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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 Mid-November through Mid-December 2024

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The (Un)usual Humanity of It All

When I wrap up each month’s reading, I like to look for themes that connect the books I’ve enjoyed. I am exciting that way.

This month, the theme seems to be something like “Joke’s on you, asshole.” Fair. A little harsh. I should be nicer to myself.

Anyway, generally, I want my books to feel “slippery and wild,” as Gwydion Suilebhan described in his post about A Real Pain. . The books should make me work for it a little, challenge me, delight me, or knock me off-balance just enough.

This month has been mostly glorious, occasionally frustrating, and terribly on-brand for late November into December. There was so much illness in the house, including me. Two solid weeks of being sick cut into my reading time, as did an ocular migraine that I was sure was a retinal detachment (long story). Finals for the kids, Thanksgiving, and the usual chaos of life were all there too — the kind of busyness we’ve somehow convinced ourselves is virtuous. Spoiler: it’s not.

Still, there were hugs to give, cheers to yell as we clawed our way through heartaches, anger, joy, and everything in between. Most of the books I read this month fit the mood perfectly. And, as you’ll see next month, even Nuclear War (which I didn’t finish in time for this wrap-up) aligns thematically in its own toe-tapping way.

WHY do we do this? Why do we run around like caffeinated ferrets, scuttling to and fro with all our urgent ferret business, only to collapse in December like, “Yes, our ferret work here is done,” and then, immediately decide January is the perfect time to start sprinting again? (Side note: I am fully bracing myself for the onslaught of “Hard to believe, but it’s time to make summer plans for your kids!” emails by January 10th. No. Stop it. Please. Let us wallow in this current hellscape for five seconds before dragging us into the next hellscape — this time flavored with the bitter tang of FOMO over missing All the Important Things.)

Back to the books. There’s a clear thread of humanity in all its messy, ridiculous, and poignant glory.

Some of these were slippery. Some wild. Some both.

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

Glen Rock Book of the Dead by Marion Winik 

Marion Winik’s The Glen Rock Book of the Dead is approximately 50 brief, jewel-like portraits memorializing (if not nearly resurrecting)individuals who have touched her life. Inspired by the Mexican Day of the Dead traditions, where mourning and celebration dance together, Winik writes about people she’s known intimately and fleetingly. She flays open lives in just a handful of paragraphs, with warmth, precision, and dazzling compassion.

And oh, holy hell. Sometimes your new favorite book waits quietly, unremarkable in a groaning TBR pile. What a delight this book is. You will feel things you are unprepared to feel about the lives of people you don’t know and whose names you may never find out. Winik doesn’t so much write as she casts spells, allowing entire lives to unfold in under two pages. Each life is “introduced” in vibrant entrances, and their passing takes a back seat to their living. Each subject arriving fully realized, their deaths present but secondary to their lives. Winik seems more interested in how they lived and how our lives imprint on one another.

There is warmth here, and ferocity. There is compassion, too, and an unwavering sense of curiosity. What does it mean to remember someone? What does it mean to be remembered? These are the questions Winik circles, never directly, but with every story she tells.

It confronts pain and disappointment, isolation and failure, but it also finds joy, community, and the unyielding mystery of what it all means. The reader is left wondering what their own two-page version would look like. Disappointment? Pain? Trying to shield myself and my kids from it all, succeeding in some places, failing in others? That’s part of the story. But Winik reminds us that we get to write our own. And that pain? That joy? It’s real. It’s messy. It’s what makes life worth remembering. And it leaves you hoping, above all, that when your story is told, someone notices. Someone remembers. Because, damn it, you mattered. All of you. Your pain and your triumph.

These aren’t obituaries — they’re titrated snapshots of life, love, and the lingering weight of loss. is uplifting even as it wounds, surprising in its candor and its grace.

May we all be remembered like this.

This one is a stunner and you can expect to see it on my “Favorite Reads of 2024.”

