Category Archives: Reading

There Might Be Giants and I Am Hopeful, Damn It

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

The Folio: What I Read August 2025

This month is about survival manuals. Don’t get excited, I’m not talking about the practical kind. You will not learn how to light a fire or pack a sensible go bag. And frankly, if you’re thinking that’s something I can provide, you don’t know me very well. Or at all. (But, maybe protein bars and magnesium fire-starters?)

This month’s books are survival manuals for other catastrophes: your metabolism leaving you without so much as a Dear John letter; fighting the demon chorus in your head so you can get words on the page; the gods themselves drunk, horny, and hurling thunderbolts again; civilization collapsing; when you’re trapped on a spaceship and you have serious brain fog.

There are giants this month, some even literal. Sometimes the giants are other things: menopause, perfectionism, capitalism, climate change, or just being dumb enough to try and write a novel (hi! It’s me!). The authors — themselves absolute giants in their fields — hand us crumpled roadmaps and tell us to keep going.

The uniting principle? Complicated hope.

Giants are human after all, even when they happen to be gods, or criminals, or your own worst instincts.

And I may not be able to help you make a fire, but maybe one of these selections will light one under you.

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:

  • Marrying George Clooney: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis by Amy Ferris
  • Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
  • Mythos by Stephen Fry
  • Audition by Pip Adam
  • Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

MARRYING GEORGE CLOONEY: CONFESSIONS FROM A MIDLIFE CRISIS by AMY FERRIS

I was first introduced to Amy Ferris via social media, where she is brash, openhearted, more-than-occasionally foul-mouthed, and soothing. She’s the kind of person who makes you feel both seen and slightly underdressed for your own life. I hoped for more of the same from Marrying George Clooney. I was not disappointed.

From the first page, Ferris hits you with big-font certainty. (Possibly the largest font outside of airport signage.) “I am hopeful.” And she is hopeful in the way you can only be in midlife at 3 a.m. Because this is a 3 a.m. book. A book written in the witching hours of perimenopause, when insomnia and anxiety shrilly tag-team you into wakefulness, and you find yourself thinking about your body, your parents, every embarrassing moment of your life, the sudden unignorable awareness that George Clooney is married with children, and also that your metabolism has left you for someone younger.

Ferris reminds us, with furious humor, that hope has sharp teeth and has bitten more than a few people who really should have known better, but who still keep sticking their fingers in anyway. Hope that carries the pressure of memory and the hunger of unfinished business. Midlife hope.

Ferris embodies the credo that You own everything that happens to you and writes accordingly. This is both empowering and terrifying, depending on your life from age 8-108. Ferris writes without filters and with sarcasm-as-survival-mechanism. You may bristle at that, but humans have a knack for dressing their wounds with sarcasm: a sort of glittery topcoat over layers of disappointment and hurt. Ferris points this out, and it somehow draws us closer, which is remarkable because sarcasm often is a way to signal “for the love of God, back off enough for me to recover.”

The book started, she says, as a funny, weird, sad menopausal diary. Then it braided itself with her mother’s descent into dementia. “THIS WAS NOT PLANNED,” she writes. This collision produces a final section of such tenderness that the only sensible response is to reread it so as to remind yourself that language and people can hold this much ache and still be lovely.

There’s a girlfriend-intimacy to her voice. She writes as if to one Dear Reader, and for the span of these pages, you get to believe you’re the one. She lets you in on her weirdest, wildest 3 a.m. thoughts.

Midlife is like losing your keys in your own handbag. Ferris is that girlfriend who reminds you your glasses are already on your head. She’ll insist that you put them on before you dig deeper, because the keys are definitely in there. Somewhere. Or possibly in another dimension.

We’ll find them.

BIRD BY BIRD by ANNE LAMOTT

Anne Lamott begins Bird by Bird with a memory from second grade: her poem published in the school magazine. “I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist.” This is everything you need to know about writers: we don’t believe we exist until we appear in print. Is this the artistic mindset? Is it neurosis? Who’s to say?

Probably Lamott, actually, and I think she’d lean more towards “this is how writers are.”

Bird by Bird is a must-have (or at least a must-have-heard-of) for most writers, and with good reason. Writers love rules and systems. We want formulas for success the way other people want life hacks for cleaning a cast iron skillet (and just as debatable online). Anne Lamott, to her credit, refuses to give them any. This is also why writers like her. We are a capricious bunch.

Writing is, as everyone knows, a profoundly humiliating and humbling activity, which Lamott affirms with delicious humor. Then she convinces you that it is somehow still worth it.

The famous “shitty first drafts” chapter has become canon for writers. Everyone quotes it, mostly because it’s true and also because it allows them to say “shitty” in a professional context. Lamott captures the voices in your head (the vinegar-lipped critic, a German dude, your parents, William Burroughs for some reason, and a chorus of judgmental dogs) and says: yes, those voices are there, and yes, you still have to write anyway. You will make a mess, and then you will make another mess, and out of this mess, a book might crawl onto the shore.

Perfectionism, she points out in another section, is an additional problem we writers have. Writers cling to perfectionism as if one day someone will congratulate them for never finishing anything.

Lamott reminds us that characters are desire, contradiction, and ways people bump awkwardly into each other in the world. Good characters want things you’d rather they didn’t. They disobey. Sometimes they have a distressing tendency to walk off with the plot while you aren’t looking. Follow them.

