in which Haruki Murakami does his thing. Things happen, or don’t. Or maybe they do, but in some weird emotional vapor. The narrators themselves often seem unsure what, if anything, just occurred. Then, more often than not, they decide that if an event did have meaning, it probably wasn’t consequential. And then The End. Sir? Excuse me? And also, this feeling I have at the end of each story isn’t necessarily unpleasant. Whyyyyy?
In all three, things happen, and they happen with juice. Not literal juice, in case any of you folks are in a “well, actually,” mood, although if you’re talking about cults, Kool-Aid will eventually burst in via a non-load-bearing wall.
Which is all just to say, here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (Translated by Edith Grossman)
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell
First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel
Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.
Oh sure, let me just take on a 900-page canonical, picaresque novel. That’s a reasonable response to insomnia, especially given what all that reading famously does to Don Quixote himself.
Uh oh.
Still. I did it. One must have standards, even while abandoning common sense. I promised myself I would watch Man of La Mancha once I finished, a show I have somehow avoided my entire life, despite being the kind of person who should have already seen it.
Also, I get to use the word picaresque. And now you do, too. Congratulations.
Janice from your high school PE class has emailed you. She’s very excited. She wants you to join something, you girlboss, you. Details about that something are murky, but it will change your life. Act fast.
If your gut reaction to this is “ew” and that “ew” is unrelated to Janice serving a volleyball directly into your face during the volleyball unit, you may have good reason.
Recently, I chatted with someone I’d done a show with years ago, and we started talking about rehearsals. At some point I said, “Remember when I got yelled at for moving the chair?”
He did not remember this.
I remembered it very clearly. During a tech rehearsal, I’d moved a chair while trying to clear the stage between scenes because the person assigned to move it hadn’t done it. The director growled, “DON’T MOVE SET PIECES THAT YOU’RE NOT ASSIGNED TO.” It was mortifying. I don’t like being yelled at, even if I have committed some kind of theatrical felony. I may have cried a little backstage, facing a corner and pretending I was absolutely not crying and just liked looking at walls.
According to everyone else, though, this never happened. Or if it did, it was no big deal. No one remembered the chair. Or the yelling. Or my belief that I had ruined everything.
I did not enjoy realizing that a moment so clearly part of my theater experience seemed not to exist anywhere else at all.
Why does November always feel like someone handed me a blinking device, said “cut the wires, good luck,” and wandered off to make a sandwich? November wasn’t catastrophic. I mean, no one actually handed me a bomb, none of my kids ran away to join a third-tier circus, and absolutely nothing went wrong on Thanksgiving (though my holiday prep was questionable, as usual). Like I said, November simply feels like that all happened.
(*le soupir*) November is just that month. It’s a little dumb and a lot chaotic and kinda drafty.
I don’t care much for dumb drafty chaos, so I hid and read. And by accident, subconscious choice, or cosmic joke, I read four books that each dwell in chaos. Personal chaos! Communal chaos! Existential chaos! Structural chaos! What a spread!
Sloane Crosley mines the human experience (hers, yours, mine) and comes up with glinting stories to share. James McBride unleashes riotous confusion in a Brooklyn neighborhood, where it morphs into grace. Katherine May slows everything down until the mess reveals a mossy, watery texture. Jennifer Egan fractures time and form, letting chaos spool into something Pulitzer Prize-winning.
Look, I get it. Life (November) is mostly uncontrollable, and yes, it can still be meaningful, funny, periodically beautiful, and let us not forget the glory that is this. But, sheesh, can things settle down a little? Or can we at least keep the chaos to the page? I can always pause that kind of bedlam for a moment by putting the book down to go make my own sandwich or cut the wires or whatever.
Which is all just to say here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:
Deacon King Kong by James McBride
Enchantment by Katherine May
I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.
The world of Deacon King Kong absolutely pulses from the get go. We start with a cinematic, panoramic sweep that situates us in late-1960s Brooklyn, where, the Cause Houses are a fully realized sociocultural ecosystem. And because the neighborhood is so fully formed, and its residents carry the whole spectrum of human feeling, the world of the book feels piercingly real and often achingly funny.
Aging deacon Sportcoat shoots a young drug dealer, Deems, in broad daylight. The mystery of why Sportcoat did this is the narrative aperture, and the mystery expands, matryoshka-like, into a larger one: how does an entire community swallow, digest, argue over, misremember, and metabolize such an event? Through this violent and abrupt act, McBride explores community, memory, and the layered structures of power shaping the neighborhood…
Katherine May’s Enchantment rearranges your insides. It’s a little uncomfortable until you realize you can breathe! Wonderful!
