To touch on form first, “Putting in the Seed” is a sonnet—close to a Petrarchan sonnet, though with a modified rhyme, and the Volta, or the turn, happens in the ninth line instead of the eighth. It’s written in iambic pentameter, which gives it such a pleasing sound. Of course—like all poetry, it must be read OUT LOUD.

Before I start sounding like your high school English teacher, though, let the form and meter fade into the background (important and impressive though they are). Frost begins by setting a simple scene. The speaker is out in the garden, and someone a “you,” most likely a wife, comes to call him to supper. He’s so engrossed in his work that he’s not sure he’ll be able to “leave off.” He’s burying “soft petals fallen” along with beans and peas. This is a late spring, maybe even early summer scene, and though the first signs of life, the early apple blossoms, are fallen to decay, the beans and peas are being planted for summer growth.

This dichotomy, death and the act of burying, along with birth and the formation of life, is central to the poem, and highlighted most starkly in his parenthetical interjection—“not so barren quite!!” Quickly, his dedication to the planting task turns into something compulsive and possibly contagious. If he lingers and his wife stays outside waiting for him for too long, she might forget herself and like him, become a “slave to springtime passion for the earth.” It’s here that the poem first takes a sensual turn, but the true turn is accomplished in the next line: “How Love burns through Putting in the Seed,” the productive, reproductive act.

Importantly, however, this burning love carries through to the “watching for that early birth,“ that hoping and that waiting for the arrival of new life. And just when it seems that the weeds are coming up to strangle the young seedling, even when conditions aren’t ideal, the “arched body” of young life comes “shouldering it’s way and shedding the earth crumbs.” I love how much life and vitality is coiled up in that arched body—how much effort in the shouldering. Life is determined to live.

It’s just a delicious poem, and I hope it inspires at least one of you to plant a garden or otherwise to reproduce with haste. LOVE BURNS THROUGH PUTTING IN THE SEED. Xx

As I trudged through the final pages of Lies & Sorcery at the end of April, I knew I would have to pick my next read carefully, or else face the consequences (despair, reading slump, existential crisis, etc.). I laid on the couch with that tome weighing on me (literally) and stared up at my bookshelf with weary eyes. I needed something that would grab me, enchant me, ideally make me forget that I was reading at all. Something with a Plot. Why do I own so many apparently Plotless novels? I scanned my shelves in mounting terror until, like a prayed for sietch on the sand planet itself, DUNE emerged from the haze to save me.

That’s right, dear reader, last month, in what can only be described as total desperation, I finally got around to reading Dune by Frank Herbert. Now I know what you’re thinking, because apparently this is what popped into everyone’s mind minute he or she heard (or saw) that I was reading Dune: it’s some variation of I didn’t know you liked sci-fi, or I don’t really read sci-fi, or do you read a lot of sci-fi. My response(s)? I don’t particularly, me neither, and no, obviously not you imbecile; if I read a lot of sci-fi, surely I would have already read DUNE, which, according to many, is the greatest sci-fi novel ever written.

I don’t feel qualified to pass a judgment of that nature (given my still limited exposure to the genre), but I can say that Dune was exactly what I needed. For those unfamiliar, this is the story of Paul Atreides. When his father, Duke Leto, is ordered to abandon their home planet (earth-like vibes) to rule over Arrakis (inhospitable desert vibes, no water, literally enormous sand worms, hostile population, but also this addictive and highly valuable drug called Melange and/or ‘spice’ that increases cognition and lifespan) the family packs up and ships out.

Intrigue abounds. There’s the Padishah Emperor, the Landsraad (which includes House Atreides and BAD House Harkonnen), and the Spacing Guild all vying for power in a precariously balanced triumvirate. The Bene Gesserit (the quasi-religious, very powerful, witch-vibe order of women to which Paul’s mom Lady Jessica belongs) are also doing stuff as are the FREMEN out in the desert. It’s really way to much to get into. The long and short of it is that everyone is lowkey evil except for the Fremen and Paul. Paul might be the Fremen’s messiah (the Lisan al-Gaib), which is kind of the same thing but not necessarily as the Bene Gesserit’s Kwisatz Haderach. TBQH it’s all pretty confusing, but Paul has to save the world (Arrakis) and maybe the whole universe.

As is common in sci-fi (I think, LOL), Herbert uses his imaginary world to explore ~themes.~ Unlike literary fiction, you don’t have to read between the lines to figure out that blue curtains mean sad or whatever. Herbert is pretty clear about what he wants you to be thinking about—and much of it is eerily relevant sixty years later. Before page 20, he hits us with this banger: “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” In addition to the dangers of technology, he’ll have you thinking about well…the dangers of everything else too (complacency, comfort, blind faith, ecological destruction, etc.).

If that sounds good to you, you’ll love Dune. If that sounds boring (or stressful?) to you, I totally get that, and the good news is that you can still enjoy Dune without reading it as an allegory—the story is that good! I was totally swept up, as my lover can attest—he was subjected to nightly recaps on what had happened “today in DUNE.” Jury is still out on whether I will read Dune Messiah. I don’t own it, but since the Timothée movie version comes out in December, I feel like maybe I should break my rules to get a copy? Robert Pattinson will be in the movie <3 Any Dune Messiah fans out there, weigh in, thank you.

Coming off that high, I thought something a little mellower, a little less all-consuming might do the trick. Back in April, I picked up two books off the street that I never told you about. This is technically a violation of my policies, but we aren’t going to dwell on it since no money changed hands. Anyway, one of the books I scurried home with that day was Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories by D.H. Lawrence, and now it called to me from my shelf like all new books do: read me! read me! The little Penguin edition I found contains just 6 tales, which frankly is a good number for someone like me who doesn’t always get the appeal of short story collections.

The titular story, “Love Among the Haystacks,” is the tenderly told tale of two brothers’ first encounters with love set against the hay harvest in rural England. Maurice has fallen in love with Paula, the German governess from a neighboring farm, and he arranges for her to come to him in the night—volunteering to be the one among the crew who stays overnight to guard the hay. Geoffrey, the shyer more introspective of the two feels left behind and lonely in light of his brother’s budding romance. In payment for his private resentments, he offers to stay with Maurice overnight as well, and ends up getting a taste of romance as well when the neglected wife of a gypsy tramp wonders into his camp.

“Love Among the Haystacks” seemed most similar to Lawrence’s usual style and subject matter (judging from my limited experience with Lady Chatterley’s Lover). He finds the encroachment of modernity alarming, and he’s interested in the romantic and sexual impulse—the way that it manifests differently, but ideally symbiotically, in men and women.

My favorite story in the collection was “The Rocking-Horse Winner” which is about Paul, a young boy growing up in a middle-class family plagued by financial anxiety. Appearances must be kept up, and the walls seem to whisper “there must be more money!” Paul learns about horse racing from the gardener Basset, and develops a strange knack for knowing which horse will win (without ever visiting the track mind you). When he knows, he asks Basset to place a bet for him, and in this way builds up a nice little fund. The ending totally shocked me in that way that only successful short stories can.

I can’t seem to find the specific collection that I have anywhere online, but if you read one or two stories, I’d seek out the aforementioned two. The others were good too if you stumble upon them—one called “The Lovely Lady,” about a poisonously possessive mother, “Rawdon’s Roof” about a selfish and foolish philanderer, “The Man Who Loved Islands,” which reads like a parable, and “The Man Who Died,” which is a kooky retelling of Jesus’s resurrection (namely what happens after the resurrection) that didn’t really hit with me.

The month burned on. I had recovered from my desert fever with Lawrence, but decided I wanted to go backwards from him for my next read instead of forwards into something more contemporary. It was time for The Morgesons by Elizabeth Stoddard, brought out by none other than the ladies. It’s starting to feel like I talk about Mandylion nonstop, but what can I say, I love their work!

To begin, I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like The Morgesons. The premise sounds somewhat simple: it’s a coming of age story set in small town New England in the nineteenth century. We are introduced to the Morgesons—with deep family roots in New England, Locke Morgeson runs a successful whaling business, and his wife Mary runs runs a house. The novel focuses on their daughters, Cassandra and Veronica, as they traverse their adolescence and become women. Cassandra is our narrator, so we are most with her, but Veronica serves as her double and her opposite.

Where Cassandra says whatever comes to her mind, Veronica speaks very little, and when she does, it always seems to be in riddles. Where Cassandra is hearty and solid, Veronica is plagued by mysterious bouts of illness that keep her laid up in bed for months at a time. Where Cassandra is sent out into the world—first to school and then on extended family visits—Veronica wouldn’t dream of leaving home. It is out in the world the Cassy gets her first (and second and third) taste of love. She even brings some love home for Verry.

What makes The Morgesons so unique is that Stoddard leaves so much unsaid and unexplained. I’m used to this to some degree when it comes to nineteenth century novels—I know that no one is ever pregnant, the babies just appear—but The Morgesons takes this decorum to the next level, or at the very least, its abstentions are more noticeable because it’s narrated by Cassy herself in the first person. I LOVED IT. More intrigue in novels, more inference and conjecture. More using your brain to follow the narrative thread, more saying “OH okay, they’ve clearly been going on carriage rides without my knowledge and now he loves her,” you know what I mean??

I don’t want to give anything else away, but this book was so good. It’s all about a woman’s place in the world—how to resist when someone tries to put you in it, AND how to find it for yourself. It’s also soooo romantic. 10/10, I loved The Morgesons, my favorite book of the month and I can’t wait to reread it.

I wrapped that right before a Memorial Day trip to New Orleans (where I knew I would get zero reading done), and wasn’t expecting to fit in another book before the end of the month. I was kind of directionless in terms of what to read next, and picked up Outline by Rachel Cusk on whim. It’s not very long, but I ended up finishing it much more quickly than I expected (it’s essentially plotless, which can make for slower reading).

