Category Archives: The Folio

The Folio: What I Read May 2025

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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!

The Folio: What I Read April 2025

Book Review, Books, Reading, Recommendations, The Folio

Reality Is Suspicious and So Are You

April 2025 reading list by Jackie Pick, titled “The Folio: What I Read April 2025.” Subheading reads: “Reality Is Suspicious and So Are You.” Books shown: Alice in Wonderland, Gentle Writing Advice, Another Roadside Attraction, and Joan of Miami.

This month, I tried to read books that, strictly speaking, weren’t about the world ending in fire, bureaucracy, or vibes. Not because I believe the world isn’t decomposing in full view — it is, and with remarkable enthusiasm — but because I am occasionally tired of being reminded.

I didn’t consume books like they were rations in a bunker. I didn’t read to survive. I read to live. And it was exactly what my overtaxed little brain needed. Books full of humor, weirdness, and sharp little elbows jabbing at the ribs of reality. Did the world behave better as a result? Nope. But these books at least did not add to the noise. They were entertaining. Intelligent. Occasionally infuriating.

You know. Worthwhile.

Can I connect them all thematically? Ha. Obviously. That’s what we do here. Let’s lay them out like tea leaves spilled across a summoning circle and see what dark magic swirls out.

If there’s a thread among these books, it’s not tone or genre. It’s attitude. These are books written by and for people who look at the world and say, “I don’t think so.” Books that side-eye the system, question reality, and refuse to take their elbows off the table.

They are books for people who suspect that reality (like most things) has been poorly edited, and that it’s entirely reasonable to rewrite it.

If you’re looking for polite stories about polite people doing what they’re told, you’ll find none of that here.

Which is all just to say these are the books I enjoyed enough to finish in the last month:

Alice In Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
Gentle Writing Advice by Chuck Wendig
Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
Joan of Miami by A. Parrish

Let’s begin.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

Abandon Linear Thought, Ye Mighty.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its companion novel, Through the Looking-Glass, form an enduringly strange and brilliant duology. These tales are far more than whimsical romps through fantastical lands — they are surrealist puzzles, philosophical playgrounds, and cultural mirrors that continue to enchant and perplex readers of all ages.

Though often lumped together, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have distinct tones and structures. Both follow Alice, a sensible girl dropped into thoroughly nonsensical worlds: first through a rabbit hole into the chaotic dream-logic of Wonderland, then through a mirror into a more structured, chessboard-like realm. Wonderland is a tumbling disorder full of talking animals, shifting rules, and queens obsessed with beheadings, while Looking-Glass is more of a surreal thought experiment, populated by living poetry, mirrored rules, and unsettling nursery rhyme characters. If the first is all riddles and reversals, the second feels like an upward climb toward queenship, meaning, and a strange kind of self-awareness. Both show worlds run by folks who absolutely should not be running the world. Through it all, Alice is as polite as she can be.

Carroll’s characters are unforgettable weirdos who’ve pitched tents in the collective unconscious. From the fretful White Rabbit and the cryptic Cheshire Cat to the haughty Red Queen and the delightfully befuddled Tweedledee and Tweedledum, each figure feels both iconic and symbolic. Some represent the adult world’s hypocrisy, others embody logical paradoxes or childhood anxieties. Their nonsensical dialogue is often razor-sharp satire disguised as silliness. They are real in that sideways way. They’re not metaphors, they are archetypes of dysfunction. And Alice, when she doesn’t outright defeat them, walks away.

Though often labeled children’s stories, these books are subversive and complex. Carroll’s background as a mathematician shines through in his love of paradox and his relentless wordplay as the engine of the narrative. Logic, grammar, and social norms are constantly upended. Alice isn’t just navigating strange places; she’s navigating meaning itself. The poems, puns, and riddles twist language until it starts to resemble something closer to truth — or at least, a more honest kind of nonsense. Carroll games the English language like an old pinball machine and never tilts.

And it works because Carroll seems to understand better than most that language is a power tool. Or a tool of power. Either way, people in power often speak the most nonsense with the greatest confidence.

Alice is a triumphant protagonist: curious, skeptical, occasionally indignant, and deeply grounded in a child’s sense of fairness and reason. She’s not a wide-eyed innocent but a sharp observer who meets absurdity with exasperation rather than awe, making her the voice of reason in a world that gleefully resists it. Neither helpless nor perfect, she holds her own against the madness. In doing so, she becomes the grounding force that allows the books to spiral, twist, and tumble without losing their center.