Lamott insists that writing is about giving. Day by day, you have to give the work in front of you your very best, not hoard scraps for some future masterpiece. “It is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad that I get any sense of full presence,” she writes.

And then she doubles down: “You are going to have to give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There’s no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.”

Lamott has been down the dark, boggy writing path and lights a torch for the rest of us. She is precisely the sort of person you want tending to your writer’s heart.

Tied for my favorite read this month.

MYTHOS by STEPHEN FRY

Many of us of a certain age learned Greek mythology in middle school, where it was presented to us thusly:

  1. Behold these photos of statues and partial buildings in Greece.
  2. Memorize fifty names, none of which sound remotely different after the third cup of cafeteria milk.
  3. Realize that Cronus and Chronos are not typos but two different gods.
  4. Take a test.

Stephen Fry looked at that steaming pile of joylessness and said, “Nah, let’s turn this into a glorious, messy bitchfest.” And he did.

Mythos is a retelling of the Greek myths stripped of marble solemnity. Fry himself pointedly reminds us these stories are not academic footnotes. Or, as he puts it: “there is absolutely nothing academic or intellectual about Greek mythology; it is addictive, entertaining, approachable and astonishingly human.”

It’s not baseless, though. Fry respects the source material as he roasts it. The man cannot resist a wink and some wordplay.

The gods here are not noble archetypes. They are jealous, petty, vengeful, capricious, warlike, creative, tender, and brutal. They also devour each other. Fry captures that energy and chaos, and the result is both illuminating and astonishingly funny. For example, when Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, Fry tells us she was “busy being unpronounceable.” Later, Gaia gets wise counsel and, “as we all do, whether mortal or immortal—ignored it.” This is the sort of wisdom we can all relate to, because ignoring perfectly sensible advice is one of humanity’s core competencies.

The style is convivial, as if Fry were sharing stories while slightly tipsy at a campfire. Every so often, he pauses to offer an etymology lesson. This is the real work of myths: the breadcrumb trails from Olympus into our everyday speech, the stories we tell about storms and seasons, and the patterns of human interactions.

However, Mythos does not do a deep dive into the contemporary references and anchors mythology has, but this may pique interest enough for you to (oh, please pardon me) do your own research.

The book is broken into short, digestible chapters, like mythological tapas. I don’t think you are meant to binge Mythos in one sitting. Much like the gods themselves, who could never resist a late-night nibble of livestock, nymphs, or one of their own children.

One of the most delightful surprises was the story of Melissa. Yes, Melissa. I was sure Fry was joking, but no: actual nymph, excellent story.

If the last time you cracked open Greek myths was in middle school, Mythos is the perfect reintroduction with equal parts affection and irreverence.

AUDITION by PIP ADAM

Reading Audition felt like waiting for the curtain to rise on a play that your friend who thrives on the strange is staging in a black box. The lights flicker. Something begins. You think this was a mistake and you start plotting how to escape without the actors noticing because you’re sitting six inches from the stage.

Then you realize you’ve bought a ticket to brilliance.

Audition’s opening section is nearly impenetrable due to fragments of conversation, interruptions, and absurdist overlaps. The only way I found to enter it was to read it as if it were experimental theater or one of those deeply strange animated shorts that air at 3 a.m., the ones that make you wonder who got high and greenlit it. Nonsense, until you let it in. Once I leaned into that frame, the text unfolded like mischievous origami.

The premise: Alba, Stanley, and Drew are three giants with wonky memories confined to a spaceship. They must keep talking or their bodies will expand, pushing against the ship until it breaks. Every word is a sandbag holding back catastrophe. And what do they talk about? Memory, incarceration, identity, the false promises of rehabilitation. These conversations are parceled out and loop back on each other, and the effect is unnerving but masterful. Adam lets information leak in portions just enough to sustain us.

Formally, it’s stunning. What begins as Beckett-like dialogue (people talking about nothing until it turns out to be everything) morphs into fractured recollection, and then just when you’re about to abandon ship, you get clarity. The result is a bit destabilizing. One moment you’re in a spaceship, the next you’re in the remembered history of “before Audition.” The boundary between the two blurs. Eventually, you begin to suspect all the settings are variations of the same place anyway.

Audition is abolitionist, queer, and political down to the marrow. It posits that we are made of memory, and also have holes where systems have taken from us. The giants have been shaped by violence and survival and systems, and Adam refuses to render them neatly.

This is not an easy book. It is experimental to the point that it, too, is pushing against walls until they almost break. Audition shows how speculative fiction can hold abolition and justice at its core. Think The Waves in space, or as one reviewer put it, “brilliantly weird, weirdly brilliant.”

I wanted it to explain itself and behave, but the disorientation is part of the experience. Possibly the point. Audition is theater and testimony and thought experiment. Read it when you’re ready to let a book dismantle you and your certainty.

PARABLE OF THE SOWER BY OCTAVIA BUTLER

HOW HAVE I NOT READ OCTAVIA BUTLER BEFORE?!! This woman wrote Parable of the Sower in 1993, set it in the 2020s, and basically nailed our current situation. Climate collapse? Check. Wildfires, water rationing, roving gangs? Check. Corporations swallowing up desperate workers into indentured servitude? Check.

It feels like it’s remembering the future before we live it.

