An essay on each book I finish, with my reading data and the Marginalia video for each one. Subscribe on Substack
Each essay is a star at its book: Hopscotch, The Magic Mountain, Flights, Solenoid, The Dispossessed, Lincoln in the Bardo, The Overstory, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Night Boat to Tangier, A Tale for the Time Being.
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being was my relief after four books in a row about bad men, and it left me empty. I mourn Nao, Jiko and Oliver, and I ask why fiction hands wisdom only to the elders with one foot in the grave. The world is a lot kinder than our most famous words show us, and wisdom is something we can all train.
· 8 min read · on A Tale for the Time Being
Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier was my rebound after Ozeki: two thugs talking through the night at a ferry terminal, in prose too gorgeous for our own good. The metamodernism I went looking for turned up in the sound of it, an alarm clock that rattles the same from beginning to end, with music hidden in the noise.
· 6 min read · on Night Boat to Tangier
Rutger Bregman’s Humankind takes the Cynical Canon apart study by study: Golding’s island, the Stanford prison, Milgram’s shocks, the bystanders who never were. I read it as the antidote to the Nocebo effect of the news, then put a question to Bregman himself and answer it with the Shire.
· 11 min read · on Humankind: A Hopeful History
Richard Powers’ The Overstory won the Pulitzer for a novel about trees, and I finished its 600 pages feeling scolded. I call the mood the Misanthropocene, where environmental love turns into self-hatred, and I argue for the opposite move: keep moving, keep building, and find a way off the planet.
· 14 min read · on The Overstory
I read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo as a ritual of unclenching. The ghosts at Oak Hill stay stuck because each keeps retelling his own story to nobody listening; the living get free the moment they set their story down and lift someone else’s load for a minute.
· 11 min read · on Lincoln in the Bardo
In Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Shevek leaves an anarchist moon for a capitalist planet and finds a prison on each. I came away thinking every ideal, from honor to justice, is a body saying yummy or yucky, and the garden still needs sweeping.
· 10 min read · on The Dispossessed
Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid is a diary that whispers stay here, dig deeper: its narrator reads eight hours a day in bed, sleeps four, and offers self-torture as metaphysical inquiry. I read it during a week alone and felt the riptide of introspection pull at me too. The ends don’t justify the means, and I found no salvation in exploring suffering.
· 8 min read · on Solenoid
Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights has no plot and does fine without one. I read it as a constellation of fragments, travellers and bodies in motion, with one command: keep moving. Whoever stops is pinned like an insect.
· 7 min read · on Flights
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is about a cure that never ends: Hans Castorp goes up for three weeks and stays seven years. I watched Settembrini and Naphta argue without a winner, and I think the only move left is the descent, back down to the village, the bone broth and the book club.
· 10 min read · on The Magic Mountain
I read Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch as a novel built like jazz, with two ways through it and a structure ReadingRate scores 85 out of 100 for difficulty. Its tragedy is Horacio, who wants to live like a jazz player among people who won’t play along.
· 8 min read · on Hopscotch