Normal Rules Don’t Apply: Stories by Kate Atkinson 

Kate Atkinson’s Normal Rules Don’t Apply is a collection of linked short stories that’s equal parts literary magic trick and narrative haymaker. Atkinson throws you in — no hand-holding, no explanations. Just the weird, the wonderful, the unsettling. The result? A threaded, clanging tumble through lives and timelines.

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill short story collection. It’s a mind-bending, genre-hopping grab bag of what just happened?

This book is cheeky. Boisterous. It’s dark humor wrapped in a velvet glove, then slapped across your face for good measure. Atkinson sets you up with a grin, plays nice for a few pages, and then yanks the rug out from under you. And you’ll thank her for it, because it all tracks. It shouldn’t work, but it does. More than once as a story ended with a brilliant twist, my response was, “Clever girl. Of course.”

The rules of this universe are deliberately opaque. Atkinson leaves you to sort through the fragments, to make sense of the silences between what is said. It’s in those silences that her true mastery lies. She gives you just enough to see the edges of the abyss and then leaves you trembling on the brink.

The collection is quite the cocktail: a shot of Twilight Zone, a splash of Black Mirror, and just enough Grimms’ Fairy Tales to make you wonder what’s lurking in the woods. The rules of this universe are blurry, and that’s the point. And, you know, the title. Atkinson creates the illusion of coherence while actively undermining it.

You don’t settle into this book. You hover above it, guarded, watching through your fingers as the characters stumble into doom, misfortune, and the occasional epiphany. These are stories about endings large and small about how the world tilts on an axis so thin it’s a wonder we haven’t all already fallen off. The characters are magnets for misfortune, yet you are drawn to them, even if only to glimpse their ruin. You feel for them, in the way one might feel for a figure in a painting, separated by time and the inability to intervene.

Not every story is a slam dunk. Some are bumpy, but Atkinson’s gift for words, dialogue, world-building, and her ability to twist your brain into a Möbius strip more than make up for it. Her wordcraft is elegant, ruthless, and a lot of fun.

Standout stories for me included “The Void,” “Spellbound,” and “Classic Quest 17 — Crime and Punishment.”

Normal Rules Don’t Apply is fun. It’s spooky. It’s grim. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine of all sorts of end times — global, personal, and everything in between. And when you’re done, you’ll sit there, wide-eyed, and maybe a little haunted.

Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed 

Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things isn’t your average advice book — it’s a mixtape of truths wrapped in gorgeous prose and raw humanity. It’s a book of dualities: brutal yet tender, despairing yet hopeful, profound yet breezy. This isn’t sugarcoated “life gets better” nonsense. No, this is Strayed, as “Dear Sugar,” rolling up her sleeves, grabbing your heart with both hands, and saying, Look. This is it. This is life. It’s messy. It’s painful. It’s achingly, stupidly beautiful.

The letters are raw, the writers, asking the questions many of us are too scared to admit we have: Am I enough? Does this pain ever stop? Do I matter? Why am I so lonely? Why does life suck so hard? How do I make it through another Tuesday? These writers are raw, stripped down to their essence, but they are also filled with the absurdity of being human. And Strayed is right there, tossing out lifelines. Not fluffy ones. Not Hallmark-card platitudes. Real, gut-wrenching ropes woven from her own heartbreaks, mistakes, and triumphs. She doesn’t shy away from the mess; she dives right in and invites us to do the same. The water may not always be warm, but you’ll adjust. As Strayed replies with wisdom and candor, there is, when appropriate, a certain lightness. She is sharp, sometimes blunt, but never unkind.

“Vespers” is a stunner — a piece that makes you sit there, slack-jawed, wondering how someone can take pain and turn it into something sacred.

This book isn’t a balm; it’s a salve that stings before it heals. It picks at the scabs of life and gets to the tender, raw human stuff underneath. It’s so much about fixing your problems as it is about reminding you that you’re not alone in the mess. That we’re all just stumbling around, wanting the same damn things: joy, connection, purpose. And, yes, you can probably fix what needs fixing, if you’re brave. You can probably get through this particular heartache if you’re brave. And you’re going to be brave because you are not alone in this.