The novel follows an unnamed writer in sweltering Athens for the summer to teach a creative writing course. It begins on the airplane to Greece, when the man in a neighboring seat strikes up a conversation. As he speaks, he reveals much about himself—as much in what he does say as in what he doesn’t—and our writer listens. We will learn that she has a knack for listening over the course of the novel, which is made up of ten chapters, each one grounded by its own central conversation. Colleagues, old friends and students talk and talk, and we as the reader (inside the mind of our great listener) have a front row seat to the ways in which people construct and project their identities.

The writer—we eventually learn that her name is Faye—on the other hand seems to operate outside these normal patterns. Like many great listeners, she reveals very little about herself, and it’s only seemingly against her will that the outline (ha ha) of her life (two children, recent divorce, deep sense of loss) does take shape. Of course, the notion that she’s somehow immune from the impulse for self-articulation and projection that the other people she encounters cant seem to escape is an illusion. The whole novel is a manifestation of her inner life.

Cusk’s use of free indirect speech—in which the majority of the dialogue (a fair amount considering how heavily the novel relies on conversation) is reported in Faye’s own words, rather than as transcribed quotations—gives Faye away. Even though we know very little about her, we somehow feel that we do. In the stories she tells about those around her, she, perhaps inadvertently (subconsciously?) reveals her own fixations: difficult family dynamics, difficult marriages, difficult childhoods, to name a few.

To be honest, I thought I was kind of neither here nor there on the whole thing while I was reading it—though I did read the back 2/3 in basically one sitting laying out by the Hudson on Sunday, so obviously I liked it well enough. The writing is strong, the voice curiously compelling, but on the whole, the book didn’t provoke strong feelings while I was in the midst of it. However, since I finished reading it and the more I think about it, I like it more and more, and I consider it to be a more and more impressive feat of writing.

Has anyone read Transit or Kudos? Should I?

That’s all for now—ta ta!

Not a bad showing considering what a busy woman I’ve been. I jetted off to Boston (I trained, but let’s go with jetted) one weekend and to New Orleans another. I tried to run and cook every week and mostly succeeded. I’ve taken up ballet again, and I’m also in a Tuesday evening poetry class. This has all been very nice, and I’m grateful.

I’ve still not bought a book (even Faulkner House Books couldn’t break me!!!); however, I have doubled down on the purchase of literary magazines in a way that I’ve deemed legal but can acknowledge is questionable. This month I enjoyed:

Midnight Mind Magazine was a Casa Magazines treat, and I got the last copy they had. This edition was themed “On the Road in America Again” and featured primarily road trip related musings and poetry. My favorites were “Going to California: A Journal Excerpt from 1981” by Hugh Findlay and “The Gospel According to Alfred,” an epic poem by Paul Doty. None of it is available online, and it’s sold out, but you can buy next the edition here!

One day, I ran out of my spicy chili crisp, and instead of going to the normal grocery story to replace it, I went to Big Night on 10th Street. Big mistake, because chili crisp there costs $15 instead off $7 at the grocery store, but also because they had copies of Steak Zine (so cute! So red!) stacked up on the counter. I ended up spending $50 that day on chili crisp and Steak Zine, so you do the math on that.

Despite the exorbitant cost it was fun to tote around and read over the course of the month. I won’t say they were all winners—sorry but every essayist seemed to think her little “I know it’s not really okay to eat steak given the political, socioeconomic and literal climate” caveat was really providing a unique perspective, and it became BORING after essay #3. That being said, my favorites were “Six Orders of Foie Gras, for Research” by Anonymous, “Omaha After the Stock Yards” by Jamal Dauda, and “Good Food, Full Nude” by Sophia June. Buy here.

My copy of the Sewanee Review arrived in the mail just in time for me to dip my toes in. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but “Dairy” by Kelan Nee (winner of the Review’s annual non-fiction contest) and “Accurate Witness” by Nell Freudenberger were both excellent. You can get an annual subscription here for the cost of one Steak Zine.

And lastly, I must admit that I additionally bought the “Dead Friends” and “Generations” editions of Granta at Trident Booksellers in Back Bay, though I haven’t gotten into either yet.

In other one off things, I read Joyce Johnson’s essay on Jack Kerouac and an old profile on Gerald and Sara Murphy (friends and muses to F. Scott Fitzgerald), both in The New Yorker. Came away wanting to read more Kerouac and Fitzgerald (although that’s really not the point), so I feel I can recommend. Some interesting parallel to be drawn there re: voice(s) of generation(s).

I also pretty reliably love ’s writing, and her contract violating Hinge x Esther Perel expose is no exception. I’m looking forward to part 2.

Finally, as it’s really almost summer, I can point you in the direction of a few worthy reading lists:

• Translated literature from

• Not technically a reading list but a review of all the books read for grad school

• ’s basics v. classics list (sorry paywalled, but honestly subscribe)

also just read Lonesome Dove, which I’m dying to read but do not own. Alas, I will try to scratch the itch for something epic via the other big books on my shelf. I famously believe that the best time to read an 700 page book is in the heat of the summer, and nothing is more glam than pulling out a clunker at the beach and going home with sand stuck between the pages. After recovering from Lies and Sorcery, I’m ready to get hurt again. Some contenders for this summer:

A bridge to cross. In the meantime, I figured some of the books that have piqued my interest might pique yours too. If you end up reading one of these in the next 7.25 months, let me know how it goes so that I can move it up my list or remove it entirely. Kisses!

Child of Light by Jessi Bender

Discovered at Afterword Bookstore on East 6th, obsessed with how amateurish the cover design is, set in 1896, main character named Ambrétte who’s interested in spiritualism and electricity? Done. this feels like it could be right up your alley (even though it was published in 2025, which does count against it).

Riders by Jilly Cooper

I’ve never read anything by Jilly Cooper. My cousin Elias texted me back in January “Read Riders by Jilly Cooper,” and then a follow up: “It’s very bawdy.” Points for cover design, would love to be reading this on the subway.

Love Life of a Cheltenham Lady by Dinah Brooke

I guess this came onto my radar because of the relatively recent McNally Editions reissue, described as “searing tale of a young woman's unravelling beneath the unforgiving Tuscan sun.” Sounds like a young couple travels to Italy, the husband is unexpectedly called away, and a young Italian man shows up and sets the wife aquiver.

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Anne Radcliffe

This book is the archetypal gothic novel. It’s also the go to novel to reference when you want to telegraph to your reader that your 19th century heroine reads too many silly novels and might have an overactive imagination. Jane Austen lovingly pokes fun at the Udolpho’s melodrama in her funniest novel, Northanger Abbey. It’s time for me to read it.

Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

I’ve had my eye on Persephone Books for a while now, but have yet to purchase anything of theirs. Streatfeild of Ballet Shoes fame also wrote novels for adults. This one follows a middle-class English family in the years before WWI, and proceeds to track “in miserable detail the disintegration and devastation which war brought to tens of thousands of such families.” Probably not an uplifting read, but I’m intrigued nonetheless.

Tollbooth by Bud Smith

I love ’s writing and am eager to read more. If you haven’t read anything by him, read Teenager!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Tattoo Murder Case by Akimitsu Takagi

I cannot for the life of me remember where I read about this book. Originally published in 1948 it’s a classic Japanese locked-room murder mystery. If reading Dune (more on this in a couple weeks) reminded me of anything, it’s that I need to be reading more GOOD genre fiction (see Jilly Cooper above, same same but different).

The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje

The Remembered Soldier was one of the best books I read last year (Huffines family recommendation). It was definitely the best book I’ve read in a while that was written in this century. Don’t even know what this other one is about, saw it would be published in English in August, will read anything Anjet Daanje puts out.

A Parish Chronicle by Halldór Laxness

From NYRB (love), a “shrewd commentary on how history bends to the quirks of certain individuals,” centered on Mosfell Church in Mosfellsdalur Valley, Iceland. I trust.

House of Fury by Evelio Rosero

Read predictably enticing review here, and join me in wanting to read this one (and maybe some others too).

Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death by Kathleen Stock

A lowkey fixation of mine ever since I found out that everyone in Canada is trying to kill themselves. Comes out in July.

Constable’s Year by Susan Owens

Love Constable because I love clouds and I love how many poems there are about him. Saw a copy of this one at Three Lives and added it to my list

Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown by Alan Watts

I want to read it because of the Van Morrison song. Kathryn is also really into Buddhism at the moment, and I think she’s great.

This morning I ran into my sister Kathryn on my way to work, and I asked her what I should write about. She said I should write about Isabelle’s wedding. Isabelle is my other sister. Isabelle and her husband Grayson went to Italy on their honeymoon—spent a lovely couple of days in Sienna, arrived in Florence, came down with a case of traveler’s bacteria (whatever the hell that is), and in her own words “didn’t get to see or eat anything.” Their wedding was beautiful.

When, after work and still directionless, I stopped by Maddie’s, she said I should write about her, and then more specifically about watching her fall in love. I asked her if she really wanted me to write about that for my thousand odd subscribers and she said maybe not, but here we are (or rather here I am, writing)—I guess you can’t really put the toothpaste back in the tube. Maddie is off to Paris tonight with the man she’s recently fallen in love with (a process that has been dizzyingly joyful to watch). That’s two votes for love.

I decided to go on a run and maybe think about love and see if I could come up with something coherent. I’ve fallen into the habit of running without music, which makes it easy to think—so easy, in fact that I don’t even have to be an active participant in the thinking. I ran three miles and don’t remember a single thought except for when I saw a single tree blooming with pink flowers and considered stopping to tear off and carry home one of its branches.

I called my cousin Grace and asked her what I should write about. She said I could write about my breakfast dilemma or about David.

