Tag: Books

What I Read September 2026

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Says Who?! (Dork Alert)

Graphic for “What I Read September 2026: Says Who?! (Dork Alert),” featuring the covers of five books reviewed this month on a bright pink background

Who defined what a novel is? Who decided which women were monsters and why? Who takes “I’m fine” at face value? Who gets corrected and by whom? And if somebody manufactures an image of a thing and shows it to enough people, at what point does the image eat the thing?

Humans LOVE categories. We make a category, invent some rules for it, forget we invented the rules, and then act like the category and the rules came from on high. And then, because we can’t leave anything along, we peel off the little labels we’ve stuck on everything to see what’s underneath.

Don’t get me wrong, labels are useful. “Please hand me the spoon,” saves considerable time over pointing at the drawer and shouting, “Gimme the small metal thing! No, the other one! No, the other other one.” But trouble begins when we name something and decide we have thus explained it. This month I read five books about that trouble.

Even though most of them were decidedly not postmodern, they organized into some sort of postmodern union behind my back. Did I sit around this month muttering about Derrida and the instability of meaning? NOT ANY MORE THAN USUAL. I sat around muttering about skepticism, mixed forms and genres, metafiction, unreliable narration, and self-reference. Bricolage, even! What a mutter!

All five books looked at the labels we’ve stuck on things and bellowed a mighty “SAYS WHO?”

I love a good SAYS WHO.

Anyway, this month’s victim of my enthusiasm is…

This is Not A Novel by David Markson

A novel has characters, plot, and narrative. It has description and meaning and metaphor and all the other things that appeared on laminated posters in my seventh-grade English classroom, right? David Markson says no. In another book he asks, “What is a novel in any case?” This Is Not a Novel seems determined to find out by getting rid of nearly all the things it is supposed to contain.

David Markson brings us a box of bones. Some are famous bones. Joyce bones. Byron bones. Beethoven bones. Some belonged to people who hated each other, slept with each other, misquoted each other, reviewed each other badly, died absurdly, died horribly, or simply died, because everyone in This Is Not a Novel is eventually going to do that. Also rattling around in the box: illnesses, insults, mistranslations, literary gossip, historical lint, quotations, coincidences, and Writer.

Writer, who is writing this book, would like us to understand that there is no character here. Writer would also like a book that is “nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” None of the standard equipment..

DORK ALERT: It activated the part of my brain that once studied literary theory, so everybody gets to suffer now. (Still preferable to activating the part of my brain that remembers old commercial jingles.) This is Not a Novel gives Reader fragments until Reader fills them in and makes a book. There is a lot of theory about gaps in texts and Reader’s role in making meaning, and This Is Not a Novel is one enormous gap with famous dead people scattered throughout.

At first: fact, fact, insult, death, Writer, fact, death. Then, Reader’s brain starts laying track ahead of the train. Recurrences become motifs. Trivia acquires emotional weight. Writer, who is definitely not a character, looks suspiciously character-shaped.

Markson keeps handing us bones. He insists there is nothing to assemble while we are very obviously assembling this book. kneads that “between” with gusto. He removes the machinery of the novel and leaves us assembling it ourselves. We keep building the very thing he says isn’t there. By the end, even the ending reaches backward and rearranges what came before it.

Maybe it’s not a novel. Fine. But by the end I had experienced character, motif, development, rhythm, consciousness, and something I might even refer to as emotional movement.

This is a playful book. It’s funny and gossipy and strange. It has rhythm. It loses the rhythm. It finds another. I wanted, sometimes, to hear it read aloud, or set to music. Performed as poetry, performed as humor.

It soothed and unsettled me. I loved it.

Honorable Mentions:

Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild and Untamed by Margaret Atwood et al

Do you know what humanity has NEVER had enough of? WORDS FOR WOMEN WHO ARE furious, wild, and/or who refuse. (How even dare they?!) I’m sure you can think of half a dozen off the top of your head, because we’ve got an entire historical thesaurus. Of course, at no point did anyone spitting these words at an “unacceptable” woman think, “Hey, maybe she has a point.” That’s the playground for Furies, an anthology that hands those labels to women writers and says: Please return to sender! Have fun! The strongest pieces share sense that we are still explaining something that should have been settled THREE CENTURIES AGO. (Mostly our humanity, but there you go. Is that a spoiler?).