Our protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is a teenager during societal collapse (as if being a teenager weren’t enough.) Her neighborhood is walled off in a sort of DIY feudalism project while the outside world devours itself. Lauren suffers from hyperempathy, feeling the pain of others, which is not the sort of thing you’d request in a collapsing society. Hyperempathy makes her porous in a world that rewards hardness. This sounds unbearable, but instead of crumbling under it, she builds a new belief system: Earthseed. Central idea: God is Change. As her world collapses, she walks north, gathering people, planting seeds of this visionary and terrifyingly practical philosophy.

Butler has to convey an entire civilization’s worth of collapse (politics, poverty, violence, religion, drugs, arson, and more arson) and does it without a single moment of expository sludge. The information just unfolds. The world is on fire, but the prose is icily precise. She withholds just enough: a neighborhood that feels safe until suddenly it isn’t, a family plan that collapses in a single night. The restraint makes every disaster land harder.

Earthseed verses throughout the book sound like scripture mixed with human software patches. “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”

Is Parable of the Sower brutal? Oh yes. Neighbors are slaughtered, and kindness is often punished. But it’s also hopeful. Lauren is pragmatic, visionary, and keeps moving. It’s not a dystopia for spectacle or misery porn, but it does feel uncomfortably close to a guide for dark times.

Harrowing and brilliant.

Tied for my favorite read this month.

And there be the August reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! What’s in your TBR pile?

The Folio: What I Read July 2025

Book Review, Books, Poetry, Reading, The Folio

The Hell Is Going On?

This month’s theme is also one of my life’s big questions: The hell is going on? I ask this at least twice a day. More when I’m forced to parallel park, and usually shortened to “The hell?” as men materialize out of nowhere to “help” me by waving their arms like those folks who guide planes on the runway. I do not request their services, and yet they always show up, without those fun and official glowing wands. The gall.

I do not, at present, know what the hell is going on.

The good (?) news is that this month’s books also ask, “The hell is going on?” I suspect if they could, they’d pat me on the shoulder and say, “We were hoping you knew.” If literature offers any comfort, it’s in discovering you’re not the only one functioning in a perpetual state of bewilderment.

This is, I should note, comforting in the way seeing someone else struggle to parallel park is comforting.

All five books embrace the “lean into confusion and see what happens” principle. Narrators, characters, and, in one case, sentient luggage, try to make sense of their place in a universe that insists it’s operating by rules when it clearly isn’t. This requires surrender in a “realizing the plan is not The Plan” sense, not the “I give up” sense.

Now, you may ask, “But what sort of books are these?” To which I reply, “Exactly.”

Ah, the works I read this month, bless their genre-agnostic little hearts.

These books prove categories are sometimes more helpful shelving suggestions than binding agreements. Just like the word “salad” has been applied to things involving marshmallows, cross-pollination of genres is the thing. It’s fine. It works. Categorize these under “Books.”

Anyway, they all attempt to make sense of existence. Usually, this was accompanied by something breaking. Break the fourth wall? Sure. Break entire narrative engines? Cool. Breakdown with enjambment? Why not?

As I said, you’re eventually going to have to give up The Plan and surrender to something in order to find meaning in this weird world.

Otherwise, all you have is an exhaled “The hell is going on” as interrogative rather than declarative.

Which is all just to say here (in no particular order except the one I typed them in) are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month

  • The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad
  • Redshirts by John Scalzi
  • The Color of Magic by Sir Terry Pratchett
  • Lord of the Butterflies by Andrea Gibson
  • Freeing the Turkeys by Laura Lentz

THE BOOK OF ALCHEMY BY SULEIKA JAOUAD

I’ve never been entirely sure how to journal. The blank pages are tyrannical in their blankness.

The idea, as I gather it, is to faithfully record the events, thoughts, and feelings of your life so that at some point in the distant future when your memory has gone soft and you’ve developed powerful opinions about municipal recycling you may look back upon your younger self and think, “Well, I certainly wasted a lot of time on that.”

But here’s the problem: that may or may not be the case. (CUE RULE-FOLLOWER PANIC.) Should I be composing a daily epistolary masterpiece for the benefit of future anthropologists? Logging the harrowing experience of going to Walgreens and forgetting why I was there (again)? Charting my elaborate plans for inconveniencing people who’ve wronged me? (Not real plans. Just little thought experiments, like, revenge wordle or swapping out one shoe of each pair with something one size too big.)

Hi. I am a writer, i.e., a person who allegedly notices things, and I struggle with journaling. Shouldn’t the noticing of things be enough?

Oh ho, it is not.

The Book of Alchemy will be the first to show you that noticing isn’t effortless or even neutral. It comes with its own weight and politics. The act of paying attention to something is also, always, the act of deciding what to ignore. This is focus, and focus is a critical step of thinking-to-meaning.

This is fun and liberating and important for its own sake.

Each of the ten chapters takes on a theme (Fear, Memory, Healing, Time — the usual gang of existential reprobates) and begins with a short essay by Jaouad. These are followed by writings from guest authors who are, quite frankly, an intimidatingly excellent crowd. (We’re talking George Saunders, Elizabeth Gilbert, Hanif Abdurraqib, Gloria Steinem…and, and, and). Each piece ends with a journaling prompt that, in one way or another, asks who you are when no one is looking.

The tone is devoid of smugness and also mercifully free of false uplift. Just steady voices asking steady questions that somehow end up in very unsteady places.