She defines enchantment as “small doses of awe” (which sounds about right. Larger doses would be too much). Her small doses of awe are the everyday sparks of joy, moments of breath, and our decision to pay attention.
The book is organized into four sections: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, which sounds a bit woo-woo, but each section reads like a grown-up, old-time fairy tale, the kind scuffed and weathered and passed forward by wind and rock and tide. May documents a lived folklore of how humans can and should make meaning in noticing. Even the structure is soothing.
Sometimes the universe takes an ordinary Tuesday, shakes it like a snowglobe, spritzes it with lemon juice, then publishes it as Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake.
I Was Told There’d Be Cake wanders through human experiences from childhood mishaps, to mall culture, to bosses who probably should not have been in charge of anything, to boyfriends who definitely should not have been in charge of anything. These worlds are recognizable, but tilted just slightly so we can see their underbellies.
Sometimes literary fiction still pulls off a magic trick. Sometimes you open a book and discover an entire small galaxy.
Which is to say, I just finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.
It’s marketed as a “novel in stories,” though that undersells it. It’s quite not a traditional novel, but it’s also not 13 stand-alone stories. It’s something hybrid, slippery and recombinant and fluid.
This month I’ve been juggling eleventy kajillion calendars. This is not, as you might assume, because I am a particularly efficient or important person. It is because time, like most of my kitchen drawers, gets jammed on all the oversized things I try to cram in it. Items currently requiring my attention and scheduling: two schools, two adults working from home at somewhere between two and seventeen different jobs, volunteer activities, various kid activities and applications, and the all-important sacred day when the Halloween candy finally materializes on the grocery shelves. That’s the one holiday America does perfectly. Costumes, sugar, minimal chitchat.
Fittingly, every book I finished in September carried within it the godforsaken ticking of a clock – THE clock – with incessant urgency and inevitable silence.
In Replay, time is a wheel greased with déjà vu: die, reboot, repeat. Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer is profoundly gentler, insisting we use our time well and show up to the page. The end will come regardless but right now there is time to mark the paper purposefully, joyfully, fearlessly. Obitchuary treats death like a hot gossip item, grief delivered with a rimshot. Robert Benchley proves that even the most mundane of moments can be slapstick if you just untie its shoelaces.
Put another way: my eleventy kajillion calendars don’t lie, though they constantly contradict each other. We’re all quite busy running out of time, and what remains is how we spend it. There are jokes, stories, hope, relationships, and maybe a decent breakfast before the lights click off.
Which is all just to say here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month, in no particular order except the one I typed them:
Dear Writer by Maggie Smith
Replay by Ken Grimwood
Obitchuary by Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes
The Benchley Roundup by Robert Benchley
*If you’ve ever watched a week vanish into laundry, you’ve seen it happen.
In the opening paragraphs of Dear Writer, Maggie Smith writes, “I believe creativity is our birthright as human beings.” I like this. It’s a much better birthright than, say, a Costco card or bad knees. She doubles down a page later: “When you read a poem, or listen to a song, or watch a play, you’re not the same person afterward. You’re slightly rearranged.”
Smith organizes her book around ten principles, which incidentally sound like the syllabus for the world’s nicest graduate program: Attention, Wonder, Vision, Play, and more. Each comes with a note to “Dear Writer,” followed by essays, some prompts, and suggestions for further reading. It’s craft book meets pep talk, heavy on kindness and honesty, light on prescriptive rules.
The section on Vision is a banger. Smith advises us to “make your own uncool,” which is the kind of line I love because I am, in fact, deeply uncool, so this will take very little effort on my part. The gist: take risks, some people won’t like your work, and that’s okay. The chapter on Restlessness also hit home. Smith reframes that itchy dissatisfaction we all feel when a draft isn’t there yet as something generative.
Smith’s quotable lines are legion. In Tenacity: “Your creativity is calling. It needs you. Work on your endurance and stamina. Wring your mind out like a rag over a bucket, until it’s bone-dry. Get every drop.” In Hope: “If hope is imaginative, then pessimism is a failure of imagination.” And she drops a piece of advice from Stanley Plumly that I’m still chewing on: “Stay deep within yourself and stay alone there — that is where your poems come from, and that has nothing to do with an audience. You are the audience.”
You don’t have to please anyone else in the room. You’re the damn room.
My personal underline-and-throw-exclamation-points-in-the-margin fest came in her section “On Feedback.” As someone who’s received workshop comments that shut me down for months, I found her take validating and humane. Feedback, she reminds us, isn’t about finding what’s “wrong,” it’s about clarifying, supporting, and helping the writer get closer to what they want.