Read it if you like your female rage peppered with linguistic reclamation.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I came to this one after hearing over and over that it was funny until it broke your heart. It did break my heart. I did not find it funny. Eleanor is strange, but at some point, laughing at her felt cruel. This is a trauma story about what happens after a child survives to adulthood and then is expected to just know how to function normally. It was a hard read for me.

Read it if you can handle a survival-by-kindness story.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

The Lambert family has several problems, mostly each other. Franzen details their lives and their spectacular professional and personal disasters. Now matriarch Enid just wants everyone home for Christmas. The Corrections is enormous. The family is big, the ideas are big, the sentences are big, and it’s 500-plus pages. I didn’t LOVE LOVE LOVE it but I’d willingly surrendered to all of it again.

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel J. Boorstin (50th Anniversary Edition)

Reality is complicated and often ugly. Fortunately, humans invented the pseudo-event, an event created largely so it can be reported. (Think press conferences, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, staged commemoration, or a planned televised presidential debates.) The fallout is that reality itself is now sometimes indistinguishable from pseudo-events. Some of The Image has aged poorly, but an unnerving amount of it feels like Boorstin somehow got hold of the internet decades early.

Read it if you like the feeling of finding the smartest professor on campus, settling into a seat, and realizing about ten minutes in that you’d happily stay after class.

And there be the September books. Read anything good lately?

On Writing. Or Not Writing. Or Writing a Little Bit, and Now I’ve Probably Jinxed It.

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Dear Lord I hope this isn’t inspirational

Essay graphic with a brushed-metal background that reads: "On Writing. Or Not Writing. Or Writing a Little Bit, and Now I've Probably Jinxed It." By Jackie Pick.

How is the writing going? Must you ask?

My computer crashed while I was writing this post. Windows announced that it had encountered a problem and needed to restart. Oh, YOU’VE encountered a problem, Windows? Fascinating. I was under the impression I was the one with the problem, seeing as you just deleted my work.

Then Windows started collecting information about the problem. WHAT INFORMATION? You’ve destroyed the document! There’s your information! What else do you need? Witness statements? Perhaps I can identify missing paragraphs from a lineup.

And before anyone writes to explain the importance of saving one’s work, THANK YOU. I was hoping to lose an entire draft and receive a lecture about it. Two birds, one stone.

The computer took its time rebooting, presumably readying a report that would establish that the problem had been me all along. I had a choice between pounding my head against a hard surface or putting away laundry. I chose the latter despite the considerable appeal of the former.

This series of ambitious attempts to think interrupted by opportunities to fold underpants is an accurate representation of my writing life.

Would fridge magnets stick to him?


Yeah, so let’s step into the confessional. For a while this past year, I stopped writing my novel.

I’d been working on a novel for several years. Hundreds of thousands of words came and went. That’s a lot of words. You could fill several perfectly good books with that many words, provided you arranged them in a different order and replaced most of them with better ones. Eventually, I stopped enjoying writing the novel. Then I stopped enjoying the novel. Then I stopped enjoying the person writing the novel.

Oh, I could still enjoy the work of people whose brains apparently hadn’t gone on indefinite leave, but mine had become a rather joyless place. I could still write my own shorter pieces, and did so here on the ol’ blog. That machinery was functioning and often amused me. But I’d lost the part of my brain that wanted to play in longer form, generating ideas that led to other connected ideas. I’d stopped entertaining myself, which is a nasty thing when you’re a writer. You spend hours a day inside your own head. Might as well enjoy being there.

Many other writers seem to have approximately eleven bajillion ideas at the ready. Ideas in saecula saeculorum! I had that one idea, and it flopped around for years. Was it a bad idea or was it a good idea that I was bad at writing? The distinction seemed important until I realized that both explanations ended with me feeling stupid and also not writing.

Eventually, I started a different novel. I’ve written so extensively about my difficulties writing these novels that I may have inadvertently completed a different book. Thank you for your continued support of this franchise.

Yes, I felt like a failure. Yes, I know all the old chestnuts, no need to cite the Deep Magic to me. “You’re not a failure. You’re learning how to write this book. You only fail if you quit. Show up to the page. You’re not too old. Trust the process.”

It’s entirely possible the process is a bastard. The process requires one to show up, and showing up requires time. Writing is my JOB. And yet life insists on treating it as something I can squeeze in between other things. (What other job do you squeeze in? Surgery? “Keep that chest open, Frank, I’ll be back Monday. October at the latest.”)

Is he dishwasher-safe?