Jaouad does not pretend writing will fix you, but it might help you see what you’re made of and perhaps uncover things you’ve been avoiding or didn’t know were there.

What this book did, which I did not expect it to do, was put a crack in the dam and get me journaling again — daily! — without worrying if I was doing it right.

This is not a workbook or “30-day challenge.” The Book of Alchemy helps you think about writing and about your history and about how to frame it. It is a companion for the quieter, more difficult work of looking at yourself.

My favorite read of the month.

REDSHIRTS by JOHN SCALZI

Imagine you’re aboard a starship where every mission is likely to end in disaster. You’re not the charming captain or the impossibly brilliant science officer; you’re just a random crew member with a gizmo of some sort. Now imagine realizing all this might literally kill you. That’s the starting point of John Scalzi’s Redshirts, a novel that is, much like the shipmen it depicts, deliciously, wonderfully, brilliantly silly in the grand tradition of Galaxy Quest.

This could’ve been a one-joke book (“Haha, everyone in a red shirt dies!”), but it’s not. Scalzi takes the premise and spins it out into something surprisingly sharp. One minute you’re laughing at a gag about away missions, and the next you’re enjoying musings about free will.

AND THERE ARE ICE SHARKS!

Scalzi’s dialogue is excellent. Scalzi’s characters are sarcastic and often joke to stave off panic.

Funny dialogue is a bit like space travel itself: everyone thinks it should be possible, but few manage to do it without something exploding.

The pacing is brisk, never pausing to admire its own cleverness. There’s a workplace-comedy vibe, but there are also moments of genuine philosophical weight. Scalzi doesn’t overdo any of it or wink at the audience. Additionally, if you’re a Star Trek fan, you’ll find plenty of Easter eggs. No worries — you don’t need to be a superfan. I’m in the “really enjoy the franchise, don’t own a uniform” camp and had a blast.

The characters blurred together occasionally, but that’s probably because I treated this as fun, summer‑escape reading rather than serious, seminar‑note reading. (Pro tip: pay slightly more attention to who’s who at the start than I did.)

Just when you think it’s all hijinks, Scalzi closes with three codas, and the book shifts gears slightly. These short pieces zoom in on a writer, a widow, and a man carrying memories he shouldn’t have, and they add depth to the book. (Coda I also has some insights into writer’s block that may have hit a little close to home.)

If you know what a redshirt is and you have even a sliver of a sense of humor, you’ll probably love this book. If you feel like a redshirt in this world, first of all, big hugs (HEY! MIND THE GIZMO!). Then, read this book.

Humor in novels doesn’t always get the same gravitas as the Serious Literary Stuff (see my review of Pratchett’s The Color of Magic for more of my nonsense about that), but Redshirts proves that funny can also be smart. Read it on vacation. Read it when you need a brain-cation. Read it because reading is allowed to be fun.

THE COLOR OF MAGIC by TERRY PRATCHETT

Writing humor is tricky and often thankless. Serious Novels™ get some grace. Even if people don’t like it, they will admire a Serious Novel™ for its depth, its artistry, and its evocative use of weather as metaphor or something. Like it or not, the brilliance is appreciated. Humor, on the other hand, is subject to the ruthless, binary judgment of the Guffaw Reflex. Either you laugh (Brilliant! Nobel Prize! Drinks on the house!) or you don’t (This author is a flailing imbecile of some sort! Escort them away from all writing instruments and polite society!)

Worry not. The Color of Magic is funny and worthy of respect. Heed these words, because I am not, by any traditional measure, a Fantasy Person (you may insert your own joke there). Fantasy People tend to know things like the difference between a glaive and a halberd or which mystical herb will undo a hex laid by a swamp witch on sabbatical. I, on the other hand, wandered into The Color of Magic expecting a goofy satire and instead found myself on a flat planet balanced on four elephants riding a space turtle. (And I loved it.) Welcome to Discworld. That’s not even the most confusing thing in the first chapter. There are wizards and dragons (sort of), and gods who treat mortals like game pieces. But mostly, there is nonsense, and I mean that in the best way.

The story follows Rincewind, a wizard whose main magical ability is being alive despite it, and Twoflower, an irrepressibly cheerful tourist. They are accompanied by The Luggage, a homicidal wooden chest with hundreds of tiny legs and a poor temperament. Together, they meander across the Disc in four interlinked episodes stitched together by improbable events and glorious wordplay.

I’ll confess that the first thirty pages were slow going, largely because I was trying to parse the rules of fantasy only to realize Pratchett was metaphorically in the margins (or, perhaps more accurately, the footnotes) saying “DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT.” The book assumes, rightly, that lesser fantasy readers may enjoy getting a little lost, which is often where the best views are.

Pratchett’s jokes are embedded in character, narrative, and picking apart tropes. There is affection behind the satire, and intelligence in the absurdity as he reimagines sword-and-sorcery worlds.

The Color of Magic is, supposedly, one of the weaker books in the Discworld series. This is like biting into a “weaker” cake and discovering it’s got three delicious layers AND cream filling AND eating it boosts your credit score.

Is it a perfect book? No. But it’s funny and smarter than it has any right to be.

I am not a Fantasy Person, but I am a student of words — how they’re used, where they’re bent, how meaning is made or broken. Pratchett’s words feel a bit like magic itself. I thank him for it.