My breakfast dilemma is this: at my old job, I used to eat two eggs for breakfast everyday which (and I know this is insane) I would cook in the office kitchen. Yes—I, Eve, was the girl who cooked eggs at work. What can I say? Though I never saw anyone else do this, there was an induction stovetop, frying pans in the cabinet, and anywhere from 1-3 dozen eggs in the fridge at all times, so someone else must have done it sometime. At my new job, they don’t have any of that stuff. They have a catered breakfast, which includes fruit (usually an assortment of melon, which doesn’t interest me), fixings for avocado toast (the mashed avocado always looks so oily, I just can’t bear it), a platter of bagels, and a pyramid of hard boiled eggs in little plastic cups. I don’t want to eat a peeled hard boiled egg out of a cup, so I end up eating anywhere from 1/4 to 3/4 of a bagel with cream cheese, and that’s just not a breakfast that’s going to serve me well. In fact, I find that I’m starving by 11am, and then even after I’ve eaten lunch, I’m hungry again 2 hours later, probably because I’m bored, but also definitely because I didn’t get enough protein for breakfast. David is Grace’s perfect baby.

Grace also said, and I quote: “You can write about anything I guess. I love all your posts. I always enjoy them. The only time I’m sad is when you just do a poem, and I’m sad that there’s not more; I want more. But I really liked the poem you posted about last week. I love your posts, all of them, and I agree, I wouldn’t want to eat a hard boiled egg—I don’t want to eat a hard boiled egg anyway, but if I did eat eggs—from someone else. I want to boil my own eggs, thanks.”

I got home from my run then and got in the shower. The stupid LED boob light in my bathroom is burnt out for the second time in the 2.5 years I’ve lived in this apartment even though they’re supposed to last for 5-20 years. Because it was dark-ish in the bathroom, I didn’t miss the change in the light outside that occurred at 7:46pm. I could see it happen through the fogged glass window in my shower.

My windows face east, so there shouldn’t really be a change in the light at 7:46pm; however, the large windows on several buildings on 7th Avenue catch the sunset and reflect it back at me. I saw the light change and flung open the window, set my elbows on the sill and leaned down and out in such a way so as not to flash any neighbors. All the tall buildings were glowing practically red, and a cool wind was blowing each leaf on the big backyard tree—also bathed in warm light—in tempting undulations. The steam from my shower drifted out into the evening, and I could almost imagine that the sound of falling water (unremarkable water pressure) was that of a babbling brook. The sunset in the east only ever lasts for six or seven minutes, and tonight I didn’t miss it.

William Wordsworth wrote “She Was a Phantom of Delight” about his wife, Mary Hutchinson. Of the poem he said, “ It was written from my heart, as is sufficiently obvious.”

Sufficiently obvious indeed. Read OUT LOUD!

xx

Lies and Sorcery was published in 1948 to much praise. Natalia Ginzburg later recalled reading an early manuscript and being “filled with vitality and joy.” This, reader, can be described as nothing but a totally insane reaction to the text. Morante’s husband, Alberto Moravia, called the novel genius. Slightly less insane. Italo Calvino called it a “serious novel” that “successfully penetrates to the bone,” which I would say is more in line with my experience of it.

The novel is set around the turn of the 20th century in southern Italy, and tells the story of one family over three generations, as narrated by Elisa, the youngest member of the clan and sole survivor. We learn in the introduction that Elisa’s parents—Anna and Francesco—have been dead for several years. Upon their death, she was adopted by a fallen woman, Rosaria, who she has lived with in relative isolation for the past several years. At the opening of the book, Rosaria has died, leaving Elisa completely alone in the world.

Alone, that is, save for the ghosts of her ancestors. During the years she lived with Rosaria, Elisa often shut herself up in her room fantasizing about her ancestors and their grand romantic lives. In her mind they were princes, saints, dukes and queens. She spun stories to entertain herself in her solitude—spurning Rosaria’s unsavory lifestyle—and she began to believe her own stories. When she finds herself truly alone, these fantastical ghosts abandon her too and are replaced with memory.

Elisa finds that she can suddenly remember, with great precision, her entire past, and not just that—she can remember the pasts of her dead ancestors as well, the true version of events. She says, “Things I never knew about I now understood and I could retrace their lives from the beginning, as if their experiences were mine.” These memories come to her in light early morning dreams, whispered in the voices of her ancestors. She rises and each morning “like a faithful secretary” writes it all down. And this is how the story begins.

We meet Cesira, Elisa’s maternal grandmother, who grew up in a middle class family but had too high a sense of herself and too great of ambitions to continue in that station. She catches herself a nobleman, Teodoro, though much to her chagrin his family disowns and disinherits him in response to their marriage. Teodoro, Cesira and soon enough their daughter, Anna, are plunged into debt. In Anna’s early life, Cesira’s overwhelming disappointment and resultant hardness contrast with Teodoro’s good nature and charm. Though the family lives in near poverty, Teodoro regales Anna with embellished stories of his noble upbringing (not unlike the stories Elisa spins for herself two generations later) and instills in her that unwarranted and poisonous sense of her own superiority. Like her mother and father, Anna will contend with the feeling that she deserves better—that she is better—than what she has for the rest of her life.

This is in some ways the center of the novel: the terrible restriction of the traditional (archaic?) social and class structures that were still so prominent in Italy during this time. Morante puts the effects of such repression on full display in her characters, each one more miserable and unlikeable than the last. The poor are bitter, the rich careless. No one wins, but no alternative is presented. Even poor little Elisa, who comes into the world when Anna, after a life altering brush with her noble cousin Edoardo, is driven to marry Francesco by bitter necessity, is hardly a compelling character. I pitied her, but that was about the extent of it.

As I soldiered through, I found myself wondering what the point was. There were moments where I expected Morante to stake a claim or take a perspective. For a section of the novel, young Francesco is captivated by Marx and dreams of creating a more equal world, but his drive doubles back on itself and goes nowhere. Beyond painting a striking portrait of one troubled family against very particular social and economic backdrop, Morante doesn’t offer a path out of the trouble, until you realize that she actually already did, on page 24 at that. At the end of Elisa’s introduction she confides in her reader: “Perhaps by reconstructing my family’s story, I will finally be able to solve the mystery of my childhood as well as discover the truth behind all the other family myths…This is why I obey their voices and write. Who knows, perhaps with their help I may at last be able to leave this room.”

It’s worth noting that Elena Ferrante (whoever she is) cites Morante as one of her major influences. For Ferrante lovers, Lies and Sorcery may be a compelling text if only to place Ferrante’s work within the larger context of the Italian novel. It’s been a while, but I remember loving the Neapolitan Quartet. Ferrante is certainly unflinching when it comes to the flaws of her characters, but I remember rooting for them nonetheless, liking them flaws and all. Consider this your warning: not so with Lies and Sorcery.

Hi! This month I have been reading Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante. As predicted, it has taken me just about the entire month, and I am by this point quite eager to finish it. Maybe I will fit something else in before May comes. You’ll find out next week.

Additionally I read two short stories out of my copy of the 1997 O. Henry Prize Stories—“City Life” by Mary Gordon (the winner), and then also, because I was intrigued by a collection of hers at the Strand the other day, “Comfort” by Mary Gaitskill. The first was about woman, who having broken away from her poverty-stricken family finds herself greatly disturbed when a slovenly downstairs neighbor interrupts her carefully constructed life. The second focuses on the subject’s respective relationships with his father and girlfriend in the aftermath of a horrible car accident that disables his mother. I’ve already kind of forgotten it—“City Life” was more memorable, which I think is as good a barometer for short stories as any.

Fittingly though unintentionally (April being National Poetry Month), I read a lot about poetry and poets, including Poetry Magazine, which I mentioned last week, and two interesting profiles—one on Michael Ondaatje and one on V.R. Lang. It inspired me to finally start a list of the poets I want to read more of which is something I have thought about doing many times. The internet is a wonderful place (LOL) to discover poetry, but it is often the case that whatever you discover is totally out of context. I want more context & a deeper understanding. So far, on my list:

Jane Kenyon
Jane Hirshfield 
Linda Greg
Michael Ondaatje
Gregory Orr
V.R. Lang  

Who should I add?

I love love love this poem and was delighted to find it featured in the April edition of Poetry Magazine along with several other poems by Gregg. She is a poet I am always meaning to read more of, and in “Praising Spring,” it seems she is at her very best.

As suggested by the title it is a celebration of the beauty of spring. It arrives every year a miracle. But there is also a more sinister undertone that balances the poem and makes it true. The best poems are true. Even in the opening line, Gregg introduces the idea of this double feeling: “The day is taken by each thing.” Is the day delighted by the blooming world around it, or does each thing (those later described: the spider, the flower, the doe, the running brook) claim the day for itself?

She expands on both possible meanings simultaneously. She is certainly taken by each thing, kicked into a frenzied and compulsive movement, out, in, out again, finding herself out even in the dark of night to witness what she describes as “a beauty that knows nothing of delay.” In this world defined by incredible speed, each of us is forced out of our heads into the moment, as Gregg says, the mind “leans back and smiles, having nothing to say.”

In our best moments, our minds have nothing to say, and the coming of spring in all its glory can catch even the most active mind off guard. However, there is a piece of this poem, a piece of Gregg’s quiet mind, that remains keenly aware of the passage of time. Small performances of life and death take place all around us and very quickly during spring. The flowers bloom only so an hour, the doe becomes a deer. Gregg is awestruck (both amazed and terrified) by a growth and “wildness / that does not heed the hour.” It will stop for no one, no thing, not even the coming of night—and all that night’s darkness may represent.

Faced with such beauty and such power, Gregg acknowledges herself as a servant and sings her praises. It’s a song of wonder and a song of humble tribute to something uncontrollable. In the closing line, it begins to rain in her spring—rain, being a quintessential springtime image, representing both birth and destruction, has not been mentioned until now. We see it nourishing the flowers and filling the brook to near overflowing. There is an old farmer sleeping while his flowers open into life, there are stars to remind us of our smallness, there is mint, fresh, bright, and liable to take over your herb patch if its not contained. In spring there is room for all of it, the rain continues to fall, but the sun shines through.