Summer was spent working, parenting, recovering from a medical procedure (all is well), enjoying the final guaranteed summer with all my children at home, and fulfilling various obligations. There was also a construction site approximately twenty-five feet from my office that required every power tool ever invented.

When I could find a few minutes to write, I couldn’t write. There was no Zone to even approach, never mind get into.

Had I lost something essential? Had the part of me that had once been curious and inventive and occasionally gloriously stupid decided it had endured enough? Perhaps it had gone into the woods to live in a small cottage, eating the occasional unfortunate traveler.

Does he come with attachments? Like a dough hook or something?


AND YET.

A few weeks ago, I started listening to my writing playlist again. I started occasionally cowriting again and I welcomed new ideas as one might welcome returning birds after an unpleasant winter, even if the birds turn out to be pigeons.

A glimmer.

If his son climbed into his suit and they jumped up two floors, would he need an elevator permit?


But I knew I was really getting back to it when I resumed ruining terrible movies for my husband.

Hear me out. Human civilization has reached the extraordinary point where we can access an almost limitless entertainment (countless videos about drywall anchors!) at the touch of a button. Despite this, last week my husband chose to watch the 2014 remake of RoboCop, thereby demonstrating the heroic tolerance for nonsense that has sustained him throughout our marriage.

I had excellent questions. I voiced those questions, mostly during major plot points. I was delighted. My husband was less delighted.

Needless to say, I was entertaining myself.

My brain is revving up again, which makes not being able to sit down and just WRITE on a SCHEDULE of SOME SORT particularly infuriating. I’ve got ideas. I’ve got things I want to say. I’ve got a book poking me in the noggin and a renewed appetite for doing the work.

But, you know, September in all of its double-stuffedness.

Can my writing brain be a little more patient? MAYBE. But patience is a virtue extolled by satisfied people. Or maybe dissatisfied people. Definitely folks not in a hurry to get to the good stuff.

Anyway, I’ve got a novel to write and some questions about RoboCop’s extended warranty.

What I Read August 2026

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Goin’ to the Inevitable (Dairy Queen), Be Back Soon!

Purple graphic featuring the covers of Departure(s), The Swimmers, The World According to Garp, and Anxious People.

What IS August? Seriously, what is this month supposed to be? Because July knows what it is. July says, “It’s summer. Here’s a chair. Sit down. Have some watermelon and lemonade. Slow down for a moment.” Fine! THANK YOU, JULY. Clear mission statement. Excellent work.

There was, this year, a moreso-than-usual noticeable lack of exhaling in August. Maybe we did all our exhaling in July. Maybe we squandered it on evenings and perfectly ripe (non-diarrhea–causing) produce and the folly that time was passing at the normal rate.

August was a rush of prepping things, getting things ready, doing things, remembering other things while doing the first things, making lists of the things, consolidating those lists into master lists, losing the master lists, and making new lists called things like “EVERYTHING ELSE” and “OH SHIT, THAT TOO.”

(And then there’s writing. But I repeat myself.)

The August incantation was “abandon all routine, ye mighty, and despair,” and boy howdy, I did ever.

I love my routines, by the way. I love the small liturgy of them. Routines keep me from distractedly wandering into traffic or a Dairy Queen. Yet August took every routine I’ve spent the last eleven months carefully constructing, stuffed them into a cannon, and fired it toward Weehawken. Now I get to return to the proverbial domicile of my life and find the place ransacked.

I’m tired.

I can’t be tired. I don’t have time to be tired. It’s not on my list(s).

Introductory blathering aside, this is a brief post this month. I’m behind where I usually am when I’m behind at the end of August, which suggests the existence of several different levels/dimensions of behind and, somewhere, a version of me who finished this post last Thursday.

I tossed more than a few books back into the TBR. This was not their fault. August found me with certain specific parched patches, and I needed books that could get water directly to those patches without first requiring me to assemble the irrigation system myself. The others will be attempted again. They know what they did, which was nothing.

Everything I read this month was beautiful and heartbreaking and funny, which is quite the hat trick. Note that the humor is bone dry. Arid, even. Not a knee-slapper in the bunch. They are funny the way life gets funny sometimes. Laugh-or-cry funny. Then cry or laugh. Then laughter through tears (Oh, Dolly, hello). Lifefunny, as it were.

And that’s what I needed from books this August — stories that understand that beautiful, heartbreaking, and funny are not separate departments.