If you’ve read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, this book is its scrappy cousin. Same heart, different swagger.
This month I’ve been juggling eleventy kajillion calendars. This is not, as you might assume, because I am a particularly efficient or important person. It is because time, like most of my kitchen drawers, gets jammed on all the oversized things I try to cram in it. Items currently requiring my attention and scheduling: two schools, two adults working from home at somewhere between two and seventeen different jobs, volunteer activities, various kid activities and applications, and the all-important sacred day when the Halloween candy finally materializes on the grocery shelves. That’s the one holiday America does perfectly. Costumes, sugar, minimal chitchat.
Fittingly, every book I finished in September carried within it the godforsaken ticking of a clock – THE clock – with incessant urgency and inevitable silence.
In Replay, time is a wheel greased with déjà vu: die, reboot, repeat. Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer is profoundly gentler, insisting we use our time well and show up to the page. The end will come regardless but right now there is time to mark the paper purposefully, joyfully, fearlessly. Obitchuary treats death like a hot gossip item, grief delivered with a rimshot. Robert Benchley proves that even the most mundane of moments can be slapstick if you just untie its shoelaces.
Put another way: my eleventy kajillion calendars don’t lie, though they constantly contradict each other. We’re all quite busy running out of time, and what remains is how we spend it. There are jokes, stories, hope, relationships, and maybe a decent breakfast before the lights click off.
Which is all just to say here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month, in no particular order except the one I typed them:
Dear Writer by Maggie Smith
Replay by Ken Grimwood
Obitchuary by Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes
The Benchley Roundup by Robert Benchley
*If you’ve ever watched a week vanish into laundry, you’ve seen it happen.
In the opening paragraphs of Dear Writer, Maggie Smith writes, “I believe creativity is our birthright as human beings.” I like this. It’s a much better birthright than, say, a Costco card or bad knees. She doubles down a page later: “When you read a poem, or listen to a song, or watch a play, you’re not the same person afterward. You’re slightly rearranged.”
Smith organizes her book around ten principles, which incidentally sound like the syllabus for the world’s nicest graduate program: Attention, Wonder, Vision, Play, and more. Each comes with a note to “Dear Writer,” followed by essays, some prompts, and suggestions for further reading. It’s craft book meets pep talk, heavy on kindness and honesty, light on prescriptive rules.
The section on Vision is a banger. Smith advises us to “make your own uncool,” which is the kind of line I love because I am, in fact, deeply uncool, so this will take very little effort on my part. The gist: take risks, some people won’t like your work, and that’s okay. The chapter on Restlessness also hit home. Smith reframes that itchy dissatisfaction we all feel when a draft isn’t there yet as something generative.
Smith’s quotable lines are legion. In Tenacity: “Your creativity is calling. It needs you. Work on your endurance and stamina. Wring your mind out like a rag over a bucket, until it’s bone-dry. Get every drop.” In Hope: “If hope is imaginative, then pessimism is a failure of imagination.” And she drops a piece of advice from Stanley Plumly that I’m still chewing on: “Stay deep within yourself and stay alone there — that is where your poems come from, and that has nothing to do with an audience. You are the audience.”
You don’t have to please anyone else in the room. You’re the damn room.
My personal underline-and-throw-exclamation-points-in-the-margin fest came in her section “On Feedback.” As someone who’s received workshop comments that shut me down for months, I found her take validating and humane. Feedback, she reminds us, isn’t about finding what’s “wrong,” it’s about clarifying, supporting, and helping the writer get closer to what they want.
If you’ve read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, this book is its scrappy cousin. Same heart, different swagger.
The trouble with dying at 43 (or any age, really) is that you expect it to be permanent. So imagine Jeff Winston’s surprise when he keels over at his desk, only to wake up in his 18-year-old body, circa 1963, with all the memories of a man who’s already survived disco. From the opening pages, it feels more exciting than the life he just lost.
At first, Jeff Winston does exactly what most of us would do. He places major bets, invests wisely, and generally struts through life knowing how it all turns out. But then the loop resets. He dies at 43 again. And again. And again. Turns out living the same 25 years over and over, no matter what, is maddening.
Like Groundhog Day stretched across decades, the book shifts from fantasy to philosophy. Can you only enjoy being 18 if you’re actually 43 inside? What happens when you’re living as a teenager and a middle-aged man at the same time? Grimwood leans into those ripple effects where every choice remakes the world, but the ending never changes.
