Category Archives: The Folio

How to Laugh at Death While Time Eats Itself*

Book Review, Books, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio

What I Read September 2025

This month I’ve been juggling eleventy kajillion calendars. This is not, as you might assume, because I am a particularly efficient or important person. It is because time, like most of my kitchen drawers, gets jammed on all the oversized things I try to cram in it. Items currently requiring my attention and scheduling: two schools, two adults working from home at somewhere between two and seventeen different jobs, volunteer activities, various kid activities and applications, and the all-important sacred day when the Halloween candy finally materializes on the grocery shelves. That’s the one holiday America does perfectly. Costumes, sugar, minimal chitchat.

Fittingly, every book I finished in September carried within it the godforsaken ticking of a clock – THE clock – with incessant urgency and inevitable silence.

In Replay, time is a wheel greased with déjà vu: die, reboot, repeat. Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer is profoundly gentler, insisting we use our time well and show up to the page. The end will come regardless but right now there is time to mark the paper purposefully, joyfully, fearlessly. Obitchuary treats death like a hot gossip item, grief delivered with a rimshot. Robert Benchley proves that even the most mundane of moments can be slapstick if you just untie its shoelaces.

Put another way: my eleventy kajillion calendars don’t lie, though they constantly contradict each other. We’re all quite busy running out of time, and what remains is how we spend it. There are jokes, stories, hope, relationships, and maybe a decent breakfast before the lights click off.

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

  • Dear Writer by Maggie Smith
  • Replay by Ken Grimwood
  • Obitchuary by Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes
  • The Benchley Roundup by Robert Benchley

*If you’ve ever watched a week vanish into laundry, you’ve seen it happen.

DEAR WRITER by MAGGIE SMITH

In the opening paragraphs of Dear Writer, Maggie Smith writes, “I believe creativity is our birthright as human beings.” I like this. It’s a much better birthright than, say, a Costco card or bad knees. She doubles down a page later: “When you read a poem, or listen to a song, or watch a play, you’re not the same person afterward. You’re slightly rearranged.”

Smith organizes her book around ten principles, which incidentally sound like the syllabus for the world’s nicest graduate program: Attention, Wonder, Vision, Play, and more. Each comes with a note to “Dear Writer,” followed by essays, some prompts, and suggestions for further reading. It’s craft book meets pep talk, heavy on kindness and honesty, light on prescriptive rules.

The section on Vision is a banger. Smith advises us to “make your own uncool,” which is the kind of line I love because I am, in fact, deeply uncool, so this will take very little effort on my part. The gist: take risks, some people won’t like your work, and that’s okay. The chapter on Restlessness also hit home. Smith reframes that itchy dissatisfaction we all feel when a draft isn’t there yet as something generative.

Smith’s quotable lines are legion. In Tenacity: “Your creativity is calling. It needs you. Work on your endurance and stamina. Wring your mind out like a rag over a bucket, until it’s bone-dry. Get every drop.” In Hope: “If hope is imaginative, then pessimism is a failure of imagination.” And she drops a piece of advice from Stanley Plumly that I’m still chewing on: “Stay deep within yourself and stay alone there — that is where your poems come from, and that has nothing to do with an audience. You are the audience.”

You don’t have to please anyone else in the room. You’re the damn room.

My personal underline-and-throw-exclamation-points-in-the-margin fest came in her section “On Feedback.” As someone who’s received workshop comments that shut me down for months, I found her take validating and humane. Feedback, she reminds us, isn’t about finding what’s “wrong,” it’s about clarifying, supporting, and helping the writer get closer to what they want.

If you’ve read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, this book is its scrappy cousin. Same heart, different swagger.

My favorite read this month.

REPLAY by KEN GRIMWOOD


This month I’ve been juggling eleventy kajillion calendars. This is not, as you might assume, because I am a particularly efficient or important person. It is because time, like most of my kitchen drawers, gets jammed on all the oversized things I try to cram in it. Items currently requiring my attention and scheduling: two schools, two adults working from home at somewhere between two and seventeen different jobs, volunteer activities, various kid activities and applications, and the all-important sacred day when the Halloween candy finally materializes on the grocery shelves. That’s the one holiday America does perfectly. Costumes, sugar, minimal chitchat.

Fittingly, every book I finished in September carried within it the godforsaken ticking of a clock – THE clock – with incessant urgency and inevitable silence.