LORD OF THE BUTTERFLIES by ANDREA GIBSON

Though it’s probably a mistake to do so, you can boil poetry down to “Pestering the Cosmos”: Who am I? Who are you? Who are we together and apart? What are we doing? Where are we going? What does that mean? Is it good? Is it bad? Does it matter? Who wants a cold plum?

The sensible thing to do when faced with such existential disarray is, of course, to ignore it and hope it goes away. Andrea Gibson, who passed away earlier this year, leaves behind work that refuses to look away from those questions. This may be why they are an extraordinary poet..

I don’t read enough poetry. This is not a confession, it’s an observation about time, and habit, and the way certain genres hover in my peripheral vision. I love poetry with its stripped-down nerve and refusal to put things plainly while absolutely putting things plainly.

The problem is, despite absolutely knowing better and having literally read lots of poetry, I occasionally fall prey to the idea that reading poetry is best done while draped luxuriously in velvet armchairs with minor-key sonatas playing on a gramophone. Possibly a monocle of some size. This is nonsense, of course. Andrea Gibson is no drawing-room poet. They are an open field to explore and run through, and maybe find a soft spot to collapse on.

While the volume is slim, I do not think I could have read Lord of the Butterflies in one go. Some poems require rest stops. Others you’ll want to read again immediately.

I had to stop, then reread the devastating and perfect “America, Reloading.” At first, I wanted to ask whether Gibson had personally survived gun violence, but the poem assumes that, in the United States, everyone alive here has..

Other standouts are “Ode to the Public Panic Attack,” “Diagnosis”, “Good Light.” “Letter to the Editor” and “Boomerang Valentine,” which contains the made-me-snort line “I am so far from ready / for Cupid, that naked little shit.”

Gibson’s voice is part sword, part feather, and you may, after reading a few pages, blink very fast because something got in your eye (it’s feelings. What got in your eye was feelings). Lines like “Come teach me a kinder way / to say my own name” and “There are few weapons more dangerous / than our wounds.” will twist in your chest.

Lord of the Butterflies doesn’t treat the personal and the political as separate continents, but as one slightly tilting island full of people trying to remember each other’s humanity.

Gibson collapses the false divide that so often attempts to place love over here, and pain over there as if the body does not carry both. Their poems ask, again and again, “How do we hold both? How do we move forward anyway?”

You should read their work.

FREEING THE TURKEYS BY LAURA LENTZ

As a child, I believed if I concentrated enough, I could move objects with my mind. I also suspected that grown-ups had very little idea what they were doing.

Alas, my mind never moved a thing. Grown-ups, however, still pretend to know things.

I was and am disappointed, mostly about the mind-moving stuff.

I mention this because Freeing the Turkeys by Laura Lentz reminds me of both my sincere attempt to change the world with my noggin, and my quiet suspicion that no one else is much better at moving the world (or even knowing what they’re doing).

With Lentz’s works, the takeaway is that real movement often comes from noticing how little we actually understand.

Personal essays are notoriously treacherous terrain. They can tip easily into performative writing carefully crafted to make you feel impressed, or guilty, or impressed with how guilty you feel.

Lentz maneuvers her terrain with clarity and not a whiff of performativeness.

Her essays deal with the usual human muddles (grief, time, family, the oddness of Life doing confounding things), but she has the gift of discovering entire universes in the smallest things.

She is eminently underlinable. From the essay Quieting the Noise: “Real silence is not silence at all, but a worthiness, an all-filled existence where we are freed from criticism and delusion and judgment.”

Then there’s the bit where she points out the difference between “Be good” and “You are good.” One is an order. The other assumes grace.

Oh, and this: Time is attention, and attention doesn’t involve a cell phone or a watch. It’s about knowing something or someone so well your rhythm and their rhythm become synced.

This sounds suspiciously like love, if we’re still using that word. (We are.)

Lentz never tries to sell you on redemption or reinvention, and she is certainly not lecturing us. What she writes is honest, funny, and very real. She does come across as a bit of an earth mother, but the good kind. The kind who will tell you the truth, offer you something warm to eat or drink, and then go quiet long enough for you to hear yourself thinking.

This book didn’t change my life in an Oprah‑style, confetti‑and‑crying‑on‑the‑couch kind of way. But it snuck in and echoed for days.

This is a book you should keep in places you forget to look for wonder. Lentz might just move you with her mind.

And there be the July reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! What’s in your TBR pile?

The Folio: What I Read June 2025

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

Musings Gone Wild! Almost Zero Horrors!

Hello and other pleasantries to new followers and the brave souls who have been tolerating my nonsense for quite some time.

A reminder and an announcement. I produce two categories of posts:

  1. A sort of high-octane humor that usually ends with me typing in all caps and you wondering whether you’ve accidentally subscribed to the ramblings of an unusually literate honey badger.
  2. Book reviews.

Book reviews are published monthly as “The Folio.” They begin with an attempt at a witty introduction and segue into a more measured discussion. These reviews are longer than advisable, and this, I am aware, can be a turn-off.

Am I trying to turn you on? Certainly, but only to using your library card. Anything else would be unseemly.

I am attempting to keep the reviews aligned with my predilection toward absurdity. Who doesn’t love a slightly deranged, funny book review? PUT YOUR HANDS DOWN. THIS IS THE INTERNET. I CAN’T SEE YOU AND ALSO IT WAS A RHETORICAL QUESTION.

