Category Archives: Recommendations

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 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?

The Folio: What I Read May 2025

Books, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio, , , , , , ,

Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and a Goldfish Named Whitney Houston

A graphic titled “The Folio: What I Read May 2025” with the subtitle “Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and a Goldfish Named Whitney Houston.” Four book covers are lined up: Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood , I See You’ve Called In Dead by John Kenney, There’s Nothing Wrong with Her by Kate Weinberg , and Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang. “By Jackie Pick” is at the bottom right.

This month, I read four books about breakdowns of sorts. While that sounds grim, I promise these were often humorous and generally optimistic. “Breakdown” implies something was once intact and now is no longer. These books suggest that “breakdown” does not equal the end. Sometimes it’s the tender beginning of something else.

These are stories of things coming undone: society, bodies, the workplace, the environment, systems. These don’t just stick the landing, they explode midair and rain glitter.

We get literary dispatches for the end of the world, warnings about how we should treat each other, books saturated with decadent language. Stories devastating and hilarious while documenting intimate unravelings of identity, patience, biodiversity, decency, and workplace norms. There is a book by Margaret Atwood, which means I am contractually obligated to use the word “prescient.” She is classy enough to not use the words “told you so.”

What ties them together isn’t just maddeningly well-rendered unravelings. It’s what’s left standing: language, connection, morality, ghosts, and sharp humor. These books are about the things that break and the tiny, glowing bits that survive the wreckage.

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

Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood
I See You’ve Called in Dead by John Kenney
There’s Nothing Wrong with Her by Kate Weinberg
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Let’s begin.

BURNING QUESTIONS BY MARGARET ATWOOD

What happens when a literary demigod has the nerve to be brilliant, funny, and absolutely right.

Early in the introduction to this magnificent mini-behemoth, Atwood poses a question: Why the title? In other words, what are the burning questions? As if anyone reading a book of essays in the year of our collective undoing requires an explanation. Still, she names a few of the flames: the planet, the economy, democracy, justice, decency, survival. This is not, one suspects, an exhaustive list. She calls these issues “urgent,” which is putting it politely.

With sharp humility she writes, “These are some of the burning questions I’ve been asked, and have asked myself…Here are some of the answers. Or should I say, some of the attempts.” She follows that with a reminder: “That’s what essay means, after all: an attempt. An effort.”

An invocation tucked into a derivation.

What follows is two decades of Atwood being Atwood: brilliantly observant, ruthlessly precise, funny in a dagger-behind-the-teacup way. It’s an impressive scope of inquiry: The mythology of trees, feminism, the art of giving advice (spoiler: don’t), Anne of Green Gables, being Canadian, and of course, The Handmaid’s Tale, which she now has to explain to increasingly horrified readers that speculative fiction has ceased being entirely either.

Atwood renders these burning questions manageable. Enjoyable, even, like a well-arranged closet of catastrophe. She’s writing because she notices and she cares.

Each piece is an anchored moment: a response to a speech invitation, a news event, a book release, a sense that something needs saying. Each is like sitting across from someone at dinner who has ordered something far more interesting than you and is generous enough to let you taste it.

My personal favorite is “Five Visits to the Word-Hoard,” a love letter to language and process. Writing tips include: If you’re blocked, change the tense or the point of view. If you have a headache, go to sleep. Honestly, the best advice I’ve ever gotten while horizontal. (OH, BEHAVE)

If you have not read Atwood’s nonfiction, this will be a newfound gem. There’s a mythic wisdom to her. She’s fiercely protective of Earth, of words, of history, of Canada, and yet she is never precious. Burning Questions is not her manifesto. She simply names things. Language, power, writing, what it means to live in the moment before history is history.

If you have read her nonfiction, you’ll recognize the voice: generous, skeptical, and clear. And curious. Always curious. Because, the essay is not a final word. It is the beginning of a conversation.

I SEE YOU’VE CALLED IN DEAD BY JOHN KENNEY

Officially (?) Dead, Mildly Functional

We’ve all suffered the slings and arrows of an accidental “Reply All.” Or sent a group text meant for one person. It’s a uniquely modern humiliation to discover you’ve shared something private with everyone including Janice in HR. Worse if it was something juicy about Janice in HR.