I too grew up eating soft boiled eggs, and have an enduring, and shall we say recurring passion for them. When I was little—very little, my grandparents would take my sister and I to breakfast at Balthazar on Sunday mornings. This was back when they still opened at 7am for breakfast service. We were often the only people in the restaurant, and I remember the table we always sat at, to the left on the first banquet. My sister and I were charming and well-behaved little girls, much cooed at by the waitstaff.

Baba would order the eggs and soldiers, which I believe was an on-menu item at the time, but may not have been. She would request that our waiter bring out a bowl so that she could scoop my boiled eggs out of the shells, making it easier for me—probably about four years old at this time—to eat them. When we ate breakfast at home, she would do the same after boiling the eggs herself. She would tell me when the eggs went in, so I knew it would only be a few minutes, and then I would become impatient while waiting for the eggs to be cool enough for her to handle so that they could be scooped.

A warm soft boiled egg is a humble food, but the flavor—which is distinct from what you get with any other egg preparation—is rich. There are many ways to skin a cat, I mean boil an egg, but my current method is: eggs & one inch of water go into a small pot, bring the water up to a boil, turn down the heat and cover for three and a half minutes, remove eggs from pot and run briefly under cold water (just long enough to be able to touch them).

I’m an adult now, so I eat my eggs out of their shells, and own delightful egg cups (two pink ones, and two that look like camels) and two different tiny spoons for this express purpose. Toast soldiers (well-buttered) are an excellent but unnecessary accoutrement. This is the most chic breakfast imaginable. If you aren’t squeamish about eggs, which is obviously important when it comes to eating them soft boiled, I encourage you to to join me:

March was a slow-ish and random month for reading as you will soon see. I didn’t get through much, and what I did get through was thematically…disparate. I mean to continue my downward trajectory (from eight books in January) as I started Lies and Sorcery (long) and will likely be reading it through the end of the month. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First, three little March reviews.

I don’t remember why I decided on Painting Time at the beginning of the month. I finished Parma, so something shorter and something modern seemed like the ticket. I am learning through my little no new books exercise that my reading is often reactive—I rarely read two similar books in a row, even if I loved the first. Good things must be spread out. And Maylis de Kerangal is a good thing. I read The Cook by her a couple years ago and loved her depiction of total devotion. I picked up Painting Time second hand shortly after, knowing that I would eventually get around to it, then never did until now.

Where The Cook portrayed a young man’s almost compulsive commitment to the craft of cooking, Painting Time takes as it’s subject, yes you guessed correctly, painting, and takes as it’s protagonist a young woman named Paula. Paula is 20 and directionless (an “impetuous dabbler) when she decides to enroll herself at the Institut de Peinture in Brussels. This is not your typical art course, something she has already dabbled in. Instead, it is the Mecca of decorative painting, or trompe-l’œil—painting to deceive the eye. Paula is told in her interview that the course is six months of “intensive practical training” during which she will “delve into the very matter of nature, starting with wood, moving to marble, into semi-precious stones, then finally drawing in perspective, gilding, silver plating and commercial lettering.

The novel follows her through her training, which turns out to be grueling, and into her early career, which at first is non-existent. The course at the Institut gave Paula direction—something to dedicate herself to if only because she was so busy she didn’t have time to think about whether she should dedicate herself to it—but after she receives her diploma and returns home to her parents’s apartment in Paris, “her rhythm is broken.” Luckily a pregnant downstairs neighbor, possibly at the prompting of Paula’s solicitous parents, wants the ceiling of her soon-to-be nursery painted like the sky.

As soon as Paula begins, she is cured of her listlessness, wherein lies the central theme of the novel: art should be made for the sake of making it, without grand artistic intentions, or grand artistic pretensions. Doing it is enough (doing it well, of course), and is largely the whole point. By choosing painting as her artform, de Kerangal is able to put the beaux arts and it’s abstracted museum-housed descendants on one side of the coin, and what Paula chooses to do, paint for work, on the other. She argues in the end that the work is the purer form, if not of art, then at least of love.

I love the way de Kerangal writes. She has this third person narration style that is simultaneously aerial and internal. She writes in the present tense, which makes it feel like you’re watching a movie, and her oscillation between laser focused action reportage and dreamy fragmented memory turns the movie into a documentary. This was my favorite book of the month!

After I finished it, I started reading Two Dozen Eggs before bed. It’s a charming collection of stories, each of which has a corresponding recipe, but before I tell you about it, I’m going to tell you about Less Than Zero, which I started in the middle of Two Dozen Eggs because I wanted a longer story with my short stories. Back in January, I read ’s primer on Bret Easton Ellis and thought to myself, you know, I really don’t know if this is for me, but I do own Less than Zero, so I could find out. Since January, it’s been on my shelf, but in a special position that indicates “maybe read me sooner than all these other books you also haven’t read,” so I did that. Reader, it’s not for me.

Clay is an eighteen year old college student back from school in New Hampshire to spend the holidays at home in 1980s Los Angeles. His parents are divorced, which means his dad lives in an apartment in Studio Ciry and his mom lives in a pharmaceutical haze. Neither one pays much attention to him, and so he galavants around the city doing drugs with his friends, none of whom really seem Like real friends. Galavant isn’t the right word though, because that makes it sound fun. No one is having much fun.

The style is very diaristic, told in short matter-of-fact fragments. For example: “I wake up sometime before dawn. My mouth is really dry and it hurts to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth,” of “Trent calls me the next night and tells me that he’s feeling depressed and doesn’t have any more coke, can’t find Julian; having problems with some girl.” Clay is detached, only occasionally revealing his thoughts or feelings, but mostly just reporting the facts.

It’s not hard to imagine that the novel started as a handful of journal entries that Ellis submitted as part of his college admission application, which it did. His freshman year creative writing professor passed them along to a Simon & Schuster Editor, who was interested. Over the next three years, Ellis continued fleshing out the novel using scenes and stories from his own experience partying in L.A. Less Than Zero was published before Ellis graduated college.1

I can understand why people like Ellis’s style, and even more how this particular first novel took the literary world by storm. I think there’s always something compelling about unsupervised and misbehaving teenagers, and underneath the hopelessness and depravity, Ellis weaves in a palpable tenderness for Clay, or at least invokes it in his reader. It wasn’t as gratuitously violent or as pointlessly shocking as I expected it to be, but when Ellis wants to horrify, he horrifies, and ~3 truly stomach turning scenes is 2.5 too many for me.

Once I was about halfway through Less Than Zero, Two Dozen Eggs got put on pause. Well, I can’t tell you how glad I was to be able to recenter Hugh Corcoran’s world after escaping Ellis’s. Of course both of their worlds are really just our world, but Corcoran has a knack for balancing misfortune and mundanity, which are both ever-present in his stories, with a gentle and curing gratitude. I found Two Dozen Eggs at Three Lives at Christmastime and immediately bought all three copies they had in stock; one for my mom, one for Kathryn, and one for me.

I say it’s a collection of short stories, which it is, but the stories are really very short, more like character sketches than anything else. Corcoran was inspired by real people he’d encountered across his travels through Ireland (his home country), France and the Basque Country. The people he portrays are simple folk, mostly middle-aged or older, often a bit lonely, but when they cook, or even just prepare to eat, they are uplifted, transformed. Each little story is followed by a no recipe recipe, so that you too can make stuffed snails or chicken in aspic and be transformed.

Sally Finnegan is turning 87, and doesn’t have a large appetite anymore. When asked by her daughter what she’d like to eat on her birthday, she thinks a boiled egg sounds nice. Her daughter ignores her, but she’s made herself hungry for a boiled egg, which she prepares while reminiscing on her childhood in the French countryside—running out to the chicken coop in the morning to fetch warm eggs in for breakfast.

Monsieur Fourcade is poor and alone. He buys bulk rice and beans from the local Indian and North African grocers and farms a small plot of land for his vegetables. He befriends Claire, a young woman who runs a wine store (one of the few extravagances Monsieur Fourcade allows himself). When she invites herself over for lunch unexpectedly, he doesn’t have much on hand, but whips together a riz pilaf and runner beans in garlic and chili.

I am a firm believer in the power of a good meal, and Corcoran captures the magic over and over again. A chef himself, he writes well about food—convincing you that it’s not so complicated to prepare, in fact it’s all very intuitive. Impressively, he writes just as well about people, and in his sympathetic hands, the most ordinary people become the most interesting. He sums it up nicely in the acknowledgments: “This book is a memory of all the characters that I have met in my life, and in this age of homogenization being a character is more important than ever.”

The best non-book thing from this month was Granta’s Winter 2026 issue, which I read cover to cover. Its theme is therapy, more specifically, Freudian psychoanalysis, and it includes interviews with three prominent analysts, short stories and essays that tackle analysis as a concept—either head on or at a slant—and poems that aim to excavate. Favorites included “Good Medicine” by Sheila Heti (though I’m not sure I’m pro-psychedelics as therapy, and definitely ANTI-psychedelics as a way to see God), “Transference in the Afternoon” by Jesse Barron (analyst and patient are obviously both totally bonkers), “My Grandfather is the Future” by Victor Heringer (lovely tribute), and “Secondhand Smoke” by Dushko Petrovich Córdova (on the world of online perfume reviewers).

I additionally read this essay by David Sedaris in The New Yorker after my mom sent it to me to PDF so that she could read behind the paywall. This is a service I’m willing to offer. Sedaris is a little bit of a cheese ball but also a pleasure. In the SoHo McNally Jackson, I stealthily read “Curtis” by Patrick Cottrell out of the Paris Review. It’s a dryly funny little short story that packs a punch. And for my obligatory piece on something that’s going seriously wrong in the world, this article on online sports betting (and gambling more generally) from The Atlantic confirmed what I already know (online sports betting (and gambling more generally)) is a scourge on society). The obligatory piece on something going terribly wrong in the world is an area where The Atlantic seems to thrive. I meant to cancel my subscription, but I forgot, so we’ve just re-upped for another year.