Yes, occasionally, seriousness is unavoidable, especially for the sake of basic human decency. For example, books about war, grief, trauma, or any of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.

But Writing Reviews That Must All Be Taken Seriously is not always enjoyable. If I must always be properly serious, I’ll run around the town square bellowing “LOOK UPON MY CREDENTIALS, YE MIGHTY!” (which is, incidentally, the fastest way to clear a town square).

Generally, I see no reason to pretend that book reviews should be written in the hushed tone of someone narrating a documentary about endangered sea turtles.

Instead, I’m determined to write the kind of book reviews I’d want to read. Irreverent, digressive, somewhat useful, and not especially academic. When writing these pieces starts feeling like homework, I suspect reading them feels the same. (See review of Terry Pratchett’s book below.)

This is a process. I must first declare independence from the Good Scholar mindset, which is as persistent as mildew and probably smells like it as well.

We’ll see if this works. Forecast: probably not, but to be fair, optimism and I maintain a long-distance relationship.

Anyway, welcome. Or welcome back. Or Welcome Back, Kotter.

Signed, Epstein’s Mother.

I attempted hedonism with my reading this month, which is a pretentious way of saying I tried to read purely for pleasure. Most of the books cooperated. Not Fever Dream, which was an absolute miscalculation on the “fun!” reading scale. It was alarming, but, to be fair, exactly as alarming as promised. (I mean, the title isn’t Sweet Dreams and No Trauma Here.)

This was supposed to be my no-apocalypse month. And while there wasn’t a climate disaster in the bunch (I’ve tended to accidentally read a lot of those this year, if one can accidentally read anything to the end), Fever Dream did slip in poisoned groundwater and the creeping suspicion that everything is contaminated.

As in every month, I tried to find a coherent, unifying thread to connect the books I’d read. Something elegant and unassailable, like a particularly clever (and attractive!) spiderweb. Something that would make me sound like I’d been preparing a rigorous syllabus rather than just reading while eating toast.

The toast, for the record, was not entirely uninspirational.

At first, I thought the unifying theme was “Overthinking,” which is my preferred pastime. Every narrator here is the sort of person who can transform an ordinary moment into an ontological exploration through sheer sustained attention. These are books about people who can’t let a single thought pass unexamined. I recognized them immediately. I am Spartacus.

Just as I was congratulating myself on having found a thesis, another potential theme popped into mind. These books are also about “The Not-Necessarily-Horrific Coming Apart of the Well-Ordered Life.” Which, okay, wordy. All these books involve trying to build a manageable life, only to discover that order is a losing battle. Even the simplest lives can turn chaotic if you pay them too much attention. Or not enough. These books have both.

I spent significant time trying to choose which of these themes to highlight. Overthinking? Everyday order derailment? Eventually, I remembered this is not English Lit 201: Advanced Book Review Blogging and Merriment. No one is grading me. No one even asked for this. (Why didn’t you ask for this, by the way?)

So consider this month’s selections a set of reminders: that our minds are weird and perilous places, that “normal” is perhaps a myth, and that occasionally you will read something so funny, real, and/or unsettling that you won’t even care about the toast crumbs taking up residence down your shirt.

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

A SLIP OF THE KEYBOARD: COLLECTED NON-FICTION BY TERRY PRATCHETT

FUNNY GIRL BY NICK HORNBY

RUN FOR THE HILLS BY KEVIN WILSON

POND BY CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT

FEVER DREAM BY SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN

A SLIP OF THE KEYBOARD: COLLECTED NON-FICTION BY TERRY PRATCHETT

Cover of the book “A Slip of the Keyboard” by Terry Pratchett

My favorite read this month.

Terry Pratchett calls writing “the most fun you can have by yourself.” It’s a throwaway line, but like much that Pratchett lobbed at the world, it is three things at once: it’s funny, it’s self-deprecating, and it’s true.

This collection includes essays, speeches, introductions, and odd bits of reflection. It covers everything from fantasy literature to mushroom picking to Alzheimer’s. It’s brimming with the idea that the ordinary world is weird and interesting. There’s also a bracing indignation aimed squarely at deserving targets, yet even his fury is grounded in compassion.

Here you’ll find Pratchett in fine form, gleefully pricking the balloon of literary snobbery. “Where do you get your fantastic ideas from? You steal them,” he writes. “You steal them from reality. It outstrips fantasy most of the time.” (N.B. This is why writers keep notebooks: to record all the implausible things real people say and do). And you get the sense that saying this felt like slipping a whoopee cushion onto the seat of every Very Serious Writer at some awards banquet.

One of the pleasures of this collection is watching him circle the same conviction again and again: writing, for all its challenges, is meant to be enjoyed. In Chapter 12, he advises writers to amuse ourselves first, because if you’re not having a good time, your readers won’t either. (It sounds obvious until you remember how many books seem to be written purely as acts of flagellation, self or otherwise.) This spirit thrums through every piece. There’s a giddy undercurrent that never tips into preciousness or stupidity. It’s radically sincere and radically human.

Of course, the book isn’t all winks and asides. The essays move into the time after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and there is a sharpening. The humor stays, although it can get a little dark, but there’s an urgency, especially as he discusses assisted dying and the politics of autonomy. He had no intention of squandering any of his time on politeness or bromides.