Now imagine doing this intentionally. Or, more precisely, in a haze of Scotch. Welcome to I See You’ve Called in Dead, a howlingly funny and sweet novel that takes everyday digital self-sabotage and escalates it to an existential crisis about the deep weirdness of being alive.

Bud Stanley is an obituary writer and midlife smoldering crater in a slow, sarcastic freefall. In other words, Bud has problems. After one bad date and enough Scotch to embalm a small elk, Bud pens his own obituary. It’s full of wonderful claims like performing open-heart surgery on himself and dying in a hot air balloon accident. Then he hits send, pushing the obituary out to the world. This leaves him in a bureaucratic no-man’s-land: he’s professionally dead per the computer system at work, and also still alive enough to get called into his bosses’ offices for reprimand. Worse, his employer isn’t sure if they can revive him in the system, at which point they will fire him for this massive breach of protocol and taste.

Now Bud is in a kind of limbo both on paper and in spirit.

What follows is a man trudging through thick malaise in search of an exit. Bud starts attending strangers’ funerals and partaking in other life-affirming activities. Along the way, he’s nudged forward by a small cast of supporting characters who represent various shades of vitality: Tim, best friend who steals every scene and never falls into cliche; Clara, a funeral-loving free spirit; and Leo, the grade-school neighbor who is seven-going-on-Stanley-Tucci. I’d say Leo was my favorite character, but they are all my favorites and I’m not choosing among them.

Kenney doesn’t waste time pretending grief is poetic or that midlife is some golden era of reinvention. But he also doesn’t turn it all into a joke. Kenney understands the architecture of comic prose (the man has a Thurber Prize!) and the human condition that fuels it. Bud’s sarcasm is a coping mechanism, not a gimmick. The writing is funny and occasionally sad, but not self-pitying. At the beginning, it felt like the timeline did a little cha-cha, but that gets sorted out very quickly.

Is this a midlife crisis story? Perhaps, but it’s not the kind where someone runs a marathon or takes up improv. Bud doesn’t “reinvent” himself. He barely reinflates. What he does do (with much sarcasm and some trepidation), is begin to engage with life.

I See You’ve Called in Dead reminds us that it’s possible to be deeply lonely, moderately functional, and still worth loving. The reluctant act of staying somewhat present in one’s own life has meaning. And sometimes eulogies are wasted on the dead.

And that weird process of staying alive? Turns out it’s a group project.

THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH HER BY KATE WEINBERG

The delicate art of being ill in a society that puts a lot of effort into not believing women.

A locked room mystery where the locked room is your own body and the mystery is why no one can figure out what (if anything) is wrong with you. Kate Weinberg’s There’s Nothing Wrong with Her is about solitude, rage, memory, creativity, and the fragile scaffolding that holds a person together.

The title is not just ironic, it’s the whole diagnosis. It’s also very much like being a woman

Here’s the thing about being low-grade, vague, hard-to-diagnose sick: Everyone thinks you’re fine. You look fine. You say, “I’m okay,” because saying “I’m falling apart in slow motion” is, frankly, a buzzkill.

The body becomes suspect and the mind is no longer fully reliable. What follows is often isolation. Not the good kind, the kind assigned by a world that distrusts women and women’s pain.

Vita (a name that would feel heavy-handed if it were in a different author’s hands) Woods is a podcast producer who loses nearly everything when a strange illness leaves her unable to climb stairs, hold a conversation, or distinguish one blurred afternoon from the next. She becomes a ghost in her own life. Sure, people are concerned, doctors can’t figure it out. Her boyfriend (a doctor!) is “supportive” in the same way a traffic cone is supportive — it’s there but it’s not really doing much.

She is stranded in her body, in bed, stuck in what she calls “the Pit”: a place of exhaustion, semi-consciousness, and memory where reality often fuzzes out then returns in sharp relief.

The novel mostly takes place within the confines of Vita’s home, her body, her brain. That should and sometimes does feel claustrophobic, but can also feel expansive when secret compartments open in Vita’s mind. There’s a Renaissance poet/ghost named Luigi da Porto who holds delightful conversations with Vita, teasing her and understanding her better than her boyfriend seems to. There’s a goldfish named Whitney Houston who may or may not be a stand-in for the weird nature of time and memory when you are ill. There’s a look at how the mind deals with boredom and stretches of time, of course, because when your world shrinks, the brain gets very inventive.