In other news, daffodils, and the light is back on my walls in the morning. A pigeon is brooding over her nest right outside my lover’s front door, and neither of us has been pooped on yet. Have you ever actually seen a pigeon’s nest? I had my friends over this week to celebrate the equinox. I made chicken cutlets (by request) and a farro salad and garlic bread because I’m starting to feel like why wouldn’t you make garlic bread when you could just also make garlic bread. I did cut my finger trying to slice the baguette but it’s closed up and healing now. The baguette was so crusty and my knife was dull and slipped. There used to be a bakery on the Upper East Side called Hot & Crusty. I would pass it on my way to ballet and even as a child, I knew that Hot & Crusty was a disgusting name for anyplace that you were supposed to get food. Anyway, we had cupcakes for dessert. Xx

“A Primer” by Bob Hicok

I never formally decided that my year long ban on book buying would extend to cookbooks, but in my heart I knew that it should. The unread novel languishes on the shelf, and the uncooked (?) cookbook also! In each cookbook, a hundred (or more!) odd recipes—languishing! Well, my past self, as excited about the whole thing as my current self, had preordered the book when she (me?) first heard about it LAST YEAR. I am so wonderful. Thusly saved from having to on the one side make an exception to my rules (laws) and on the other side deny myself the pleasure of this book and the recipes therein, all that was left was to decide what to cook first.

It’s spring technically (officially as of today!!!!), but it’s still…hmmm, cold. Something light but comforting was what I craved and, was I immediately drawn to the lovely looking Poached Halibut with Fresh Chiles, Tomatoes, and Mint. I almost talked myself out of it in favor of the Lamb Meatballs with Mint and Feta in Saucy Couscous (also delicious looking for what it’s worth). It’s not tomato season and the fish counter at Citarella is good, but doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi as the fish market at the summertime beach. I’m glad I went with my gut (ha ha). SOMETIMES I EAT OUT OF SEASON PRODUCE, okay! SOMETIMES I am a modern girl.

This was literally so easy to make. I always roll my eyes when I see “TIME: 20 minutes” at the top of a recipe and plan for double that, but this one genuinely took 20 minutes. I halved all measurements since it was just me and my lover, used halibut as called for, and subbed dry vermouth for white wine (as suggested) because I had an open bottle of white wine and did not have vermouth. I served the fish and broth over a little rice because I will take any opportunity to incorporate rice into a meal, but honestly it wasn't needed. A hunk of fresh bread is the optimal carb accompaniment for this dish. No notes, enjoy enjoy enjoy!!!

Must be read OUT LOUD. Read it out loud NOW, and then read it out loud again. Xx

At the end of January,1 I finished Washington Square, and felt drawn to something a bit more contemporary. I thought it would be wise to also start the shortest month with a short book, so as not to nosedive from eight books in January to one book in February. I have a section of my shelf dedicated to skinny little spines, and I picked out Little Lazarus by Michael Bible. I picked it because a couple weeks ago I read a short story by Bud Smith, googled Bud Smith, found his Instagram (on browser), and saw that he was teaching a workshop with Michael Bible. I thought Little Lazarus might be good since I think Bud Smith is good, and Bud Smith obviously thinks Michael Bible is good, or at least is friends with him. I also think I bought it off the staff picks table at Three Lives, which will always be good enough for me.

Well, turns out Little Lazarus is good but is also a really very strange book, and I think I’ll have to read it again to really get a grip on it, which I’d be glad to do. Ostensibly, it is the story of two teenagers—Francois and Eleanor. Don’t let their French names fool you—they live in Harmony, North Carolina. Also in Harmony is a man in a seersucker suit who does not speak, and his clairvoyant giant tortoise, Lazarus, who answers yes or no questions on a small chalkboard. On a vacation in New York City, Eleanor acquires a little tortoise herself, and names him Little Lazarus. One fateful evening, these characters collide (except for Little Lazarus who is at home in a shoe box), and everything changes.

The story is told in five parts, beginning with an overture, and then a section for each of our central characters—Francois, Lazarus, Eleanor and Little Lazarus, in that order. It is a jumpy book, full of tangents, misdirection and fabricated narratives carried out to their complete conclusions. Lazarus’s advanced age allows Bible to stretch his story some hundred and fifty years back in time. But why stop there, at the preposterously long lifespan of his be-shelled fortune teller? Bible stretches even further, and he does not hide from the reader what feats of imagination will be required of them. He begins: “Envision the past. The thunderclap of everything beginning and all the pain and poetry that follows.” No spoilers, but the book wraps up nicely with the end of the world.

Francois and Eleanor are simultaneously a blip on the timeline and all important actors in the destiny of the universe. Bible makes this dichotomy, by which all of our lives are defined, come to life. As a matter of personal preference, I found the moments in which Bible leaned into ultra-specificity (of which there were plenty!) to be more compelling than some of his broad, sweeping strokes. Broad, sweeping strokes are difficult to execute well, and I will excuse the silly, wizard-like vibe of some of his narrative interjections since I understand what he was trying to achieve through them.

After Little Lazarus, I did something I literally never do and started reading three different books at the once. The first of those was Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I bought my edition at the Big Chicken Barn in Ellsworth, Maine (a magical & overwhelming place), and it also includes Other Love Poems. I decided to read it because Valentine’s Day was fast approaching and I love love. I wrote about it, and one of my favorite poems from within it, here. TLDR: read more poetry, more sonnets if possible, and read them out loud.

At the same time, I decided I might as well try to chip away at my shelf of languishing nonfiction by reading one of the most recently acquired (and thus least languishing) titles thereupon. Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester was a Christmas present from my sister’s lover, John. He knows that I love volcanoes2 for their sheer destructive potential, and identified Krakatoa as a deeply destructive volcano that I should probably know about. He couldn’t have been more correct!

On August 27, 1883, Krakatoa, an island volcano in the heart of the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia, erupted. The eruption was so violent that it not only blew clouds of ash and rock some thirty miles into the atmosphere, but also blew up its source (itself). After the smoke had cleared, the imposing island known as Krakatoa that once sat in middle of the Sunda Strait was simply no longer there. The sound of that great final explosion was heard 3,000 miles away, which would be like hearing an explosion in San Francisco from Philadelphia.

Though some were killed more directly by the explosion, it was the three tsunamis that followed that killed close to 40,000 people. In the weeks after the eruption, the cloud of ash spreading through the stratosphere started creating striking sunsets, which continued through 1886, and of which there is much documentary evidence. In Poughkeepsie, NY the volunteer firefighters noticed a red glow on the horizon and rushed off to fight a fire, which was in fact the setting sun. The temperature dropped globally by an average of one degree Fahrenheit in the year that followed.

Most insane of all? In the place where Krakatoa once existed, there now presides a new mountain island (read: volcano): Anak Krakatoa, or “Child of Krakatoa,” which is almost constantly erupting, building steadily upon itself, and which one day will likely meet (mete out) the same fate as its ancestor.

I cannot stress how riveting I found this book. Winchester leaves no stone unturned and goes to great lengths to link seemingly disparate events at and around the time of the Krakatoa eruption. He weaves together the geopolitics and the plate tectonics with no dearth of first-hand accounts and primary sources. I feel smarter than I was before I read it, yet no greater prepared for a catastrophic volcanic eruption, which is exactly how I want to be (because what’s the point).

The third book I was reading through the middle of the month was Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. If memory serves, I bought it at the Strand a couple years ago because my friend Robbie Huffines told me Robinson was great. Housekeeping is her first novel, and I always like to start at the beginning. Then the other week, I was perusing ’s Top Reads of 2025 and she mentioned it as a favorite re-read of the year, and what’s more, as a book she couldn’t live without!

The novel centers on the Foster family, and begins by telling you how they ended up where they are, which is a fictional Idaho town called Fingerbone. Edmund Foster settled there when a west-bound train put him down there, and there he built a home for his wife, Sylvia. They had three daughters, Molly, Helen and Sylvie, whose childhood was sweet, but who through various acts of abandonment, became a source of sorrow to their mother. Years on, Helen drops her own two daughters, Ruth and Lucille, off on her mother’s porch before driving a borrowed car into the lake. These events are related by Ruth, who is our narrator, in a style that is both mythic and dispassionate. When Sylvia dies, Sylvie is called home from her life as a transient to care for Ruth and Lucille.

She is an untraditional caregiver in that she often vanishes in the night (a habit that’s startling to the girls at first), collects newspapers and coffee cans, and does not seem to mind if her charges skip school for whole months at a time. While Ruth recognizes that Sylvie is not like the other people in town, she doesn’t hold it against her—Ruth doesn’t feel that she fits in either, and doesn’t mind if all of Fingerbone is talking about how strange things seem to be over at the Foster house. Lucille and Ruth are inseparable in body and mind for the first half of the novel, but around the mid-point, a rift opens. Lucille does not want to be odd, Lucille wants to be normal.

From this point, Robinson veers somewhat off the path, or at least onto another path. The traditional narrative, coming of age story vanishes with the melting snow. Lucille chooses to pursue a conventional life, but that course of action doesn’t seem to be an option for Ruth. She continues her education under Sylvie and her story—her thoughts—become increasingly philosophical. The action, which always had in it a tinge of unreality, becomes even more untethered.

The novel is ultimately—as signaled by its title—about making and keeping a home, both literally and more conceptually, and perhaps most importantly spiritually. Set against the natural grandeur of the northwestern United States, but also against the pettiness of small town persuasions, Housekeeping puts forth that the larger world is at times indifferent, at times antagonistic, but that we must nonetheless find a suitable way to inhabit it. I was laid up with a cold as I came to the end of the novel and, my illness and the resultant haziness coincided perfectly with its devolution from something grounded into something absolutely aloft. Both before and after, it was inconceivably beautiful.