Alice is just trying to make sense of it all, get to where she thinks she should go, and make some friends along the way without getting her head bitten (or chopped) off.

Aren’t we all?

These books endure because they resist a single interpretation. They can be read as nonsense or satire, fantasy or dreamscape, children’s story or commentary on Victorian society — or all of these at once. Carroll invites readers into a world where nothing is fixed, and that openness keeps Alice fresh with each reread.

Together, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are strange, clever, disorienting, and absolutely iconic for reasons that are both obvious and, frankly, impossible to explain. They remind us that logic can be silly, that childhood contains profound insight, and that language itself is a kind of magic.

If you’re willing to wander, they’ll take you somewhere worth going.

Gentle Writing Advice by Chuck Wendig

How to Be a Writer Without Coming Entirely Unglued

Writing advice is usually:

  • Agonizingly Practical (“Use a timer, a color-coded scene-by-scene spreadsheet, and an accountability partner with a whistle and cocked eyebrow.”)
  • Fussily Prescriptive (“Make sure your protagonist’s internal arc adheres to all twelve stages of the Hero’s Journey and Save the Cat, then read the entire Western Canon [preferably in the original languages] before attempting dialogue.”)
  • Completely Bananas (“Lie in damp grass, arch your feet, and listen for the ghost of Virginia Woolf to whisper your story into the mist.”)

Oh ho! But there’s another category: advice that isn’t so much instruction as permission. Permission to be weird. Permission to be lost. Permission to not write for a while, or write badly, or want to burn everything down and start a goat farm.

This category is usually where the good stuff is.

Cue Chuck Wendig.

Gentle Writing Advice: How to Be a Writer Without Destroying Yourself is, in theory, a craft book. But in reality, it’s an exploration of “Why Bother?” in the best sense. It’s also hysterical, intelligent, and surprisingly tender in a way that makes you realize halfway through a solid joke about Comic Sans that you’re actually crying. Or writing your next book. Or both.

I am a — well, not firm believer, but a somewhat jiggly, Jell-O-level believer — that writing expertise is mostly a slippery reflection of what we’ve already done. For example, I am an expert on my most recent dumb social media joke, my last published piece, and my last writing disaster (unpublished, thank goodness). That’s the résumé. And yet, like everyone else, I want the hacks. The tricks. The hacks about the tricks.

But what we really want is reassurance that we’re capable, we’ll find our voice (again or ever), and our messiness doesn’t disqualify us from making something good. We want to laugh at ourselves and fiercely believe in ourselves. We want someone to tell us how to be confident and vulnerable and brave and realistic and gentle and productive and very specifically address the spiral of concerns we have about that one unfinished essay that haunts us like a ghost in a hoodie sitting in the corner of our writing space playing the recorder.

Chuck Wendig gets that. (The need-for-reassurance part, not the recorder-playing-ghost part. I hope.)

Note: Yes, the title says “gentle,” but he’s saucy and foul-mouthed, and his words come at you rat-a-tat-tat. And then, like most saucy, hilarious, foul-mouthed people, he lets the mushy, empathetic core out.

In the introduction, Wendig warns us: “Writing advice is bullshit. But bullshit fertilizes.”

Unfortunately, this is very good advice.

He takes aim at the MFA-ified “listen to the clouds” advice that dominates traditional literary circles. Not because it’s wrong, but because it doesn’t always speak to the chaos-writing many of us do in the margins of our lives. We, the 4 AM Scribblers.

Please consider this book if only for the footnotes. (See page 8 for one that made me snort my coffee). Chapter 5, “Self-Care for Writers,” contains a section on shame that I desperately needed, along with perhaps one of the most resonant pieces of writing advice I’ve ever heard:

“Self-care sometimes means limiting people’s access to you.”

This funny, sweary, generous writing guide believes in you. It’s vulnerable because it knows you are, too. It’s strong because it’s built to help you keep going. Gentle Writing Advice connects us to something inside ourselves that still believes in trying.

And honestly? I’m happy Wendig and I live in the same timeline. (I think. The man gives strong “slides between dimensions on Tuesdays” energy.)

Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins

Absurdist fiction / countercultural theology / metaphysical hot dog stand

Let me begin by saying that I do not believe in roadside attractions. I believe in roads. I believe in destinations. I believe in stopping only when absolutely necessary: for example, when a building is on fire, or when someone is waving at you to prevent you from driving into a sinkhole.

Roadside attractions, as a concept, suggest you are not already where you’re meant to be.

Which also describes this novel.

Another Roadside Attraction is Tom Robbins’s debut novel, and it comes in HOT. The plot, such as it is, is something like: a clairvoyant ex-circus performer named Amanda and her musician/tightrope-walking husband John Paul open a roadside hot dog stand that is also a museum of weirdness. They are joined by a scientist/drifter/occasional scold named Marx Marvelous and an ex-CIA operative named Plucky Purcell who steals the mummified body of Jesus Christ. What follows is a swirl of theology, sex, and philosophy.

If you’ve ever read a book and hoped there was at least one pet baboon in it, you’re in luck.

The prose is a study in excesses. Robbins unleashes language upon the reader. His sentences somersault and flirt, then rest. Even when it’s too much — and it often is — it’s never boring.

The characters are archetypes in tie-dye, full of delightfully implausible wisdom and nonsense. Amanda, especially, is the grandmother of every mystic dream girl in contemporary fiction. Yes, radiant, but also written in that “male-gaze-mystical-fertility-goddess of the 70s” way. (although, to be fair, her agency and internal logic are more developed than “archetype” implies.) John Paul is a philosophical foil with a man bun before man buns were a thing. Robbins clearly adores his characters and seems to write them with a loving sense of “You’re fabulous, go be free.”

This book does not ask for permission to be weird. It takes swings at organized religion, capitalism, science, mysticism, and the entire notion of polite fiction.

As one character puts it: “Real courage is risking one’s clichés.”

Robbins risks every cliché. And that is fun. He has big, unwieldy, thought-provoking, and possibly unwashed ideas.

Overall, however, the book felt pseudo…something. Philosophical? Poetic? Literary? Infectious? Familiar? Challenging?

Perhaps that is due to the writing style, which felt relentless. It is metaphor-as-worldview. Or at least as a hallucinogenic window to a worldview. If you’re in the mood, it’s delicious. If you’re not, it feels like being sea-lioned by someone in a fedora who wants to “explain” how you’ve misunderstood greatness by just asking questions. A different editor, perhaps, might have been warranted.

And yes, the book is extremely of its time, and it may be possible to get a contact high off of some of the passages.

Don’t read Another Roadside Attraction for plot. Read it for the ride. For the glittering, overgrown language. For the absurdity and the sincere questioning. For a bygone world that’s falling apart but bringing forth a whiff of patchouli and old truths. It’s for all of us weird kids.

And here’s the thing: Despite all that, I feel largely indifferent about Another Roadside Attraction, and I think Robbins, were he to float by on a peyote-scented cloud, might actually be fine with that. This isn’t a book that begs to be loved by everyone. It’s not tidy — it’s not even particularly clear — and it’s not universal. It’s certainly not a relaxing tale.

This book is not normal.

A not-normal book doesn’t necessarily need adoration. It just needs you to walk through it once, eyes open, and maybe leave a little differently than you arrived. You may even end up admiring it, as I did.

Joan of Miami by A. Parrish

A Joan for the 21st Century

It’s an ambitious book and, to its credit, entertaining while committed to the radical notion that a young woman with opinions might actually change the world.

Read any good books lately? Let me know in the comments!

The Folio: What I Read March 2025

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

History is fading, the sea is rising, and a turtle is unimpressed.

Some months, the books are books. Story. Characters. Distinct pleasures.

And then there are months where books refuse to stay in their lanes. They start talking to each other, or maybe through each other. Suddenly the tidy book stack turns into a narrative séance. Ghosts, toddlers, bureaucrats, broken systems, family myths, fractured timelines, fractured time.

Oh, I had questions. What does memory preserve, and what does it redact at convenience? Are stories fixed or quantum? Can language hold sacred when everything else falls apart?

MAYBE.

These five books lurch, loop, and rebuild themselves mid-stride. A girl travels across water and time. A man folds a stranger’s laundry. A mother dies, a child is inherited. Many of these books refuse the ease of a beginning, middle, and end. Some worry about the end of the world. Others worry about surviving the day. Most do both. It all means something or quite emphatically does not.