The pacing is tight. Grimwood spares us the tedium of every replay in full, fast-forwarding to the choices that matter like a cosmic remote control with a mercifully working fast-forward button. Yes, it reads a little late-1980s, but then again, so did the 1980s.
If you love books like 11/22/63, “what if” fiction with actual emotional depth, or have ever just wondered “If I had to do it all over again, knowing what I know now…” you might enjoy Replay.
Replay starts as wish fulfillment (i.e., the fantasy of having the opportunity to do it again and fix things) and becomes a philosophical exploration of regret, loneliness, and the dreadful suspicion that life only matters because it ends. The brilliance of Grimwood’s novel is in showing that inevitability can be both a curse and a peculiar sort of gift.
I didn’t realize until after I got hold of this one and looked at the back cover that the authors are podcasters. This did not bode well. I like my podcasts like I like my books: unrelated.
I opened it anyway.
Obitchuary is breezy, irreverent, and laden with more-than-occasionally-gross death facts. If there is a Venn diagram of “Halloween enthusiasts” and “people who correct you on the Latin root of rigor mortis,” this book sits precisely in the overlap. Especially good for pub trivia enthusiasts during Spooky Season.
The tone at first is like listening to two slightly tipsy friends who’ve been speaking in inside jokes since middle school. Now set them loose on the surprisingly sober business of what happens to your body after death. It’s not wholly unpleasant, but it’s undeniably jarring.
By Chapter Two, they settle in. The humor shows up in the right places instead of everywhere all at once, and the information takes the lead. Honestly, they are funny, it just lands better when they don’t keep poking you in the ribs to make sure you noticed the joke.
What Obitchuary underscores, with a deliciously relentless cheer, is how people are quite odd about death. Before it, during it, long after it. Some readers will find this refreshing, others gratuitous, and still others will wonder if they’ve accidentally purchased the wrong book.
That’s gallows humor for you.
I finished it out of morbid curiosity (tip your wait staff). I read some sections twice, skipped others. That’s the great advantage of nonfiction. You can dip in and out.
But whatever you do, don’t skip the epilogue. It’s unexpectedly tender and inspiring.
This book might best be enjoyed by fans of the Obitchuary podcast, trivia junkies of the macabre, or readers who like their death culture delivered with a wink. If you think you might be the audience, flip through it first. You’ll know pretty quickly.
Robert Benchley was the sort of man who could look at a perfectly ordinary activity and turn it into a full-scale farce. He made being baffled by modern life into a writing career, which is no small achievement considering modern life’s eagerness to baffle.
The Benchley Roundup, assembled by his son Nathaniel, gathers these short pieces into a single cabinet of curiosities.
It is what you might call a “panoply,” although I can’t imagine anyone actually using that word outside of a catalog.
Nathaniel admits up front that his father’s humor is hard to pin down: “I don’t think it can be analyzed. It is sometimes mad, sometimes penetrating, and sometimes based on nothing more than word associations, and the only generalization that can be made with any degree of certainty is that it is different—or, if you will, unique.” Which is another way of saying: abandon all hope of categorization. Benchley was, inconveniently, unique. And that’s exactly the appeal: Benchley never sounds like anyone else, even now. I would venture a guess that Benchley thought faster than the rest of us, and we’ve been trying to catch up ever since.
Many of these essays originated in magazines. Some land perfectly; others remind you that you are reading something written when people still wore spats with jokes and references that make you feel like you’ve walked into a party eighty years too late. Others arrive startlingly fresh, proof that certain absurdities never go out of fashion. Humor is like that: part fossil, part banana skin.
Reading Benchley today is like watching an old black-and-white film where everyone speaks in that brisk, so-called mid-Atlantic accent that once passed for sophistication and now just sounds faintly ridiculous. But that voice, that sense of time, is half the fun. His writing is unpretentious, seemingly effortless, and wide-ranging. You get the sense he could spin absurdity out of absolutely anything. And often did. This is either a tribute to Benchley’s talent or a condemnation of how little progress we’ve made as a species. Probably both.
The Benchley Roundup is a delight to dip in and out of. Some essays feel like artifacts, some land with fresh precision, but together they remind you why Benchley mattered, how he influenced subsequent generations of humorists, and why his style still feels different, even now. It’s smart, silly, and deceptively simple. As his son notes, the collection is best read in small doses, dipped into like a jar of peculiar sweets, because each piece is its own odd little universe. Some will feel like time capsules, others like dispatches from a mind still waiting for us to catch up. Benchley pointed out, with impeccable timing, just how gloriously inexplicable the world was and still is.
And there be the September reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! What’s in your TBR pile?
Jackie Pick 