A few of my favorite reads…
CONTEMPORARY & CANONICAL ǁ NEW & OLD.
Fiction ※ Poetry ※ Nonfiction ※ Drama
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Nevil Shute’s novel, A Town Like Alice (originally published 1950), leads its readers through the years before, during, and after WWII on both the British home front and the colonial outposts of British Malaya. Eventually, readers wander as a far as Queensland, Australia in this classically mid-century novel about a resourceful (we might call her entrepreneurial in the 21st century) young woman (Jean Paget) whose grit and good sense make her a natural leader and a wildly likeable character.
Some books sweep the reader away to a specific place and time within the first lines. In the case of Australian writer, Tea Cooper’s novel, The Naturalist’s Daughter (2024), this certainly holds true. Cooper’s newest historical fiction opens amid the many oddities of a naturalist’s workroom in the backwaters of New South Wales, Australia. The year is 1808 and readers immediately meet the child Rose. She is a delightful young heroine who assists her father’s work which focuses on observing and documenting the curious creature now known as platypus (known by many names in the nineteenth century including Aboriginal mallangong).
Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006, translated to English 2008) brims with internal rumination and philosophy. It is also the tale of human connection and the small moments that transform individuals existing in close proximity to others without ever really seeing one another into kindred spirits. Set almost entirely in the disconnected community of an upper class residential building in central Paris, The Elegance of the Hedgehog’s cast centers around the building fifty-four-year-old concierge; aloof and prickly, she is clearly an outlier living under the building’s glitzy roof. Readers meet a second integral character early on who calls the building home: the twelve-year-old younger daughter of one of the families. Perspective alternates between these characters through out the novel and the reader spends considerable time in both their internal thoughts.
I realized I had never read her Pulitzer winner, The Shipping News (1993). So this year I did. I found myself slowly pulled in by an unlikely hero, Quoyle, a gentle giant in a cruel world full of betrayal, disappointment, and heartbreak. The precocious characters multiply as Proulx’s award-winning novel progresses and her hero returns to his family’s ancestral home in Newfoundland. He finds himself in an unlikely Eden, but in time it becomes clear it is the home he has always sought. Ultimately, The Shipping News is a testament to the power of place in great writing as well as the magic of human connection to heal us; Proulx transports her readers to the bitter cold and hard living of Newfoundland where small acts of kindness and community serve as palliatives to the landscape’s harshness.
Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake (2023) is a slight novel (page count just over 300) that explores storytelling and story-receiving, innocence and experience, memory and truth. Set during the long, slow days of pandemic lockdown, Tom Lake follows a mother unwinding the tale of her youth to her now young adult daughters.
Madeline Miller’s short work, Galatea (originally published 2013), is a satisfyingly tiny book. Bound in hardcover with petite dimensions (roughly 4” x 6”), this little book is only 56 pages (including a six-page afterword). The story itself, like Miller’s novel-length Circe (previously reviewed—the first on LitReaderNotes— here) and The Song of Achilles (previously reviewed here), is a feminist retelling of classical myth. Miller fleshes out Galatea’s story from the story of Pygmalion in Ovid’s Metamorphosis.
Many people have spoken of the power in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), but nothing can prepare its reader for the heart-wrenching narrative held within its pages. This story, told in alternating, first-person perspective, is a story of place. A native of the Mississippi Delta, Ward knows Sing, Unburied, Sing’s setting intimately. The delta, and its many unburied spirits, come to life in this moving coming-of-age story rich with themes of belonging, loss, addiction, and so much more.
So often writers tease out an elaborate story by asking a series of compelling what-ifs. In the case of Percival Everett’s most recent novel, James (2024), this is certainly the case. Everett spins an alternate history of American slavery that draws the reader in and provokes readers to reconsider certain narratives. Because, what if? James is the tale of the enslaved man readers met a century ago in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but Everett’s Jim is far more complicated and dynamic than his literary debut (à la Twain) depicted.