Tiny Beautiful Things is a reminder to stay human. To stay messy. To stay hopeful, even when it feels impossible. It’s also a reminder that there are good, decent, people in this world who are here for you and me, and we for them.

Cheryl Strayed doesn’t just give advice — she lights a fire in your chest and dares you to hold onto the warmth. You get a lifeline! You get a lifeline! Everybody’s feelings get saved — or at least acknowledged — and isn’t that half the battle?

Tiny Beautiful Things is here to break your heart, stitch it back together, and then maybe poke at it a little for good measure. It’s a book that’ll make you want to hug a stranger, laugh at your own bad decisions, and send a text to that one friend who always puts up with your nonsense. It’s brutally honest, occasionally breezy, and profoundly human. Read it, feel all the things, and maybe grab a box of tissues. You’re gonna need ’em. Chin up, friend. We’re here for each other.

The Misanthrope by Moliere

For a script written in the seventeenth century, The Misanthrope by Molière has a strikingly contemporary feel. The sharp dialogue, biting wit, and complex interplay of ideals versus social niceties could easily be transplanted to a modern setting without losing its punch. Molière’s critique of societal hypocrisy still hits hard.

This wasn’t a game-changer for me, but it’s a classic I’ve wanted to check off my list, and I’m glad I did. There’s something refreshing about reading a script, where the dialogue and characters carry the story’s full weight. Alceste, the titular misanthrope with unyielding moralism, is both frustrating and fascinating, a man who despises the very world he’s hopelessly entangled in. His dynamic with Célimène, his perfect foil, creates a tension that still feels fresh. Her flirtations and charm contrast his severity and bluntness, and their relationship becomes the beating heart of the play. She is everything he claims to despise, yet he cannot look away.

Alceste’s disdain for pretense and societal hypocrisy feels less like a relic of 1666 and more like the bitter grumblings of someone scrolling through social media today. And yet, his rigid moralism isolates him, a reminder that the pursuit of ideals often comes at a cost. The play’s ending, where Alceste stubbornly clings to his principles, has sparked plenty of debate. Is it a comedic jab at the absurdity of rigid moralism or a quiet tragedy about isolation? Molière pokes fun at Alceste’s earnestness while acknowledging that society, in all its artifice, is hardly blameless. It’s not neat, not tidy, but just ironic enough to make you think. Alceste stomps off to be alone with his ideals, proving once and for all that being “right” doesn’t necessarily make you happy. It’s funny, frustrating, and real in a way that feels timeless. Classic Molière.

Look, it’s not going to knock “hanging out at Chuck E. Cheese for my twins’ 5th birthday” out of my top life experiences or anything, but I’m glad I read it. It’s clever, and its critique of human nonsense is as relevant now as it was when Molière wrote it. If you like your classics with a side of sarcasm and existential dread, give this one a shot. Plus, reading a script makes you feel fancy. Like you’re one latte away from writing your own play. And isn’t that lovely?

Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring 

Arsenic and Old Lace is a dark comedy that takes sweet old lady energy and spikes it with cyanide. Mortimer Brewster, your average theater critic, discovers his adorable aunts have been murdering lonely old men and burying them in the basement. One brother thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt; the other is Creature Feature of the Month having a bad day. The whole thing is bedlam.

I read the play, having heard my whole life that it was a real treat. I didn’t not get it, but I also didn’t get it-get it. So I watched the film — it’s not entirely faithful, but close enough. Same reaction. It’s not for me.

I don’t usually review things I don’t like, or even finish them, but I finished this, so I’m marking it here.

Millions of people love the play and the film, and I leave it to them with warm wishes that it continues to bring joy for years to come (and with sincere hopes that the name “Mortimer” makes a comeback.)

Next week I’ll post my favorite reads from 2024. I’ve got my eye on a lot for 2025. I went through the NYT list of the top 100 books from the year and it made a nice little graphic of things that caught my eye. The local librarians are going to get very sick of me soon.

Were you able to read much this last month? Anything good?