Then, with only a handful of days left in the month, I thought it would be wise to start a longer novel, one that I could focus on entirely, and one that would take me into the coming month as my first book of March. I chose The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal, because it was named as the favorite novel of the charming female protagonist of a short story I read earlier in the month.3 I finished it at the beginning of this week, so I’m including it here instead of waiting for next month.

I blew through it at such alarming speed because it’s so fantastically entertaining. It is set in Italy during the years following the French Revolution and primarily follows the lives of a young nobleman, Fabrice del Dongo, and his paternal aunt, Gina. The action eventually centers itself in Parma, in the fictional court of Prince Ranuce-Ernest IV. There, Gina holds great sway as the beautiful and clever mistress of Prime Minister Mosca. Through advantageous marriage, she becomes a duchess, and develops great plans to advance her nephew—who she loves perhaps more than an aunt should love her nephew. Everything goes off the rails when Fabrice kills a traveling actor in self-defense and the Duchess’s enemies identify a weakness that they can exploit to bring about her downfall.

But that’s getting ahead of myself—the action really kicks off when a seventeen year old Fabrice, with no military experience whatsoever, decides to join Napoleon’s army. Yes, he begins how he means to continue—romantic, idealistic, and naïve. From this point forward, he is in and out of disguise and in and out of prison too. He has a strong sense of right and wrong, but barring the introduction of a plan that offends that sense, he trusts completely the judgement of his aunt and Mosca when it comes to navigating the intrigues of the court.

The court is portrayed as a force of degradation, and the reader is made to understand that Fabrice’s high level of trust (and resultant lack of participation in the making of his own destiny) stems just as equally from familial love as it does from a genuine disinterest in playing the games that must be played. He is more concerned with his inner life. He reflects that in his life he has only experienced passing fancies, tiring of the beautiful women he woos after a short time. He comes to believe that he’s not capable of real love, which greatly disturbs him, though he tries to accept it. When love does eventually come for him, it is in the least likely of circumstances, and will upend his life and the lives of all who love him.

It’s a lengthy novel and though romance and adventure abounds, it also requires a high level of attention to keep track of the various characters, their aliases, false passports and disguises, their servants and assassins, their double crosses and foiled plans. Most of the time, it was a genuine pleasure to follow along with the duchess’s scheming. Through some of the lengthier tangents into what Stendhal refers to generally as “politics,” it was his narrative voice that kept me totally engaged. His language and tone are at once flowery and matter of fact, winking with humor, and a disarming familiarity.

No spoilers, but the ending is wildly abrupt. After spending 500 pages sparing no detail, Stendhal fast forwards three years (literally: “At this point I will ask my readers’ permission to pass in silence over a period of three years.”) and wraps up in a matter of four or five pages. Whether this was part of the plan or he was just on deadline I couldn’t say, but it certainly produces an interesting effect. I am still thinking about what exactly that effect is…

Nonetheless, The Charterhouse of Parma was my favorite of the month—highly recommend!

In shorter form, I perused a copy of The Los Angeles Review of Books that someone left in the hallway of my apartment building, and actually flipped through the copies of Poetry Magazine, The New York Review of Books AND The Sewanee Review that showed up on my doorstep. These things are always a mixed bag, but when you come across a real gem it makes the other less gem-like material worth it. I liked “The Gull McCabe” by Robyn Gill out of the Sewanee Review, but it doesn’t appear to be up on their website yet, so I can’t link to it, which is not terribly helpful in this context. If you also subscribe to The Sewanee Review, you can find it on page 47 of the Winter 2026 volume. There was a piece in the NYRB about Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir worth reading, and also one about the writing of Margaret Kennedy which I got bored of in the middle, but served its purpose in making me want to read the recent McNally reissues of one of her books.

In The New Yorker, I read “Sentimental Education” by Harold Brodkey (originally published in 1957). It’s a lovely, funny, deadly serious short story about a campus romance. It’s also why I decided to pick up The Charterhouse of Parma.

In The Atlantic, I read this illuminating essay by Tyler Austin Harper that details the current landscape of humanities funding. Highly, highly recommend if you care about that kind of thing.

Like the hoarder I am, both my refrigerator and my metal front door are covered with magnetted photos, cards, tickets, scraps of paper, etc. Unlike a true hoarder, I typically take some time at the beginning of the year to clear space in both locations. Like a hoarder again, I file the things I remove from the fridge/door in bins that I keep under my bed. Anyway…last year I stumbled upon this poem, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” by Nâzim Hikmet. I loved it and knew I loved it, so I stuck it up on my door where I forgot about it since it’s three and a half pages long when printed (thus much too long to read in passing when walking in and out of my apartment). This month, I brought it down and read it again to myself aloud (important!!!), and I still love it. I think you should read it, which you can do here.

I also read a review of a new biography of Dennis Johnson. The new biography is by Ted Geltner, and it sounds good, though I probably won’t read it. What I will read is Tree of Smoke, because I already own it. I am nervous because I loved Train Dreams and Tree of Smoke looks to be about 500 pages longer than Train Dreams, so is presumably a somewhat different kind of book. I’m sure it will be good though. Has anyone seen the Train Dreams movie? I want to see that.

I didn’t realllly want to see “Wuthering Heights,” but I also had to see “Wuthering Heights.” I have now additionally been subjected to 10000 reviews of “Wuthering Heights,” which, for whatever reason, I can’t stop clicking on even though I literally do not care. My thoughts on the music video, I mean film, summed up below:

To start, I thought it best to pick something that couldn’t be measured directly against Tartt. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje is described as a “spellbinding web of dreams” on the front cover. This seemed promising in terms of incomparability with Tartt’s precision. It also won the Booker in 1992 when it was published, which made it promising in terms of general quality of writing. Thanks to a delay in Charlotte (my least favorite airport on the planet including the ones I haven’t been to), I finished it before we even arrived in Harbor Island.

The novel opens in an almost abandoned villa in the hills outside of Florence. Set during WWII in the immediate aftermath of German surrender, it focuses on four very different characters brought together by the strange circumstances of war. The villa served as a hospital at the height of the Italian campaign, but now hosts only one patient, the English patient, burned beyond recognition and unable to move, and Hana, the Canadian nurse who for reasons even she may not fully understand, refuses to leave him. Onto the scene come two additional characters: Caravaggio, a thief, spy, and, in what feels like impossible coincidence, friend of Hana’s father who she knew in her youth in Toronto, and Kip, a Sikh sapper for the Allied forces, responsible for diffusing and dismantling the network of tripwires, mines and unexploded artillery left by the Germans on their retreat.

Slowly, in disordered and dreamy vignettes, we learn about each character’s past. Particularly and most compellingly, the English patient, who was a desert explorer around the time of the North African campaign, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Caravaggio becomes convinced that the burned man isn’t English at all, but a Hungarian count who cooperated with German forces in Cairo. The burned man claims not to remember who he is, but slowly a grand love story unfolds in the Sahara through the fragmentary stories he shares when he is on enough morphine to talk but not enough to sleep.

I found the descriptions of the desert, and of what it takes to plan and execute an expedition in that most unforgiving of terrains absolutely fascinating. The segments of the novel dedicated to Kip’s history and work as a sapper were also captivating. There was a satisfying parallel between the English patient and Kip, in the danger of their chosen work and the precision required of them, and also in the love stories that unfold—one in memory and one in present day—for each of them.

It was only a few months after German surrender that the US dropped two atomic bombs in Japan ending the war, so I don’t consider it a spoiler to say that the same thing happens in the novel, jolting our four characters in the Florentine hills out of their fragile equilibrium. When I was reading, suspended as I was in Ondaatje’s dreamy world, it felt a bit like he used Hiroshima and Nagasaki to wrap up his story, if not neatly, then whatever the violent and horrible version of neatly would be. It’s not fair to hold this against him, since it’s what really happened and I think he rendered believable reactions for each of his characters. I was particularly struck by a line Hana writes in a letter home in the days following: “From now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public.”

Next up, I picked up The Hours by Michael Cunningham. I bought this book years ago at the Strand, somehow without realizing that it was about Virginia Woolf. The first time I tried to read it, I decided I should really read Mrs. Dalloway again beforehand. I use this method to put off books with some frequency (see Demon Copperhead, James, etc.). Last month, however, I decided that I was familiar enough with Woolf and remembered Dalloway well enough to read it anyway. It won a Pulitzer when it was published, so I felt sufficiently confident that it wouldn’t be bad…

And it wasn’t bad. I know that it wasn’t. But if I felt the end of The English Patient was un petit the easy way to end things, I found the beginning of The Hours horribly cheap. Namely, in the first chapter, Cunningham recounts Virginia Woolf’s suicide from her perspective. And I know that Virginia Woolf doesn’t need me to protect her—she’s public domain—but I didn’t find Cunningham’s handling of Woolf to be as deft or honorable as his reviewers apparently did.

I didn’t let my initial distaste for the project generally stop me though. This was the book I brought, so this was the book I’d read, and Woolf’s timeline is only one of three. In alternating chapters, we are with her in 1923 in the suburbs of London, with young housewife, Laura Brown, in 1949 Los Angeles, with poetic muse Clarissa Vaughan in 1999 Greenwich Village. Each of these women leads what is an ostensibly fulfilling life, but each is quietly unfulfilled.

Cunningham emulates Woolf’s signature style, floating in and out of the minds of his characters. They move through the worlds, but their minds move at a different pace, in a different place. His emulation is sometimes beautifully successful and sometimes feels like the output from a freshman year creative writing seminar—overly flowery or derivative.

The same applies with his numerous references to Woolf’s life and work. The novel takes place over the course of a single day like Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Vaughn is throwing a party that evening like Mrs. Dalloway. She decides to go out for flowers in the morning, like Mrs. Dalloway. The party is for her closest friend, Richard, an acclaimed poet who has affectionately referred to her as Mrs. Dalloway since they met in college.