September has arrived and I exhale a quiet hallelujah. Then I breathe considerably faster because…September. In Julian Barnes’s Departure(s), he mentions Philip Larkin’s reported final words: “I am going to the inevitable.” Well, apparently so am I. According to my calendar, the inevitable is absolutely rammed through the third week of September. Join me there if you like. I’m keeping it on this side of the mortal coil but I can’t promise we’re staying out of Dairy Queen.

Anyway, this month’s victim of my enthusiasm is…

The World According to Garp by John Irving

The first time I read The World According to Garp, I was young and thought danger was an event. Something happens and the terrible thing arrives. There is a before and an after. Now I know better. The possibility of danger is a constant companion.

The World According to Garp is a strange, hungry, unruly, amazing novel about writers, wrestlers, marriage, mothers and children, sex, feminism, assassins, bears, terrible driving choices, wanting, breaking, changing, and an alarming number of body parts that become separated from the people to whom they were originally issued.

With all this, John Irving has written a book about the human desire to control our lives.

Garp would like to impose some order on his life. He’s a writer after all, and writers take the bloody animal of life and put sentences around it.

But Garp isn’t just a writer, he strives to be a serious writer. His mother, Jenny Fields, writes one book almost incidentally and becomes a feminist icon. Then strangers begin telling Jenny what Jenny means. And strangers begin telling Garp what Garp means.

This happens everywhere in Garp. People take other people’s lives and make something out of them. Everyone is forever grabbing someone else’s story, carrying it off, repurposing it, and then returning to explain what it all actually means. And that is out of Garp’s control, no matter how hard he tries.

Garp has roughly the same success controlling his family life.

He and his spouse Helen’s deep love for each other does not prevent them from making an impressive mess of their marriage. They sleep with other people. They lie and fume and forgive and fail to forgive. Garp is magnificently hypocritical about fidelity, which would almost be comedy if bodies in this book did not have such a terrible habit of turning metaphor into flesh.

Then Garp becomes a father and discovers on an even deeper level that loving someone gives you absolutely no additional power to keep them safe. He sees danger everywhere. The family calls that sense of impending danger and anxiety the Under Toad, a child’s misunderstanding of “undertow.” The Under Toad is the terrible thing waiting just out of sight.

The worst part is that Garp is right. The world is dangerous. Irving tells us so. Sometimes he practically points at the monster before it bares its teeth. You can know the Under Toad is there and love everybody enormously and still not be able to prevent disaster.

This beautifully written book should be emotionally unbearable. Instead, it is balanced. Funny, even. God, it is funny. After all, between the assassinations and adultery and grief and missing pieces of human anatomy, somebody has to make dinner and side-eye dogs. Somebody has to keep inhabiting their ridiculous, breakable bodies as though nobody has told them how this ends.

I read this book when I was young, and I loved it. I love it differently now. I dropped everything else to read one more page, which is about as much control over the situation as any of us gets.

Honorable Mentions:

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

First there’s a life. Then a memory. Then a story. Barnes’s self-described final novel prowls around memory, mortality, love, writing, and what lies between what happened and the story we tell about what happened. He spends ample time considering what a writer owes the real people whose lives become material. It’s a hell of a question to save for your final book. It’s also at once remarkably pensive, funny, and unnerving.

Read it if you like your existential musings to be non-linear, melancholy, and sharp-toothed and/or if you wonder whether writers preserve people’s stories or are simply very articulate burglars.

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

Every day, a group of people finds refuge in an underground swimming pool. They stroke, breathe, turn, repeat, reach, and pace themselves. Then a crack appears at the bottom of the pool. Eventually the book narrows to one swimmer, Alice, who is losing her memory, and the daughter losing her. Otsuka’s prose is so lyrical and rhythmic that reading it feels a little like swimming: push off, breathe, turn, repeat until you realize you’ve gone somewhere much deeper than you intended.

Read it if you want a tiny-yet-enormous, lyrical book to help you swim out past where your feet can touch.

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

A bank robbery goes wrong, an apartment viewing becomes a hostage situation, and everyone involved is trying very, very hard to be a person correctly. There are also police officers, a bridge, multiple meanings of what it means to be “from Stockholm,” and a rabbit. Backman gives us roomfuls of ridiculous people, gives us space to judge them, and then reveals their heartbreaking backstories.

Read it if you find people exhausting but love the idiots anyway, and/or if you appreciate a writer who practices the art of the reveal.

And there be the August reads. Read anything good lately?