Category Archives: Reading

Girl Bosses Tilt at Windmills (Or Do They?)

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

What I Read December 2025

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.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (Translated by Edith Grossman)

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.

(continued here)

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

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.

(continued here)

First Person Singular: Stories by Haruki Murakami (Translated by Philip Gabriel)

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.

Which brings us to First Person Singular.

(continued here)

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

Personal, Communal, Existential, Structural.

Book Review, Books, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio

What I Read November 2025

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.

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

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…

(continued here)

Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May

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.

(continued here)

I Was Told There’d Be Cake By Sloane Crosley

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.

(continued here)

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

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.

(continued here)

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

Gross and Fallible (Me). Brilliant and Difficult (Books).

Books, Humor, Reading, The Folio, Under 750

What I Read October 2025

I spent much of October being ill in the manner of a faintly tragic Victorian governess. Nothing grave, just an assortment of mortal inconveniences that showed my body is not so much a temple as it is a structurally unsound system of tubes and liquids, gross and fallible.

It should be noted that there is no angle from which this type of Camille-on-the-chaise illness is alluring. You cannot smoulder while blowing your nose.

By end of month, I expected some turn-of-the-century doctor with a pince-nez to prescribe a restorative stay by the sea. I would have gone. Gladly. I’d have even covered my pasty ankles for decency’s sake.

Still, between the tissues and the intermittent Byronic languor, I managed to read four books by people who are very good at doing the writing thing. (Also, SPOILER: Between illnesses, I GOT TO SEE COLSON WHITEHEAD LIVE! I’ll save that for another post when I have regained the ability to write about it in complete sentences that are more than “!!!!!!!!!!!”)

I haven’t written the individual reviews; those will eventually arrive (crosses fingers, appeals to the mercy of time gods). So for now, some thoughts on the books as a group. This is, by the way, not me asking the books to do group work. Group work is a scourge. I’m noticing what they did when they sat in the same room in my brain.

The books:

  • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
  • Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
  • A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett
  • Missing a Beat by Seymour Krim

Wildly different in form and structure, but all perform the same literary judo: they force a reader to look at history, absurdity, brutality, and ego-masquerading-as-culture. Three of them probe indelicately at the grand American myth that everything is fine and glorious, which is to say, the bootstrapped bald eagle stories America tells about itself in order to sleep.

By far the most…important, I think I want to say…of these books (and the best, I definitely want to say) was The Underground Railroad. Whitehead refuses to euphemize our history and natures. Vonnegut satirizes. Pratchett pokes at our soft spots, and Krim interrogates his disappointments in some sort of New Journalism version of an Individual and Society 101 course.

All four share an obsession with the ideas of story-as-power and language never being neutral. Who gets to define things? Whose suffering counts? Who gets to say what happened? Whose foolishness becomes legend? Whose story gets believed?

Moreover, what do we gain and lose by accepting these myths?

Pratchett regards myth as something humans compulsively produce to keep us comforted in our belief that we’re terribly wise or terribly tragic or, at the very least, the Main Character. A sort of psychological bubble wrap. The other three books, though, scrutinize the rather large and rickety myth called America, one shaped by power, violence, and selective memory. Race is a central pressure point in those three books, and the authors address it with varying degrees of authority, clarity, and moral handholds.

Whitehead writes starkly about the historical and ongoing realities of systemic racism, refusing euphemism or safe distance. His work is both expansive and claustrophobic. Violence often arrives without warning, as it does in life. It is brutal and brilliant and essential reading.

Vonnegut has characters use racial slurs to expose and criticize racist American thinking, and it lands sharply. It was unpleasant. Intentionally so. Yet that intention does not make the experience easy. Also intentional. There is a lot to unwrap in this book about racism, free will, and people-as-machines.

In several essays in this collection, Krim writes about Black culture from the outside, with a mix of admiration, projection, and longing that reveal (and sometimes perhaps widen) the gaps in his understanding and the limits of his perspective.

So, yeah, if I’m slow on getting the reviews out, it’s because I don’t want to just toss off some half-baked take while my skull is hosting a demolition derby. These books deserve deep analysis. I want to show up for that like a person who still has a functioning cortex.

Both my health and this blog are back on track. *Looks at calendar, sees what’s advancing over the horizon at an impolite jog* Well. Right. Onward, then. Let’s just agree to continue to do our best with as much dignity as we can reasonably fake.