Memory shows up as both myth and mortar. While ghosts linger and names slip, fragile truth cracks. Growing up and growing old involve figuring out what we owe each other now and in the future (and in some cases, the past). The answers are words shared or withheld and often wrapped in grief.

As shown in these five books, those words, expressed or not, recommend a deep belief in storytelling as lifeboat and anchor. When systems fail and the world turns sideways, people build stories from scraps. That’s how humans get on with this whole business. It may be the only way.

Violence still hums underneath, of course. We’re human after all.

Every story here is about surviving damage.

That can be draining. Worth it? Yes. Still, I’m hoping to gift myself some lighter April reads. But who knows? Haphazard book-choosing is haphazard, as absolutely no one says.

Also, somehow, I read two climate apocalypse novels this month. One would’ve been sufficient. Two feels pointed.

Aaaand, one book does indeed have a talking turtle. The turtle has opinions. Heed the turtle.

Which is all just to say these are the books that I enjoyed enough to finish in the last month.

Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
Going Home by Tom Lamont
Old Filth by Jane Gardam
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg

Let’s begin.

Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch

Beautiful, brutal, and shouldn’t make sense, but does

If you pick up a novel hoping for relaxation or comfort, you might want to reconsider Thrust by Lidia Yuknavitch. This is not comfort reading. It’s barely even comfortable reading.

HOWEVER, Thrust is a tsunami wrapped in poetry. Beautiful, brutal, and shouldn’t make sense, but does. Yuknavitch does not shy away from complexity or discomfort, and here she plunges us headlong into narrative that defies ease. It’s a story full of place and people dissolving and somehow still fighting to create something that feels like home and family.

I began Thrust without realizing it was set in a future defined by climate catastrophe. It took a bit of time to get my bearings with the structure of the book and the fantastical elements, but somewhere around page 48, I stopped trying to grip the story and let it carry me. I did not so much sink into this book as hover over it, skeptical and fascinated and ultimately won over.

The story centers on Laisvė, a young girl gifted/burdened with the ability to glide across water and time. She slips between timelines from the Statue of Liberty’s assembly on America’s shore to an America drowning beneath rising seas and its own humanity. Society, it turns out, was always built on shaky ground, half-broken and desperate. Animals speak with her, and unsurprisingly, they have more sensible things to say about humanity than humans do. (Largely that humans may not have ever had our acts together.)

Structurally, the novel loops and swirls through time, memory, and identity with a complexity reminiscent of Cloud Atlas. Just…wetter.

Yuknavitch writes about characters who are lost in one way or another. Those who exist in the kinds of spaces society has reserved for those it cannot properly categorize or who it can categorize a little too glibly. She reminds us that identity, names, and history are slippery things. “I think humans are comforted by names isn’t that right?” a whale asks young Laisvė. “I think names and naming do matter a lot,” she replies. “Also, I think names can slip their meanings.” Profound, although not necessarily cheerful in or out of context.

It’s almost unfair how good Yuknavitch’s prose is. Lines such as, “She slept in pieces,” or “David let out the heaviest breath I’d ever heard, as if he were releasing a long, thick, coiled rope” hit in that way that can make a reader take a deep, respectful breath.

In the end, Thrust isn’t a snuggly read. It’s unsettling, powerful, and almost obnoxiously good. Yuknavitch writes like a time traveler with a flare gun.

“You will all die, too, is the thing. But you haven’t figured out how to make death-stories, and death-places, that have generative power.” And yet, Thrust is exactly that: a death-story, a life-story, and a hell of a ride.

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

A Master Class in Writing the Unresolved

The Joy Luck Club is like being invited to someone else’s emotionally loaded family dinner. One minute you’re trying to stay out of the competition over the side dishes, the next you’re knee-deep in decades-old grudges, unspoken secrets, and love wrapped in miscommunication. Tan serves carefully balanced portions of humor and tragedy, and before you know it, you’ve ingested more insight about your own family than you ever intended to when you told your friend you’d love to go.

I think I’ve exhausted the food metaphors for now. We’ll see.

The novel centers on four Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters as they work through and/or avoid tangles of memory, identity, and cultural translation. Told through interwoven stories, The Joy Luck Club shows how silence travels through generations just as surely as genetic or cultural traits. The mothers carry unspoken griefs and brutal histories; the daughters try to decode them while managing their own anxieties about expectations.