Vita’s upstairs neighbors, a grieving piano teacher and her charismatic tenant, serve as unexpected lifelines, pulling her attention upward both literally and emotionally.

It’s a book of in-betweenness, and Weinberg captures these spaces beautifully. Time slows down, then forgets itself.

This book is weird. It’s brilliant. It’s a little mad in exactly the way being sick for too long makes you mad. The boredom gets loud. The silence gets mean. Your own mind becomes a snarky roommate with a penchant for cruel flashbacks. The tone ricochets between funny, sorrowful, and furious, capturing what we think about when all we can do is sit still and try to piece together words and memory, even when our brains feel like unspooled VHS tape.

There’s Nothing Wrong With Her is not a protest novel, but it is a political one. To write about an ailing woman stripped of narrative control, credibility, and energy, and to insist that her version of reality matters, is a quiet and necessary rebellion.

It’s a standout. I’ve never read anything quite like it.

LAND OF MILK AND HONEY BY C PAM ZHANG

What’s for dinner when the world is ending

I really didn’t mean to pick up another climate disaster novel. But I did. And oh, this book is so beautiful and devastating it steams off the page.

Due to some very bad science in America, most of the Earth is covered in smog. Crops fail. Biodiversity collapses. What little food remains looks and tastes gray. The world starts to choke on its own hubris.

It’s not a great time to be a chef, like our narrator is. As America slams its borders shut, it is not a great time to be out of the country, like our narrator is. If you are Asian-American, like our narrator is, you are shuffled to the bottom of the returnee list. She is effectively stuck.

So she lies about her credentials as she applies for a chef job on one of the last smogless places on Earth: a remote mountaintop colony in Italy. Yet, in her application, she writes truthfully, “I will faithfully perform any task within reason and with dignity.”

In fiction, this is a flare gun to the gods which says: “Please test this.”

(N.B. Throughout the book we see how survival and truth can repel each other in drastic situations, and how much living and truth can cling.)

The mountaintop is a private country owned by a wealthy man with a god complex who has amassed massive stores of seeds, livestock, and deep freezers filled with once-extinct and going-extinct species. Animals hung in the deep freezer two-by-two while the rest of us eat mung-protein-soy-algal government flour. It’s a dystopian Noah’s Ark.

Aida, the only main character with a name, is the employer’s daughter, a geneticist who runs the secret labs and revives what maybe should have stayed lost. She is also what we commoners might call “a foodie.” Aida and her father (“the employer”) say they are trying to rebuild/save humanity, with an alley-oop from the world’s wealthiest.

The narrator is hired to seduce these potential investors. Food is but part of the bait. She is bait in another way. But not how you are thinking.

For a book set in the thick fog of collapse, the language is dazzling. The prose is a tasting menu: precise, ornamental, and full of unexpected flavor.

Zhang offers no subtlety in the distinction between lushness and rot, between those who live and those who die, between those who get seconds and those who starve. All the appetites in the book are sensuous and fairytale-like.

The novel is not subtle in its moral juxtapositions. But then, neither is extinction. The employer — a composite of every charismatic autocrat, every disaster profiteer — believes his wealth confers both survival and vision. Luxury and its skewed version of altruism are not spared judgment here, but it is complicated. It is violent and virtuous. Deprivation and depravity of every sort thrive. This book is a panic window into the terrifying human inability to form community under pressure. A survivable planet is one of trust and equity. This is not that planet.

There’s a love story throughout, but the sensuality turns in on itself, becoming something numbing. For a book so full of flavor, it is also deeply desensitizing. Heavy. Slow. Holy. And like all things that present as holy, sometimes we need to look away.

Still, how can you resist a line like this:
 “And that is how, in the depths of that surreal country in a flavorless world, I discovered, among various fruits, vegetables, and animals believed extinct, the last specimen of my professional pride. Shriveled, squashed — but extant.” (p.29)

Land of Milk and Honey is slender, but it’s hardly a light read. This book asks you to look at something beautiful, and then stay there when it turns monstrous. It wants you to crave, and then to feel gross about craving.

It is a book about who has the privilege to choose, and often it’s not pretty either way. However, apocalypse is not à la carte. It’s a prix fixe situation. You get what’s on the menu.

Read any good books lately? Please share in the comments!