Laura Brown is reading Mrs. Dalloway. She reads to escape the creeping ennui that she knows she shouldn’t feel with her American dream, World War II veteran husband and charming young son, Richie. Clarissa is bisexual and in a long-term relationship with a woman named Sally. Laura kisses her neighbor Kitty in a fraught moment sitting at the kitchen table. The representation of lesbian relationships and curiosities is a clear homage to Woolf’s own sexuality.

Some of these connections just feel like they’re there to remind you that this is a novel about Virginia Woolf-like the names, almost all pulled out of Mrs. Dalloway. Others are more subtle and meaningful. I appreciated the temporal grounding—as Woolf grapples (in her own life and through Mrs. Dalloway) with the aftermath of WWI, so Laura occupies a post WWII world, and Clarissa navigates the carnage of the AIDS epidemic. Cunningham’s thesis, that life is made up of the profound mundane, and that the small moments can contain an ecstasy that compensates for life’s difficulties and disappointments, is lifted from Woolf as well. He pulls it across time, into the present day, but I’m just not sure he really needed to. The novel is homage (respectable enough, though I still find I’m irked by the suicide chapter), but it is not expansion.

Due to truly harrowing travel complications on our return, I finished The Hours in a Bahamian airport I never intended to visit, a full 24 hours after I should have been home in New York. Thankfully, I had my backup backup book at the ready: Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt, another New York Review Book that I’ve heard wonderful things about from several trusted sources that I can’t remember or track down now. I didn’t get very far into this one before passing out, finally home in my bed at 2am. But when I picked it back up, I was in for a real treat.

Our main character and narrator is Ruth. Ruth has one daughter named Eleanor who is a drug addict. Eleanor in turn has one daughter, who she names Lily. Ruth tries to decode what Eleanor might need or want—tries to stay away when she feels she’s not wanted, tries to keep in touch, give some money here, bring some food there, but whatever language it is that Eleanor now speaks, Ruth can’t quite decode it. Eleanor lives in an apartment that Ruth owns, as do a cast of rotating drifters. One afternoon, when Ruth stops by with a roast chicken, she walks into the bedroom to take a look around and finds a man who has died of an overdoes laying on the bed, covered in blankets. She grabs Lily in the general panic that follows her discovery and flees.

From there on, Loved and Missed is a novel of everyday affection. Lily is a balm to Ruth’s suffering in her very existence, in her sweetness. She is also a second chance for Ruth, who blames herself for Eleanor’s situation. The narrative style, which is a simple first person takes on something extra—not as though Ruth is thinking, not as though Ruth is writing a record, but as if she is speaking out loud to herself. In a very short amount of time, you feel quite connected to her—and when elements of her past are revealed it feels as though you have become privy to something she’s been hiding, not from you, but from herself.

The novel is sweet, funny and devastating—all of that quietly. I found myself waiting always for the other shoe to drop, for Eleanor to come claim her daughter, to die, to do something horrible. For Lily to become unhappy, bitter, resentful. But it’s not a book of conflict—aside from the conflicts that Ruth has privately with herself. I found it to be a striking portrait of how one woman comes to live with herself, what she’s done and what she hasn’t done. The end came unexpectedly and was extremely well executed.

Boyt has published seven novels, of which Loved and Missed is the seventh, and first to be published in the US. I will be getting in touch with UK-based contacts to procure additional material by her as soon as I am legally allowed.

I didn’t feel like anything else contemporary after Loved and Missed, so I plucked Washington Square—a novel serialized by Henry James starting in 1879–off the shelf. I started reading it on a whim, kind of not sure if I would finish it or choose something else instead, only to find myself totally captivated.

A few contributing factors to my captivation: Henry James is a master of the sentence, Henry James is funny, and I can’t really figure out just what Henry James is trying to do. In Washington Square, he gives us a not particularly compelling heroine to root for. Our wry narrator tells us that Catherine Sloper “was a healthy, well-grown child, without a trace of her mother’s beauty. She was not ugly; she had simply a plain, dull, gentle countenance. The most that had ever been said for her was that she had a ‘nice’ face.”

She is, however, a heiress. Her mother, who died in childbirth with her, had a respectable fortune which her father was able to build upon considerably with his successful medical practice. Dr. Sloper is not a particularly loving father; though he takes pains to protect Catherine and give her every advantage, he does not really love her. Catherine’s paternal aunt Lavinia who has lived with the Slopers since the death of Mrs. Sloper is portrayed as something of a foolish, self-involved woman, and meddles in Catherine’s affairs to ill-effect.

What are those affairs? The appearance of one Morris Townsend, beautiful and charming good for nothing in search of, well, a fortune. Catherine proves to be an attractive target, but when Dr. Sloper catches wind of the budding relationship between Catherine and Morris, he is unequivocal in his disapproval, threatening even to disinherit Catherine should she choose to go against his wishes and marry Morris. In his stubbornness on the matter, there is a curious combination of true protectiveness—he does not wish for his daughter to end up with a man who will spend her fortune without making anything of himself—and a perverse impulse to insult and downrate his daughter.

I won’t spoil the ending, but it reminded me of Daisy Miller (the other James novel I’ve read) in that it is simultaneously tragic and totally unsatisfying. Nonetheless, James’s writing is highly entertaining. In Washington Square in particular, there was something Austen-esque about his setup and his characterizations. Austen-esque, but significantly meaner. Mona Simpson sums it up well in a 2013 essay in the New Yorker when she says of James: “He borrows from melodrama, but lops off that genre’s gratifications, going realist on us at exactly the wrong moment. If Americans want a tragedy with a happy ending, Henry James delivers something more like a comedy with a haunting close.”

In summary, favorites in bold:

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway - graceful & somewhat depressing
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion - definitely depressing but in California
Ariane A Russian Girl by Claud Anet - insane
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt - so, so, so good
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje - very good until the end
The Hours by Michael Cunningham - kind of like…how did this win a Pulitzer?
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt - sweet, sad, funny
Washington Square by Henry James - Jane Austen but New York & meaner/sadder

That’s January! Back soon with more. Xx

IV

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore
Alone upon the threshold of my door
Of individual life, I shall command
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand 
Serenely in the sunshine as before, 
Without the sense of that which I forbore—
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine
With pulses that beat double. What I do
And what I dream include thee, as the wine
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue
God for myself, He hears that name of thine, 
And sees within my eyes the tears of two. 

Elizabeth Barrett wrote her Sonnets from the Portuguese during the early years of her budding romance with Robert Browning. She was then living as an invalid in her father’s house, quite a pitiable character, as I think she herself would say. In January of 1845, she received a letter from Browning that began, “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett.” Within a few months he was regularly visiting her in secret, and they were writing to each other every day, sometimes more than once a day.

Elizabeth’s father was very controlling—loathe to let any of his children fly the nest, but especially Elizabeth. On top of that, having suffered a good deal—through the death of her mother, her own illness, and later the death of her favorite brother—Elizabeth had all but resigned herself to a life of solitude and sorrow. It seems she lived both physically and mentally on the brink of death, and had not imagined that she might have a second act (at 39, she was firmly in her middle-age).

It was very difficult—painful really—for her to give this love with Robert Browning a chance. Sonnets from the Portuguese is a series of 44 sonnets (not actually translated from any source material) that charts the course of EBB’s loving struggle to accept her unexpected happiness and to go against her father’s wishes. The earlier poems are tentative and disbelieving. By the end, her proclamations of love are more confident—the penultimate sonnet is certainly the most famous, beginning, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” I like to imagine that by this point, her elopement was already well in the works.

The sonnet above is number six, and EBB is still struggling to claim Browning’s love for herself in the face of obstacles real and imagined. She entreats her lover to go from her—she cannot take part in such happiness after years of sorrow. And yet (it’s all in that “yet), she knows that even now it’s too late. She has been altered by this love, and will never live without the mark of it. Browning’s shadow will be her constant companion. Going beyond companionship, she feels that her soul is no longer hers alone to command—even if he goes, that worst imagining, she has tied herself to him irrevocably.

Even an action as simple as lifting her hand “serenely” is now imbued with high emotion owing to the memory of his touch. He touched this hand! No matter the distance between them, his heart will be not only with hers, but in hers, beating double. There is a sensuality in this nesting, which continues into the following image: the wine must taste of the grapes that are juiced (also perhaps a hint of destruction here) to make it. Again, Browning is within her; she is somehow made of him. The creative act is also top of mind here, as both EBB and Browning were poets of some acclaim during their lifetimes.

She closes: “When I sue God for myself, he hears that name of thine.” So powerful is her love that it makes her secondary to Browning. When she prays for herself, the prayers come out in his name. Otherwise read, when she goes to God at her death, when her soul is weighed, it will have the weight—and the tears—of two souls, not one. There is in it that terrifying loss of self, balanced by immeasurable gain—which is love.

Happy Valentine’s Day <3

It’s been a month and a week since I bought a book, which is surely a record for me, and I’ve never read so much. I decided somewhat on a whim in December that I would embark on this little experiment, spurred only by a vague sense of embarrassment at the number of unread books languishing on my bookshelf. I thought it would be hard, which it is, particularly if I enter a bookstore, but it’s also fun.

I’m reading books that I’ve owned for years and loving them or liking them or thinking they’re fine, but I’m reading them. It’s nice to not have so much choice. I have to just pick something, and so I do, and then I read, and then repeat. I’ve picked well so far.

I started the month with The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. A couple years ago, I found a pretty cloth bound Hemingway set at a thrift store. I thought, I should probably read Hemingway, so I bought them and then I didn’t read them. I picked The Sun Also Rises because of the three in the set (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls), its spine was the skinniest. It also happens to be Hemingway’s first novel, which is nice.

For those uninitiated (perhaps many, since Hemingway isn’t exactly fashionable at the moment), The Sun Also Rises follows Jake Barnes (American, veteran, journalist, expatriate in Paris) and a cast of characters that includes Lady Brett Ashley (divorcee, bobbed hair), Robert Cohen (Jewish), Bill Gordon (from New York), Mike Campbell (engaged to Brett), and eventually, once they all make it from Paris to Pamplona, Pedro Romero (bull fighter).