Tan’s prose is graceful and wry, lulling you in then quietly wrecking you with an underlying throb of the unsaid. Generational connection doesn’t always come from words, it comes from tone, from gesture, from knowing which part of a story was left out. This takes the characters (and, you know, folks in real life) sometimes decades to unravel, if they do at all.

I’m embarrassingly late to reading this. Tan writes with empathy and precision, and there’s a warm familiarity to each character. It’s as though you’ve met them before. Or maybe like you are one of them, depending on the day.

Tan is particularly good at capturing the vibrations between people who love each other but don’t quite know how to show it. It reads beautifully like a sort of emotional translation error. These mothers and daughters are just as estranged by their own efforts to protect, preserve, or forget as they are by language or culture differences. Tan doesn’t tidy that up, thankfully.

What’s striking is how much the book holds at once: war, motherhood, survival, pride, superstition, and kitchen-table psychology. The silences are golden. Not for the characters, necessarily, but definitely for the reader. The silences are earned and enhance rather than frustrate the reading.

The Joy Luck Club is about the things we carry, even when we don’t realize we’re carrying them. It’s a book built on rituals of care and memory. There is also no small amount of the kind of maternal judgment that reads like poetry when you’re ready for it but ooof, does it hit.

You’ll find a lot to love here, especially complicated family dynamics and deeply emotional prose with a light touch.

A lot to love.

Going Home by Tom Lamont

Relationships: Some Assembly Required

Tom Lamont’s Going Home opens so quietly you might think you’ve wandered into a long meditation on unrequited love and youthful navel-gazing. For a few early pages, I feared a descent into melodrama. But then the book begins a gentle and precise shift, and what emerges is something tender, funny, and clear-eyed: a lovely debut novel about surprise parenthood, fractured friendships, sandwich generations, and the quiet work of becoming someone others can count on.

The setup sounds like the first half of the first line of a joke — three men, a toddler, and a rabbi — but Lamont sidesteps trashy sitcom impulses. Téodor Erskine returns to his childhood town to care for Joel, the two-year-old son of his late friend (and unrequited love), Lia. Joel isn’t precocious, saccharine, or a plot device meant to teach a man how to feel. He simply exists, which makes him and the novel believable.

Téodor’s orbit includes three characters who, in lesser hands, would’ve been cardboard cutouts. His father is occasionally obstinate and struggles with aging. His friend Ben is impulsive and underbaked. And then there’s Sibyl, the newly arrived rabbi who faces particular challenges in her new community. She could have been reduced to the wise outsider trope, but Lamont gives her space and dignity, even if this is ultimately a story about men, and the emotional labor they’re rarely taught how to do.

Lamont writes male friendship without irony or overcorrection. There are no big ol’ bro-hugs or teary confessions under stadium lights. Just the quiet, complicated beauty of men trying, and sometimes failing, to show up.

The book shifts between perspectives, offering characters from the inside and the outside. This adds texture without feeling gimmicky. And while I didn’t tear through it, I didn’t want it to end either.

Most telling: I rooted for every single character. Even the ones who screwed up. Especially them. That’s rare. And while reading about parenting can be brutal (hello self-comparisons and quiet self-judgement!), Going Home reminds us that effort counts and that being trustworthy — or even just wanting to be — is a kind of grace.

Sure, a few threads tie up a little too neatly, but it’s a small quibble for something this warm, intelligent, and human.

Going Home is a gentle hand on the shoulder and a lovely read, but take note that there are moments of hardship and grief that are honestly portrayed.

Old Filth by Jane Gardam

Things dismantle properly and still fall apart.

When a friend (Hi Sadie!) recommends a book, one does not simply stroll to the library. One launches to the library like a caffeinated muppet, arms windmilling, breathlessly asking “DO YOU HAVE THE ONE WITH THE SAD BRITISH JUDGE.” And that is the story of how Jane Gardam’s Old Filth got into my grubby, windmilling, muppety hands. And then I sat with it. And reader, it sat back.

Old Filth reads not with a bang but with the heavy sigh of someone who’s seen too much war, too many port cities, too many fools, and at least one ghost of Empire. It is emotional shrapnel in a teacup and some witty conversation.

On the surface, it’s the story of a retired British barrister looking back on his life, but to leave it at that is like calling the ocean “damp.”