In Replay, time is a wheel greased with déjà vu: die, reboot, repeat. Maggie Smith’s Dear Writer is profoundly gentler, insisting we use our time well and show up to the page. The end will come regardless but right now there is time to mark the paper purposefully, joyfully, fearlessly. Obitchuary treats death like a hot gossip item, grief delivered with a rimshot. Robert Benchley proves that even the most mundane of moments can be slapstick if you just untie its shoelaces.

Put another way: my eleventy kajillion calendars don’t lie, though they constantly contradict each other. We’re all quite busy running out of time, and what remains is how we spend it. There are jokes, stories, hope, relationships, and maybe a decent breakfast before the lights click off.

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

  • Dear Writer by Maggie Smith
  • Replay by Ken Grimwood
  • Obitchuary by Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes
  • The Benchley Roundup by Robert Benchley

*If you’ve ever watched a week vanish into laundry, you’ve seen it happen.

DEAR WRITER by MAGGIE SMITH

In the opening paragraphs of Dear Writer, Maggie Smith writes, “I believe creativity is our birthright as human beings.” I like this. It’s a much better birthright than, say, a Costco card or bad knees. She doubles down a page later: “When you read a poem, or listen to a song, or watch a play, you’re not the same person afterward. You’re slightly rearranged.”

Smith organizes her book around ten principles, which incidentally sound like the syllabus for the world’s nicest graduate program: Attention, Wonder, Vision, Play, and more. Each comes with a note to “Dear Writer,” followed by essays, some prompts, and suggestions for further reading. It’s craft book meets pep talk, heavy on kindness and honesty, light on prescriptive rules.

The section on Vision is a banger. Smith advises us to “make your own uncool,” which is the kind of line I love because I am, in fact, deeply uncool, so this will take very little effort on my part. The gist: take risks, some people won’t like your work, and that’s okay. The chapter on Restlessness also hit home. Smith reframes that itchy dissatisfaction we all feel when a draft isn’t there yet as something generative.

Smith’s quotable lines are legion. In Tenacity: “Your creativity is calling. It needs you. Work on your endurance and stamina. Wring your mind out like a rag over a bucket, until it’s bone-dry. Get every drop.” In Hope: “If hope is imaginative, then pessimism is a failure of imagination.” And she drops a piece of advice from Stanley Plumly that I’m still chewing on: “Stay deep within yourself and stay alone there — that is where your poems come from, and that has nothing to do with an audience. You are the audience.”

You don’t have to please anyone else in the room. You’re the damn room.

My personal underline-and-throw-exclamation-points-in-the-margin fest came in her section “On Feedback.” As someone who’s received workshop comments that shut me down for months, I found her take validating and humane. Feedback, she reminds us, isn’t about finding what’s “wrong,” it’s about clarifying, supporting, and helping the writer get closer to what they want.

If you’ve read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, this book is its scrappy cousin. Same heart, different swagger.

My favorite read this month.

REPLAY by KEN GRIMWOOD

The trouble with dying at 43 (or any age, really) is that you expect it to be permanent. So imagine Jeff Winston’s surprise when he keels over at his desk, only to wake up in his 18-year-old body, circa 1963, with all the memories of a man who’s already survived disco. From the opening pages, it feels more exciting than the life he just lost.

At first, Jeff Winston does exactly what most of us would do. He places major bets, invests wisely, and generally struts through life knowing how it all turns out. But then the loop resets. He dies at 43 again. And again. And again. Turns out living the same 25 years over and over, no matter what, is maddening.

Like Groundhog Day stretched across decades, the book shifts from fantasy to philosophy. Can you only enjoy being 18 if you’re actually 43 inside? What happens when you’re living as a teenager and a middle-aged man at the same time? Grimwood leans into those ripple effects where every choice remakes the world, but the ending never changes.

The pacing is tight. Grimwood spares us the tedium of every replay in full, fast-forwarding to the choices that matter like a cosmic remote control with a mercifully working fast-forward button. Yes, it reads a little late-1980s, but then again, so did the 1980s.

If you love books like 11/22/63, “what if” fiction with actual emotional depth, or have ever just wondered “If I had to do it all over again, knowing what I know now…” you might enjoy Replay.