Peppered with factoids and historical references that dangle carrots over plenty of delightful rabbit holes, Elizabeth Gilbert’s novel, The Signature of All Things (2013), is a thoroughly researched historical fiction that quickly drew me in. Readers absorb all sorts of botanical and nineteenth-century truths— like ginseng is native to North America (Midwest to Maine)— and countless other little facts, references, and interwoven historical moments. Gilbert’s hefty historical fiction deftly interweaves scientific and historical research into the life of a nineteenth-century woman. Indeed, the novel centers on the life of one woman. Readers observe her, from birth to death, and the many scientific and social shifts witnessed over the century during which she lived. The novel opens with her birth, then takes a momentary pause in her story to tell that of her father’s youth. The Signature of All Things explores myriad themes, bold characters, and plenty of actual historical facts, but upon careful consideration, this is a story about adaptation in both scientific and human terms.
George Saunders’ first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), is an astonishingly genre-bending tale set primarily in the in-between space that follows death and precedes whatever comes after. As the novel’s dust jacket explains, “bardo” is a Tibetan Buddhist term for the place souls occupy between death and reincarnation. Saunders is a master of written word (called the greatest American short story writer of our time by many), but this is his first foray into longer form fiction; and he dazzles.
Maria Dahvana Headley’s new translation of the iconic Old English poem, Beowulf (2020) presents modern readers with a perfect blend of direct translations of Old English phrases and hyperbolically contemporary verbiage. Indeed, she translate kenning (the compound word phrases frequently used in Old English poems) after kenning alongside words like “bro,” “hashtag,” and, yes, “fuck” (although the later may well have been frequently used among the warrior class of individuals depicted in Beowulf). What Headley presents is not traditional high poetry like that championed by many medievalist of yesteryear (among them the likes of Tolkien), but it is lyrical, delightfully readable, and very accessible. What’s more, it is arguably representative of the original feel of Beowulf’s oral roots. Alliterations and lyrical turns of phrase collide with 21st-century slang in Headley’s entertaining and approachable new translation of this oldest of English poems.
What if science could bring people back to life complete with memories created prior to premature death? Surely such abilities would be fraught with ethical questions and ramifications. What if a serially killer targeted young women alone in the dark? What would the tipping point be at which the public would rally for these women to be brought back? These are some of the questions from which Katie Williams’ novel My Murder (2023) stems. Williams’ novel takes readers to a not-so-distant future when technology—medical and otherwise—changes certain fundamental certainties in life. Most notably, My Murder is set during a time when death need not be forever.
Michiko Aoyama’s slender novel, What You Are Looking for is in the Library (2020, English translation 2023) connects a series of vignettes about largely disconnected individuals living in contemporary Tokyo. The central hub of the many spoked story is the community library with its large librarian who seems like a character who has stepped out of a Miyazaki film like My Neighbor Totoro.
You don’t need to be a social psychologist to recognize the social crisis of modernity. It seems particularly visible among the generation currently coming-of-age with record high levels of mental illness and increasing instances of “failure to launch.” If you happen to be a social psychologist, however, you might find yourself better equipped to unpack the underlying reasons for the generational shift. In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (2024), Jonathon Haidt, famous for previous books like The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American (2018, see previous review), zooms in on the questions of why Gen Z faces such unique challenges.
One of the things I love about reading books like Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952) is the way the characters and language transport me to mid-20th century England—London in this case—and highlight the myriad Britishism that a Yank like me pauses and considers. Surely, we think “slut” must mean something else; as in: “‘You'd hate sharing a kitchen with me. I'm such a slut,' she said, almost proudly” (4). And, indeed it does. But the linguistic differences is just the start of what makes Excellent Women so, well, excellent. Pym’s novel emerges from the first person perspective of Mildred Lathbury, “an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties” (in her own words on page 1). Her world quickly alters as Mrs. Napier moves in to the flat below her; the flat with which she shares a bathroom. Mrs. Napier and her husband, the much-anticipated Rockingham, are not what one might expect from a married couple. Excellent Women quickly populates—around the life of Miss Lathbury—with eccentric and entertaining characters. While the novel is set in London, it has a decidedly village feel and Mildred Lathbury is a wildly likable narrator.
Try as we may, all of us remember the feeling during Covid lockdowns and quarantines when we wanted to escape the confines, climb out of our skin, anything to escape the mindless numb of every day. Sarah Moss puts flesh on those feelings in her post-pandemic novella, The Fell (2021, first American edition 2022). Coming in just under 200 pages, Moss’s latest fiction will haunt readers just as much as our own memories of COVID’s darkest days.
