Category Archives: Book Review

Fight, Flight, Freeze, or Fran

Book Review, Books, Creative non-fiction, Humor, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio

What I Read March 2026

I’ve been rotating through four classic responses to stress: fight, flight, freeze, and Fran. By which I mean Lebowitz. By which I mean I observe the mess, describe the mess, and get a laugh.

I might even drop a “We should circle back.” I absolutely do not circle back. Who has time for that?

If you’ve spent any time with me or my writing, you know I live in a town that likes noise. I do not like noise and I work from home. Local skeet/trap shooting finally stopped after its annual allotted 215-ish hours, and within a day the neighborhood leaf blowers began.

The clean baton pass from one form of mechanical noise to another is impressive.

I register it. I sit still and hope it ends. This is “freeze.” For variety, sometimes I Fran about it.

Meanwhile.

During an unscheduled visit to an upper cabinet, I rediscovered a Rubbermaid 20 Deviled Egg Keeper Storage Container (with lid!). I assume my husband brought it to the marriage, because this is not my spiritual tradition. This container implies we not only make an unholy number of deviled eggs, but also transport them elsewhere like some kind of appetizer diplomacy corps.

Every time we stumble on it, we say, “Oh, I loved deviled eggs!” like we caught them on tour in the early 00’s. We consider using it or donating it. Then we return the container to the upper cabinet because we do not host or attend high-volume eggy gatherings and don’t want to think about it.

Flight.

Bigger Life Problems are less funny, don’t budge for most of those strategies, and deal with the increasingly delicate question of where one safely places one’s actual self in a world that seems to reward anything else. (Even typing that, I assume I’ve annoyed someone. Hello! Welcome to my page!)

You cannot freeze your way into trust. You cannot flee your way into community. Even if you stretch beforehand, you cannot Fran your way into repair.

We sure love forgiveness because it lets everyone move on; repair asks you to be accountable. And while devastating commentary is deeply satisfying (TRUST ME), at some point, if anything is going to be rebuilt, somebody has to stay in the room and do the work.

Which is what this month’s books address – what it actually takes to stay and deal with things.

In The Fran Lebowitz Reader, the move is clear: identify the things and make good suggestions for more motivated folks to do something. In So Far Gone, repair is slow, uncomfortable, full of uncomfortable accountability. The Beginning Comes After the End argues that (re)building is the whole plot (and history proves that the necessary work must continue). And The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write dispenses with metaphor entirely and says sit down and get to it.

Now, fight sounds dramatic, but in practice a great deal of it is showing up and working with the broken thing long enough for it to improve.

Unless it’s a deviled egg container. I’m not dealing with that.

Which is all just to say, here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:

  • So Far Gone by Jess Walter
  • The Fran Lebowitz Reader by Fran Lebowitz
  • The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write by Sarah Burton and Jem Poster
  • The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

So Far Gone by Jess Walter

Jess Walter’s So Far Gone may win the award for the most forgettable title attached to a most unforgettable reading experiences. It’s frustrating because I now have to enthusiastically recommend a book whose title I cannot remember five seconds after I say it. I feel like I’m pitching a movie called That Thing With the People and the Stuff. “You’ll love it!” “What’s it called?” “I DON’T KNOW, BUT IT’S GREAT!”

The book is, among other things, a road trip. Every stop produces the unnerving realization that you have, in some essential way, already been there, emotionally, culturally, existentially, possibly geographically. Each location is a diagnostic tool. Ah. Yes. This particular human mess/cultural sinkhole. Been there, done that, got a koozie.

(continued here)

The Fran Lebowitz Reader by Fran Lebowitz

I had to read The Fran Lebowitz Reader in careful, controlled doses. You can’t really binge Fran Lebowitz. At least I can’t. It’s literary espresso. Lebowitz comes across as someone who remembers that things were supposed to be better and finds the current situation inadequate. And then she lets you know exactly why in as few words as possible.

Lebowitz has an unmistakable voice with an unmistakable cadence. Sentence to sentence, essay to essay, she sounds exactly like herself, which is both the pleasure and the reason you can’t binge this book the way you might a more contemporary essay collection. Also unlike many more contemporary essay collections, there’s no narrative arc or tidy throughline. Essays are loosely grouped under headings like “Manners” or “Science” or “People.”

Which, if I may be so presumptuous, feels very Lebowitz.

(continued here)

The Book You Need to Read to Write the Book You Want to Write by Sarah Burton and Jem Poster

I read a lot of craft books. Most, at some point, begin to feel like they are passing around the same handful of writerly chestnuts, all flapping about “structure!” and “voice!” before settling down to discuss three-act arcs. So I approached with cautious optimism but expecting very little.

This one is genuinely terrific, and, for newer writers, probably indispensable.

(continued here)

The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit

“Hope” is a great four letter word.

The Beginning Comes After the End by Rebecca Solnit packs a lot into a small volume. This collection of dispatches reads more like someone trying (calmly, patiently) to answer a question a lot of us are circling right now: how do you keep going when you can’t tell if anything you’re doing is working?