Replay starts as wish fulfillment (i.e., the fantasy of having the opportunity to do it again and fix things) and becomes a philosophical exploration of regret, loneliness, and the dreadful suspicion that life only matters because it ends. The brilliance of Grimwood’s novel is in showing that inevitability can be both a curse and a peculiar sort of gift.

OBITCHUARY by SPENCER HENRY and MADISON REYES

I didn’t realize until after I got hold of this one and looked at the back cover that the authors are podcasters. This did not bode well. I like my podcasts like I like my books: unrelated.

I opened it anyway.

Obitchuary is breezy, irreverent, and laden with more-than-occasionally-gross death facts. If there is a Venn diagram of “Halloween enthusiasts” and “people who correct you on the Latin root of rigor mortis,” this book sits precisely in the overlap. Especially good for pub trivia enthusiasts during Spooky Season.

The tone at first is like listening to two slightly tipsy friends who’ve been speaking in inside jokes since middle school. Now set them loose on the surprisingly sober business of what happens to your body after death. It’s not wholly unpleasant, but it’s undeniably jarring.

By Chapter Two, they settle in. The humor shows up in the right places instead of everywhere all at once, and the information takes the lead. Honestly, they are funny, it just lands better when they don’t keep poking you in the ribs to make sure you noticed the joke.

What Obitchuary underscores, with a deliciously relentless cheer, is how people are quite odd about death. Before it, during it, long after it. Some readers will find this refreshing, others gratuitous, and still others will wonder if they’ve accidentally purchased the wrong book.

That’s gallows humor for you.

I finished it out of morbid curiosity (tip your wait staff). I read some sections twice, skipped others. That’s the great advantage of nonfiction. You can dip in and out.

But whatever you do, don’t skip the epilogue. It’s unexpectedly tender and inspiring.

This book might best be enjoyed by fans of the Obitchuary podcast, trivia junkies of the macabre, or readers who like their death culture delivered with a wink. If you think you might be the audience, flip through it first. You’ll know pretty quickly.

THE BENCHLEY ROUNDUP by ROBERT BENCHLEY

Robert Benchley was the sort of man who could look at a perfectly ordinary activity and turn it into a full-scale farce. He made being baffled by modern life into a writing career, which is no small achievement considering modern life’s eagerness to baffle.

The Benchley Roundup, assembled by his son Nathaniel, gathers these short pieces into a single cabinet of curiosities.

It is what you might call a “panoply,” although I can’t imagine anyone actually using that word outside of a catalog.

Nathaniel admits up front that his father’s humor is hard to pin down: “I don’t think it can be analyzed. It is sometimes mad, sometimes penetrating, and sometimes based on nothing more than word associations, and the only generalization that can be made with any degree of certainty is that it is different—or, if you will, unique.” Which is another way of saying: abandon all hope of categorization. Benchley was, inconveniently, unique. And that’s exactly the appeal: Benchley never sounds like anyone else, even now. I would venture a guess that Benchley thought faster than the rest of us, and we’ve been trying to catch up ever since.

Many of these essays originated in magazines. Some land perfectly; others remind you that you are reading something written when people still wore spats with jokes and references that make you feel like you’ve walked into a party eighty years too late. Others arrive startlingly fresh, proof that certain absurdities never go out of fashion. Humor is like that: part fossil, part banana skin.

Reading Benchley today is like watching an old black-and-white film where everyone speaks in that brisk, so-called mid-Atlantic accent that once passed for sophistication and now just sounds faintly ridiculous. But that voice, that sense of time, is half the fun. His writing is unpretentious, seemingly effortless, and wide-ranging. You get the sense he could spin absurdity out of absolutely anything. And often did. This is either a tribute to Benchley’s talent or a condemnation of how little progress we’ve made as a species. Probably both.

The Benchley Roundup is a delight to dip in and out of. Some essays feel like artifacts, some land with fresh precision, but together they remind you why Benchley mattered, how he influenced subsequent generations of humorists, and why his style still feels different, even now. It’s smart, silly, and deceptively simple. As his son notes, the collection is best read in small doses, dipped into like a jar of peculiar sweets, because each piece is its own odd little universe. Some will feel like time capsules, others like dispatches from a mind still waiting for us to catch up. Benchley pointed out, with impeccable timing, just how gloriously inexplicable the world was and still is.

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

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?