It’s also worth noting how nimble he is. Pratchett can write equally brilliantly about dismantling the idiocy of genre snobbery as he can about daiquiris, and it all feels grounded in what is very clearly his voice and worldview. If you could distill a giggle, a guffaw, a groan, a raised eyebrow, and a perfectly aimed lightning bolt into a single human being, I’d like to think we’d get something very close to Terry Pratchett.

Standouts are most of them, but I particularly loved: “2001: The Vision and the Reality”, “The God Moment”, “Doctor Who?,” and “A Week in the Death of Terry Pratchett.”

Highly recommended. You don’t have to be a Discworld devotee to appreciate this. (I haven’t read them yet.) But you probably should care about books and stories and people and the planet. And if there’s an afterlife with any good sense, may it have a library big enough for him, a comfortable chair, and a hat no one is foolish enough to pinch.

FUNNY GIRL BY NICK HORNBY

Book cover of “Funny Girl” by Nick Hornby

Some of us (ME!) want the laugh. As a child, I’d sneak VHS tapes of Monty Python and Saturday Night Live, memorize sketches, and reassign myself all the best roles. I mentally cast myself as Madeline Kahn in everything she ever did.

So when beauty queen and I Love Lucy-obsessed Barbara Parker realized she’d rather have the punchline than the pedestal, I got it. She wanted to be in the room where the funny happened. Correction: she wanted to be the funny happening. And good for her. Beauty was/is a far more economically efficient trait.

Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl follows Barbara as she abandons the pageant world and reinvents herself as Sophie Straw, a comedically ambitious, photogenic young woman determined to become the next Lucille Ball. She moves to London, lands a lead in a new BBC sitcom almost immediately, and finds herself at the center of a cultural moment. This may sound like the setup for a frothy star-is-born tale, and it is. It’s also well done.

At its best, it’s a warm backstage novel with plenty of nostalgia for 1960s London and classic, frothy sitcoms. The first section snaps. Sophie’s introduction to the world of television is filled with biting dialogue, insecure creatives, and writing-room banter (which is arguably the best part of the book). Hornby nails the way brilliance and bitterness coexist in a creative team, as well as the cranky machine that seems to have been the BBC. I would happily read an entire novel that never left that room.

Once the sitcom takes off and Sophie settles into her role as national darling, the narrative zooms out. We get more focus on her coworkers: writers Bill and Tony, who steal scene after scene (especially Bill!). They embody one of the novel’s central tensions: should comedy comfort or provoke?

The “funny” dissipates into complexity, and it mostly works. Hornby’s wonderful at dialogue, even better at capturing the feeling of being slightly out of sync and by being ahead of your time. Funny Girl is like one of those rubber playground balls: bouncy and liable to knock you in the face when you least expect it. Hornby captures much of the texture of 1960s television: the starchy formality, creative constraints, looming cultural shifts.

What I loved most — and what I wanted more of — was the joy of collaboration, the weird alchemy of making something funny with other people. That’s where the book shines. Not in fame or romance or the idea of being “the one girl,” but in the magic of a room full of smart, neurotic misfits trying to make each other laugh.

If there’s a flaw, it’s the one that afflicts many long-running series. Eventually, there’s a sense that a wrap-up should have come sooner. Also, the book never quite reckons with the sexism it documents. That might have been thrilling as well, but a book cannot be all things to all readers.

When this book lands, it lands. It gets the weird intimacy of artistic collaboration. It gets the rush of writing a good bit. It gets the long slide from being new and bold to just being there.

Perfect for summer. It’s sweet and tart like lemonade, and just as delightful.

RUN FOR THE HILLS BY KEVIN WILSON

Book cover of Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson

Most of us were raised on a diet of artificially flavored found-family stories. That most cherished of modern fables in which a group of charming misfits (orphans, strays, emotionally stunted baristas, etc.) band together and discover that what really matters isn’t who raised you. (See also: The Brady Bunch, those sunny-eyed avatars of family bliss. Fictional. Sanitized. Immortalized on lunch boxes.) Somewhere along the way, these found families become closer than real families.

Cue the swelling music. Hugs all around.

Enter Run for the Hills, Kevin Wilson’s contribution to the genre, which, thankfully, avoids nearly all of the above. It is not randomly peopled with inexplicably irrepressible eccentrics who “just need each other.” What it is, instead, is a not-saccharine-yet-still-positive, more ambivalent version of found family.

It starts with Mad Hill, a woman living a self-contained life on her mother’s farm, doing a great job avoiding the complicated legacy of her absentee father and minding her emotional business like a professional. That is, until her half-brother Reuben shows up. His plan is to track down the man who abandoned them both, and see if a couple of other step-siblings are up for meeting, if not joining the adventure. The sudden reveal of a half-brother, his PT Cruiser, other siblings, and this whole nutty scavenger hunt is…a lot for Mad to take in. Mad does not want to go. She says yes anyway. This is what we call family obligation, and also improv training, which sadly has no place in this book at all.

What unfolds is a road trip that’s more emotional audit than grand adventure. Wilson isn’t interested in big plot mechanics or over-processed closure. These siblings don’t know each other. All they have is blood and disappointment and a half-formed instinct to care. Over the miles, something resembling a bond starts to form because they decided to try.

The entire trip is a glorious, laugh-out-loud exercise in restrained dysfunction among truly good people.