That’s the feeling, yes? That things are…a lot? Maybe too much? That the future feels like it’s unfolding out of control. Solnit doesn’t pretend otherwise as she moves through all of it: the pandemic, climate change, political upheaval, the ongoing fights around feminism, racial justice, Indigenous rights, and who gets to belong and be heard. Nor does she pretend it’s easily manageable. She just keeps pointing us outward and backward – look at where we’ve been, look at where we are, look at what actual people have done, over time, to move things, even when it didn’t look like anything was moving! Look! And breathe!

(continued here)

And there be the March reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?

Spines, NyQuil, and Staring At the Ceiling

Book Review, Books, Fiction, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio, Writing

What I Read February 2026

For a few days in February, my God-installed, non-award-winning back and intercostal muscles decided to spasm up and shut down operations. I was horizontal against my will, which is the least fun way to be horizontal. I did not enjoy this real-world lesson in what intercostals are, but I did get to spend a not-insignificant amount of time staring at the ceiling like it’s a limited series.

Just as my spine stopped trying to yeet my head down the hallway like a bowling ball, I got sick. Just like the rest of the family, only they all got it before I did.

So now I have this painful, unproductive cough, which my back is like NO, DO NOT. (You may insert your own “your writing is also painful and unproductive…NO, DO NOT” joke here. First prize is one underwhelmed “Good One, Mild Heckler” from me. Don’t spend it all in one place.)

Because of all that, this intro section is clearly going to be a bit of a wild ride, plus or minus one Mr. Toad. Whatever. It’s fine. If the intro licks a doorknob, just pretend you didn’t see it.

ANYWAY. A couple fingers of NyQuil in, and after my fourth attempt to roll over without sounding like a two-pack-a-day rusty door hinge, I started thinking about whether there might be some clever thread tying together the books I read this month. At the same time I was bellyaching about my back — *insert celestial music*

This month’s reading stack is about spines. Spines let us move through the world without collapsing into a soupy mess.

Look, I’m sticking with this premise, even if I have to force it a bit (consider it artistic chiropractic).

A man tries to stand upright in a world determined not to see him. A woman wonders what remains when cultural and personal scaffolding falls away. In another story, women hold lineage like vertebrae across generations. And in a craft book, writers are reminded that stories need structural, thematic, and other spines, and are shown how to build them.

These books also address questions of dislocation, power structures, self-determination, appearance versus reality, and the social codes that buoy and bruise us.

Which is all just to say, here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:

  • Once I Was Cool: Personal Essays by Megan Stielstra
  • Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
  • The Song of the Blue Bird by Esther Goldenberg
  • The Architecture of Story: A Technical Guide for the Dramatic Writer by Will Dunne

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

Once I Was Cool: Personal Essays by Megan Stielstra

Once I Was Cool: Personal Essays

Cool is elusive and requires a certain indifference to what other people think. That’s extremely difficult to achieve for people like me who spend a certain amount of time thinking about what other people think. (Perils of the job.)

Which is to say: I am not cool. And, unlike Megan Stielstra, I may never have been.

Once I Was Cool lives in that gap between who we thought we were and who we are now…

(continued here)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man (Edition 2) by Ellison, Ralph [Paperback(1995£©]

We tell ourselves stories about who we are. We tell ourselves that effort will be seen, that talent will be recognized, that identity is something we build and then present to the world.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison dismantles that.

The novel follows an unnamed young Black man trying to find his place in a society determined not to see him as an individual…

(continued here)

The Song of the Blue Bird by Esther Goldenberg

The Song of the Blue Bird: The Desert Songs Trilogy, Book 3

History is usually sung in the key of men: their journeys, their covenants, their departures and returns. The women, if they appear at all, are often relegated to the margins, tending the hearth.

The Song of the Blue Bird by Esther Goldenberg shifts the lens and begins where the women have always been: at the heart of survival and the center of the story. These women are far too busy living, enduring, scheming, loving, and adapting to remain marginalia in someone else’s story…

(continued here)

The Architecture of Story: A Technical Guide for the Dramatic Writer by Will Dunne

The Architecture of Story: A Technical Guide for the Dramatic Writer (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)

I picked up Will Dunne’s The Architecture of Story while working on my novel and trying very hard to ignore the inner voice that had begun scream-whispering, “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

I was stuck. I had reached Chapter Twelve with the creeping suspicion that Chapters One through Eleven were not only slightly disconnected from Twelve, they might also be slightly disconnected from each other and possibly from any version of “good…”

(continued here)

And there be the February reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?

I Feel Bad About My [*Waves Around Wildly*]

Book Review, Books, Inspiration, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio

What I Read January 2026

Thank you for being here. I mean that. There are, after all, many other things tugging at your sleeve for your attention. And yet, you’re moving your eyeballs down this screen while at least fourteen other tabs (literal/metaphorical) attempt to hijack your concentration. One of them is almost certainly bad news. One a recipe. One a person whisper-screaming about cortisol. Somewhere, something is on fire. Possibly a dumpster.

(You will probably not make that recipe, by the way. Close that tab.)