Nothing much happens. They go from the cafe to the restaurant to the bar and back drinking copious amounts of regionally appropriate alcohol. They misunderstand each other, offend each other and sometimes actually fight each other. They sometimes apologize and sometimes don’t. They are, in many ways, the embodiment of the “Lost Generation”—a term coined by Gertrude Stein in reference to Hemingway and his real life friends.

This lost-ness is most clear when the characters sit around trying to talk to each other (frequently). I say trying because Hemingway’s dialogue jumps and spins. the characters don’t listen to each other, they don’t say what they mean, or they do, but only in the middle of a conversation that’s got nothing to do with it. What everyone says about Hemingway is true. His language is simple and spare. What you hear less often (I think) is that it’s simultaneously very graceful, with something of the dancer in it: controlled with the odd dizzying moment.

I was also surprised to find, that while there is an overarching aimlessness to the whole crew, there is, in Jake, a real and grounded love of place. Hemingway said that there was no hero, no protagonist in The Sun Also Rises, but I’d say that it’s Jake—and so his caring attention to his surroundings suffuses the whole novel (and fights valiantly against the creeping (tempting?) aimlessness). I was particularly fond of the fly fishing section, and the descriptions of Montoya—the proprietor of Jake’s favorite hotel in Pamplona.

When I was reading Hemingway, I remembered that Joan Didion claimed she learned to write by copying down his sentences. I own two books by Joan that I haven’t read, so I picked up Play It As It Lays. It was something of a lucky selection because it seems to owe a lot to The Sun Also Rises (probably particularly when you read them one after another).

Namely, nothing happens in Play It As It Lays, and the characters are lost—less so aimless, more so stuck in a pervasive meaninglessness. Maria (pronounced Mariah, which I simply could not get through my head) descends into madness. She goes places, mostly nowhere in particular, in her car. She drives aimlessly around Los Angeles and out into the desert and dissociates. She also drinks and takes drugs to dull the pain of the fact that her daughter Kate lives in a care facility after some kind of terrible accident—it’s never explained. All the people around her work in or adjacent to Hollywood (including herself), and they’re all awful—alternately numbed or tweaked up on their own pharmaceutical cocktails.

Like Hemingway, Didion is spare with her language. She makes do with very little, but her result is much more hollow. I don’t mean that as an indictment of her skill as a writer because I think it’s meant to be hollow, but it’s hollow nonetheless. Didion achieves, masterfully, a novel with no grace, no dance. There is no connection between the reader and Maria, there is no connection between anything.

Praise for Play It As It Lays lauds Didion’s “mordant lucidity” and calls the novel “scathing.” I can’t argue. Didion is sharp; she is caustic. But if she is eviscerating the lifestyle (prevailing attitudes, society at large) that she portrays, attempting to tear it down, etc., well, she doesn’t offer MUCH in the way of something to fill the void she leaves. I enjoyed the novel while I was reading it, but in the weeks since, I haven’t really thought of it. It’s not thought provoking, it just is.

Worth noting perhaps that people in LA apparently love this book, so maybe there’s something specific to place in it (à la Hemingway too!) that missed me.

At this point, I was ready for something with a bit more hmmm…plot, maybe even a bit of romance, but I also needed it to be kind of dark still so as not to shock me out of the stupor Hemingway & Didion had put me in. Ariane A Russian Girl by Claude Anet had been sitting on my shelf for many moons after it was purchased online during an NYRB fall sale, only to be forgotten/forsaken. The back describes Ariane as “the queen bee of her provincial Russian town…tired of breaking hearts in the sticks,” and promises “a brilliant exploration—engrossing, unnerving, comic, and cunning—of the matchless cruelty of desire.” Sounds good!

And it was—good and insane. Set in a pre-revolutionary Russia, where old-world propriety shows signs of falling to a more promiscuous way of life, our Ariane is very modern indeed. Her natural facilities are supplemented by the tutelage of her equally modern Aunt, who doesn’t believe in love, and doesn’t believe in constraining her charge either. With her sweet good looks, cunning intelligence, and hint of wickedness, Ariane is completely magnetic. Even as we are told that she has that “mix of haughtiness and mockery that, truth be told, caused her to be hated,” we are trapped in her web along with every single man she meets.

It’s not long before the little one has figured out how to manipulate everyone around her to get just what she wants. But what does she actually want? To go to Moscow and to be free. Well, naturally she makes it to Moscow, but there she meets Constantin Michel, a man too many years her senior for it to be romantic, even without the rampant manipulation that plagues their relationship from both quarters. Neither is willing to give up the upper hand they imagine they have, and so they punish each other. Everything changes.

I won’t claim that the romance I was looking for is what I got. Ariane is a fairly disturbing portrait of love, particularly by our evolved standards, but also a highly entertaining one. The characters, and the subtlety with which Anet renders their motivations—allowing them to believe in their own delusions, refusing to give them away to the reader—is really very well done. In the end, love is the great equalizer.

While Ariane was more lively than Hemingway and Didion, and was more of a story in the traditional sense, my hunt for plot continued. I thought it might be good to sink my teeth into something a bit meatier. My eye was drawn to The Little Friend—the only Donna Tartt novel (of her 3) that I had not yet read. This book would have sat on my shelf forever. Though I’ve owned it for a while, and known about its existence for much longer, I have never been drawn to pick it up. Plus compared to all the (continuing, commercial, critical, etc.) buzz around Tartt’s other novels, The Little Friend doesn’t get much action, which makes you wonder…

The novel is set in small town Mississippi over the course of a single summer in the 1970s and focuses on the Cleves, and in particular the youngest of the bunch—Harriet, who is twelve years old. One of the first things we learn about the Cleves is that they love to talk about the past, “loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history—repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire deathbed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occurred a hundred years before.”

This habit is part myth-making, part trauma processing: they go over the past in large part to translate the horrible events of thier share history into “that sweet old family vernacular, which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form.” This includes all kinds of calamities, from the death(s) of husband(s) to the loss of the family’s beloved plantation home, Tribulation. One event, however remains too awful to speak of. Back when Harriet was just a baby, her older brother Robin—himself twelve at the time—was found dead, hanging from a tree in his family’s backyard on Mother’s Day. The police never found the person responsible.

The other family who comes more into focus in the second half of the book is the Ratliff clan. The Ratliffs are from the wrong side of town and are regularly engaged in criminal activity (ranging from petty theft to drug trafficking to capital murder). Danny Ratliff is one of five or six brothers, two of whom are currently in prison—they’ve all done their turns. Robin was Danny’s age, and when Harriet hears that people saw him hanging around on the afternoon of Robin’s accident, she is sure that he’s the one responsible. Her certainty is in no way impacted by the fact that Danny was cleared by the police at the time of the crime. She launches her own investigation with the help of her sidekick, Hely.

What follows is an incredible portrait of a bright and uncompromising girl trying to balance her (highly developed) sense of what is right with the realities of her world. It’s not just the injustice of her brother’s unsolved murder that she’s suddenly interested in, but also the racial and socioeconomic dynamics (in post-segregation rural Mississippi) that have been humming in the background of her life until now. In the course of a summer, much of the background of her life suddenly jumps into the foreground. The reader has a front row seat as Harriet takes her first (large) steps out of childish country where the world is made up of amorphous, seemingly unlinked acts and facts, into an unfamiliar territory where actions have consequences, and what you do becomes who you are.

Donna Tartt is a master storyteller, and The Little Friend is the type of novel that makes you think literally how on earth did she do that. Seriously—how did she do that? The pacing can feel slow at times, the details gratuitous, but somehow even when it drags, it drags you along with it. I think it’s probably Tartt’s least popular book in part because of the pacing and related genre confusion (a murder mystery with pages dedicated to how twelve year old girl occupies herself in a quiet house when she can’t sleep?). But if you let Tartt take you where she wants to take you, it’s an incredibly rewarding read. 10/10, favorite book of the month. LOTS of snakes though, so be prepared for that.

I additionally consumed the To Be Young edition of Hotshoe Magazine, which I acquired at Casa Magazines, probably on a Saturday when I suddenly felt spendy while out for breakfast. I have not yet determined whether this type of behavior is acceptable in the year of no new books. Technically a magazine is not a book, but some of them can be suspiciously book-like. Not Hotshoe though; Hotshoe is a photography magazine (wonderful!). From what I can gather, they bring together collections from a variety of photographers around a central theme. In this case, youth, and more specifically teenagerhood (a word?). Featured photographers include Sally Mann, Davide Sorrenti, Claudine Doury, Raymond Meeks & others. It’s mostly photographs, but interspersed are the featured photographers’ responses to set questions (When is the first time you remember no longer feeling like a child?, What advice would you give to your young self?, etc.).

In the world of less long things to read, I stumbled upon this piece in the Atlantic from nine years ago about a Filipino family who came to the United States in 1964, bringing with them their slave, Lola. They kept her up to the end of her life. It’s by Alex Tizon, one of the children who Lola helped to raise.

I was delighted to find a short story by Bud Smith in the Fall Paris Review that had been sitting on my bedside table for 4ish months. I love Bud Smith and will be buying more of his books as soon as I’m allowed. Everyone should read Teenager, it’s fantastic.

This month I also liked “The Quiet House” by Tessa Hadley in The New Yorker. I like reading about old ladies and their memories right now (see All Passion Spent). I also like her depiction of female friendship.

Also from (but this time on Substack, I guess?) I loved Mold and Melancholia by Madeline Cash. Kathryn is reading Lost Lambs; will buy when allowed.

In better news about books that I can read, this month wrote about Brett Easton Ellis and wrote about Iris Murdoch—or at least about The Black Prince. What a boon that I already own that one, AND I own Less Than Zero. My cup runneth over. I will perhaps read them both in February.