Wilson writes with enormous empathy and just the right amount of weirdness. The book is emotionally resonant, highly enjoyable without begging for a laugh track or a piped in “awwww.”

After a carefully paced journey, the final pages may feel slightly soft, a quiet, gentle roll to a stop for some readers. Look, sometimes road trips end and sometimes they just keep going.

So, no, this is not the Brady Bunch. It is not about the ideal family, or even the fully-healed one. It’s about the possibility that choosing to remain in proximity to others, despite discomfort or history, is its own kind of commitment. And there is a lot of fun to be had in that.

POND BY CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT

Book Cover for Pond by Clair-Louise Bennett

Most people will do almost anything to avoid being alone with their thoughts. They will join clubs. They will cultivate elaborate social obligations. They will distract themselves with devices whose primary purpose is to obliterate solitude (see: iPhone, pickleball). Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond is a testament to the opposite impulse: the deliberate, even defiant choice to pay attention to one’s mind. Where a banana left out becomes memento mori.

Reading Pond feels like showing up ten minutes late to a strange, luminous experimental film. You stand there, half-certain you’ve missed the part that explained everything, until you realize there is no part like that. You are simply inside someone else’s mind, and you get to stay.

In her debut collection, Claire-Louise Bennett assembles 20 fragments, vignettes, and near-monologues narrated by a semi-reclusive woman living alone on the edge of a village in the west of Ireland. She is never named; she is quite selective about what she shares about her exterior life. What she does share with abandon is a torrential, exhilarating interiority. Our narrator has a mind exquisitely tuned to its thoughts. This isn’t stream-of-consciousness, it’s a waterpark.

What is Pond about? Well, there isn’t much about here. No driving plot, no clear progression. But I’d argue there’s a lot of “there” there. There is an astonishing amount of noticing. Jeannine Ouellette (among others, but I like her approach very much) talks about paying attention as a radical act, an act of devotion, an act of “the most powerful writing practice you can cultivate for yourself.” Pond proves that. Each piece zooms in on a moment, an object, a mood. “Morning, Noon, & Night,” for example, imbues the most basic of breakfast foods with something close to rapture. Bennett’s descriptions are precise and saturated with significance. It’s Walden if Thoreau were a woman living alone in Ireland, interested in cooktop knobs, and quite possibly happier for it.

Bennett sounds like a dear friend who overshares with deep self-awareness while you sit and watch her “do her thing.” Take this line:

“English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things.”

This book requires a carving out of uninterrupted time. (Which is to say, this is probably not the book to read in five-minute increments between checking email.) But it is unmistakably alive . Prickly, even. It is also, in its way, a challenge: Who among us is willing to be this honest about what goes on in our heads when no one is looking? Most people can’t stand a single unscheduled thought. This book contains nothing but.

If you want to be reminded that noticing is itself an art form, then I say yes and yes again.

FEVER DREAM BY SAMANTA SCHWEBLIN

Book cover of Fever Dream By Samantha Schweblin

This is a book you absorb, like a symphony or a toxin, depending. It’s short, disorienting, beautifully written, and unpleasant in the best way. 

It is called Fever Dream, which is helpful, as the entire experience reads like the kind of dream you’d have after eating something you should not have eaten at a charity luncheon.

At first glance, this slim, unassuming volume looks harmless. You think, “Oh good, I can read this in a day.” Which you can. What you won’t expect is to spend the evening staring at your water glass, wondering if it has ever tasted quite so chemical.

The premise is simple: Amanda is dying. A boy named David (or perhaps a child-shaped presence named David), who may be real or may be the embodiment of Amanda’s crippling maternal worry or the result of illness, interrogates her as she drifts in and out of narrative coherence. She is trying to explain what happened. He is trying to hurry her along.

Early on, Amanda introduces the concept of “rescue distance” — the invisible, ever-changing rope between her and her daughter that represents how far her daughter can be while Amanda is still able to keep her safe.. She recalculates the rescue distance constantly depending on terrain, proximity, and possible threat. The “rope” tugs or goes slack, and both states feel awful for different reasons. It is one of the best metaphors for motherhood I’ve ever read, a reminder that parenthood is mostly the exhausting calculation of invisible risks.

Something is wrong, not just in Amanda’s mind, but in the rural Argentine town she’s visiting. The land is poisoned. Children are sick. Animals are dying. There’s a woman who might be a witch, and a boy whose soul might have been split or transformed. Or perhaps he was just traumatized. Schweblin doesn’t lean too hard into explaining the supernatural elements that vibrate in the background. That’s not where the horror lives.

The horror is in the groundwater and the gossip and the things the residents agree to pretend not to see. This town is rotting.

Structurally, the book is a conversation braided with memory, braided with something that may or may not be happening in real time. Whether David is present or imagined is irrelevant in this claustrophobic fever-dream-within-a-fever-dream. One minute you’re in a waiting room with Amanda, the next, you’re on a farm with Amanda and dead animals and sick children.

Megan McDowell’s translation carries it beautifully. It’s sparse, urgent, and devoid of unnecessary hand-holding.

As for the ending: it puzzles with an elegant disregard for the readers’ expectations.

Fever Dream is an exquisitely crafted conjoining of anxiety, dread, and maternal devotion. It is disorienting and unforgettable.

It’s motherhood rewritten as slow-burn horror.

And thus went June. I’m excited for my July reads, and as always, I welcome any recommendations! What’s in your TBR pile?