My point, if indeed I have one, is that focus is scarce. Heck, I’m having trouble focusing on this sentence I’m writing. The fact that you’re still here is either due to admirable determination or you’re experiencing a temporary failure of escape mechanisms. Or maybe you’re resting your thumb for a moment.

Still, here we are, clinging to the page like the mildly confused primates we are. Good for us!

Friend, I don’t need to tell you that January was awful. The news is a firehose of inhumanity. The weather has been making creative use of its worst instincts. People have been doing the same. We, the body politic, are fatigued and enraged. We’re cold. Our brains are pudding. It’s all just a grinding, cumulative awful.

As such, reading has been work this month. I’ve been bargaining, bribing, and staring at margins before turning pages. I reread the same passages multiple times and often still couldn’t tell you who anyone is or why they’re there. Are they in a room? A void? The DMV? (But I repeat myself.)

My brain, ever eager to help, kept suggesting alternatives to reading. Catastrophize! Scroll! Dissociate in the shower like a normal person! I know reading is good for me. My brain is in a big noping-out phase. Darn the puddingness of it.

It’s easy right now to feel like everything is stupid and terrible, and everyone is ridiculous, and we’re all trying to optimize ourselves into…I don’t know. What are we trying to optimize ourselves into this week?

ANYWAY, I read because I must and want to, and at some points it all opens up. I am not reading books right now to be transported. “Here” is fine. I know where everything is.

What I want andneed are books that affirm Yup, that’s a mess. Let’s poke it with a stick.

And I found some! Trust me, a lot of books were flung aside. There are scuff marks. SEND MAGIC ERASERS.

Nora Ephron (one of my January reads) reminds us that reading is both escape and the opposite of escape, a way to make contact with someone else’s mind when your own keeps short-circuiting.

In a moment when we keep mistaking performance for connection and proximity for community, good books feel like a refusal to join the grinding, cumulative, optimized, puddingish awful.

I’ll take it.

Which is all just to say, here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:

  • On The Road by Jack Kerouac
  • I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron
  • Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
  • Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

On The Road by Jack Kerouac

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

On the Road is devoted to the idea that the journey matters more than the destination. Narrator Sal Paradise is happiest when he is on the go, scarcely letting the engine cool before thinking about his next departure. I, on the other hand, am happiest when I am on the couch, so it was hard to relate. Maybe this book hits differently for young men on the whole. Maybe it hits differently before you’ve learned that, no matter how fast you’re going, motion and purpose are not the same thing. On the Road spends a lot of time suggesting that they are.

Par exemple: “There was nowhere to go but everywhere” has done a lot of unpaid labor for On the Road for nearly seventy years. It promises freedom, transcendence, and meaning, preferably without responsibility, receipts, or a return time. In short, keep chugging and you will discover something profound.

Well, smack my jukebox and call me Fonzie.

(continued here)

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman by Nora Ephron

It’s been tricky to find books I want to read and then tricky to finish books I start. Not sure what I needed this month other than, pitifully, some validation. Specifically, smart, funny validation. And for this, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck hit the spot while also inspiring me to write better. Or at least try to. I’m sure that brings some small relief to my intrepid band of readers.

Ephron notices what absolutely sucks and what absolutely does not suck and talks about it in great detail. She is irritated, observant, loving, and correct. These are qualities I respect.

(continued here)

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

The epigraph to Cat’s Cradle is a cheerful little threat. “Nothing in this book is true.”

What a nice way to say, Relax. I’m only going to describe the collapse of civilization. No need to tense up.

You should know that this is a funny book. You should also know that being funny does not stop it from being horrifying.

Vonnegut is often called a gateway author, and maybe that’s because often people read him young and then spend the rest of their lives trying to find that exact flavor again: smart, fast, funny, devastating. “Gateway” suggests he is the some sort of charming, goofy doorman waving you through toward Real Literature

Nonsense. He’s serious and brilliant and immediate. Besides, if anything is going to ruin your day, it should at least get to the point and have a sense of humor about it.

The vibe is University of Chicago, all angles and bells and theorems. Sharp intellect, unpretentious, but exacting and impatient.

In other words, the vibe is impolite, wild-haired brilliance.

(continued here)

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

I do not believe in the concept of a “work family.” Families visit you in the hospital. Work sends an URGENT email while you’re in the hospital, then eliminates your position in Q3. The phrase “work family” exists so companies can feel moderately at-ease replacing compensation and boundaries with feel-good vibes. And yet, this is the sharp, pointy edge of Then We Came to the End. Offices still manage to feel intimate (and we, the public demanding to be entertained, love that. See: every workplace comedy ever.) We spend more time with our coworkers than with our friends. We know who drinks oat milk. We know who steals that oat milk. We know who cries in the bathroom. We know whose job we could probably do if things went sideways. Work dehumanizes people while demanding emotional, intellectual, and physical labor from them.

A lot of reviewers call Then We Came to the End a “workplace satire.” Yeah, sure, and a colonoscopy is “light touch diagnostics.” This book is about “business as usual,” where nothing is technically wrong, but everything feels wrong, and most of it probably is wrong on some level or another. Usually ethics.

(continued here)

And there be the January reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?