“Old Filth” stands for “Failed In London, Try Hong Kong.” A joke, sure, but also a code. Sir Edward Feathers is Old Filth. A widowed barrister and borderline representative of British restraint. But Gardam gives us the man: a Raj orphan shipped off to England, broken early, bandaged with decorum, built entirely out of Empire and repression. He is a lot. And a little. Mostly lonely.

The novel moves fluidly between past and present timelines. There’s class tension humming throughout, understated but sharp. At the end of his life, Feathers is a bookmark of another world.

Fear not, though, this story isn’t a slow-motion tragedy, thanks to British wit that slips in right when you think the whole scene might tip into something overwrought.

Feathers himself is a marvel of a character: infuriating, endearing, proper to the point of parody, and desperately alone. Through him, themes of closeness, intimacy, and patient survival ripple through the novel. There’s illness (Fevers! Bad bananas!) but it’s not a Victorian swoon-fest. It’s atmospheric dislocation and quite necessary.

Gardam’s prose is spare but piercing, and occasionally devastating. It’s not entirely a breezy read, but it’s generous. It reads like a Saturday afternoon on PBS, all history, dignity, a touch of mothballs and some sepia-toned scandal.

Maybe I’m too twitchy these days, what with *indicates the world with the muppet wildness engaged when first getting the book.* So I am a little restrained in my adoration, although unhesitant in my enjoyment. Maybe this book is an October book. Or an August-in-a-Hammock book. I’ll revisit it. And when I do, I’ll likely be the windmill-armed version of myself, full of adoration. This one will stand up to a second date, I am certain.

This is a grown-up, thoughtful, quietly brilliant novel, and it rewards a grown-up, thoughtful reader. This book doesn’t grab you by the eyeballs and scream “LOVE ME!” But it will move something in you that you didn’t know was still tender. It’s full of nuance and memory and wit so dry it could start a small fire.

Thanks, Sadie! Good call!

Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg

Heat and Static.

The word atomized, once largely in the realm of physics or dystopian sci-fi, now feels like the most honest way to describe moving through the world. Not exploded, just broken down into parts. Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized embodies it. Families are scattered, identity is poofed away, and narrative floats about and is pieced back together if you can trap it at all.

Berlin Atomized follows Goldstein siblings Nina, Jeremías, and Mateo, children raised in the unnervingly pristine gated community of Nordelta outside Buenos Aires. The novel opens in a world already broken. The poor have been politely removed, the landscape reshaped, and the wealthy moved in to build something that metaphorically functions like a luxury scented candle “Only those who were invited were allowed to enter,” we’re told. It’s a perfect setting for dislocation.

The siblings scatter eventually and in their own ways. Nina rituals her way through bathtubs and language; Jeremías seeks refuge in music; Mateo turns toward fire. Each is lost, or lawless, or both. All seem allergic to stability. All feel uncomfortable in their own skin.

The novel itself feels hot and unsettled, even though the whole thing is framed from the future. In 2063, childhood friend Angélica Oshiro is trying to reconstruct their lives from notes and fragments. The whole premise renders the story slightly and deliciously unreliable as she attempts this archival experiment from the kind of scraps that usually end up in a recycling bin or memoir.

Kornberg’s sentences are strange, straightforward, and sometimes slippery. The world may be falling apart (and yes, it’s another climate disaster novel), but these characters still try to exercise control in the way they know how: by naming, remembering, forgetting, floating, burning and bathing.

And underneath it all lies the question of Jewish identity. Berlin Atomized doesn’t put Jewishness at the forefront, but it’s there. All of the siblings are tinged by something ancestral, something broken and half-remembered. In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kornberg said, “There’s a messianic aspect to Judaism that I really appreciate; the idea that you have to work to make the future better is very appealing and real to me.” The novel wrestles with that drive. It’s a kind of generative eschatology — what happens after the world ends, when you still have to get up and figure out who you are.

This is not a warm novel. But it isn’t cold, either. It’s precise. It’s not trying to be overly charming. Instead, it is deeply suspicious of comfort.

Berlin Atomized is beautifully and strangely built and slightly haunted. It’s a novel about people trying to assemble themselves from the pieces left behind. If you’ve ever wondered what’s holding your fragments together, this one is a must-read.

It’s messy in the way that trying to survive a world that doesn’t know what to do with you is messy.

Read any good books lately?