Earth 7 (2026) by Deb Olin Unferth

 Audiobook Review

Earth 7 (2026)

by Deb Olin Unferth

Daunt Publishing

  The idea of "book-tok" is not something I take seriously, probably because it favors genres like Romantasy.  The major exception to this stance is the phenomenon of Jacquelline Harpman, the Belgian author who struck Tik Tok gold a couple years back with the English language translation of I Who Have Never Known Men (1995).  I had that book recommended to me by a random woman at a dog friendly cafe in Eagle Rock, but when I searched up the title, it seemed clear I would like that book, and I did. Earth 7, which is published by Daunt Publishing, seems to mine that same literary territory: minimalist science fiction and strong feminist themes with an end of the world vibe. 

  The protagonist of Earth 7 is the lonely daughter of a single mom who happens to be a gifted scientist/programmer, working in the aftermath of "Depop" which is pretty much how it sounds- the causes being many and varied.  Dylan Stein is her name, and she is raised by her mom inside a living habitat at the bottom of the ocean.  Originally planned as a community, Dylan's mom ends up being the last hold out, which leaves Dylan, naturally, dreaming of escape.  Unferth works with a light touch as far as the genre stuff goes- there are no chapters of exposition where recent history is explained by a thoughtful professor or authority figure.   Rather, Earth 7 more or less resembles a bildungsroman as Dylan escapes her undersea mom prison for life on the dry n' dusty surface, where she works for an obscure corporation plodding forward in the wasteland. 

  Eventually she falls in love, with another woman, of course and that sets in motion the rest of the book- Dylan and her love living in obscurity in the desert until death do us part.  Stuff happens, but it is low impact plot and mostly what the reader is left with is atmosphere of the dying Earth. 

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020) by Deesha Philyaw

1,001 Novels: A Library of America 

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020)

by Deesha Philyaw

Sugar Hill, Jacksonville, Florida

Florida: 17/21

  Deesha Philway has her first novel dropping in a couple months, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, and it was cool to see The Secret Lives of Church Ladies on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America.  Also, a very obvious pick given editor Susan Straight's predilections.

 

Published 1/18/21

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020)

by Deesha Philyaw

    The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was the last of the 2020 National Book Award finalists in the fiction category I was able to secure- the LA Public Library finally picked up the Audiobook version, though I certainly would have bought a copy if I'd seen it in a bookstore.  The publisher is West Virginia University Press, and I'm pretty sure I've never read another book from that imprint, and it makes me wonder why this obviously sharp collection of short stories about the lives of African American women in the rural/suburban America didn't pique more interest from an established publisher.

    It was an enjoyable listen- Philyaw has a sharp eye for domestic detail that reminded me of Alice Munro.  I look forward to future books from her, hopefully a novel, but there is no doubt that the National Book Award nomination will ensure that she has a greater choice of publishers for her next book.

1,001 Novels A Library of America Collected: Mississippi

 1,001 Novels A Library of America 

Collected:

 Mississippi

   I am genuinely passionate about consolidating this blog into 200 posts, with 10 chapters of 20 posts each, with some chapters being chronological and others being thematic, combining autofiction and criticism.   I'd imagine that this project would be one of the ten chapters.  The 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die would be one of the ten chapters.  Writing about World History would be a chapter. Aesthetics would be a chapter.   And then 2008- 2010 would be a chapter, 2011-2013 would be a chapter, 2013-2019, 2020-2023, 2024-2030. That's eight chapters right there. 

  Mississippi is a dark spot on the map of American literature. Faulkner and Welty are both more-or-less canonical authors in the canon of 20th century American Literature.  Beyond that you've got contemporary writers like Jesmyn Ward and Robert Jones Jr.- prize winner types writing about African American experiences.  Honestly, I got more from the non-fiction I was reading about this same area- specifically the cotton plantation economy and its relationship to slavery and capitalism.  That was eye opening. 

Published 9/17/25

Light in August (1932)

by William Faulkner

Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi

Mississippi: 1/18

  Faulkner might be considered the apotheosis (a word he uses at least three times in Light in August) of high modernism in America, in that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Faulkner won in 1949, Hemingway in 1954, Steinbeck in 1962.  Only Faulkner is comprable to the high modernism/experimentalist prose of the early 20th century, both Hemingway and Steinbeck are the opposite of the flowery, ornate prose and complicated plot structures of Faulkner.   Faulkner has also maintained a legacy through the writers he influenced- Cormac McCarthy, to name one. At the same time, it's hard not to think Faulkner's time has past- a dead white male, an alcoholic and a frequent user of the n word, there are plenty of textual and non-textual reasons that a contemporary student of literature could through an MFA program without reading more than a short story here or there.

   At the same time- and I'm saying this as someone who is 250 books into the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, there is no denying the Faulkner simply is one of the top five American novelists of the 20th century.  It is simply undeniable, even if you don't like modernist prose, the south or writers who use the n word. If you think about it in terms of the south as a literary place, consider that Margaret Mitchell published Gone With the Wind, one of the great prose narratives of the South, in 1936.  The movie came out in 1939. Faulkner wins the Nobel a decade later. 

  I listened to the Audiobook because I've read plenty of Faulkner novels, and I've always felt like they would be good Audiobooks.  This version was only recorded 10 years ago.  I think it a fair observation that the American literary establishment itself didn't appreciate the brilliance of Faulkner at the time he was writing- I went and looked at the New York Times and saw a plea from Malcolm Lowery- published in the 40's, that said Faulkner was out of print. 

Published 12/2/25

Yonder Stands Your Orphan (2001)

by Barry Hannah

Clinton, Mississippi

Mississippi: 2/18

  Both Mississippi and Alabama scored eighteen titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project.  That ties them for last place in this specific chapter, behind Florida, Louisiana and Georgia.  18 titles does put them both above the single digit states of the mid-Atlantic.  I've also moved away from the original 13 colonies of the Atlantic seaboard and into the first of the hinterlands that were settled (excepting those that lay within the original 13 colonies).  Here, the dynamic was first, the clearing out/removal of the Native tribes- most of whom were property holding and "civilized" within the usage of that term at the time.  Second, it was the cotton revolution which opened up huge swaths of Alabama and especially Mississippi for enormous, slave driven cotton plantations.   The need for slaves, exhaustion of the soil in the upper south from Tobacco farming and the ban on the importation of slaves from abroad drove a huge, forced population movement, as the slave holders of the Virginias and Carolinas sold their slaves "down the river" to work on the plantations of the newer south.

   Not that Yonder Stands Your Orphan, by moderately well-known southern author Barry Hannah, addresses any of that.   Instead, Orphan is a loosely assembled collection of eccentric and violent characters living around a lake.  It's not a great book- it was the author's last novel- but it, at least, interesting, and neither a work of chick-lit or a YA title.  I will say I've never read a book where so many people were sliced open by knives.

Published 1/9/26

Where the Line Bleeds (2008)

by Jesmyn Ward

DeLisle, Mississippi

Mississippi: 3/18

   Two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward would have to be at the very top of any serious list of American authors of literary fiction in the 21st century.  Her presence amidst the detritus of YA and chick-lit titles stands out like a beacon from a proverbial light house of literary fiction.  I checked out the Audiobook because I was wondering if I could seriously tell the difference between an Author with such widely regarded literary merit and the run of the mill titles, I've been suffering through for the past couple years.  Where the Line Bleeds was her first novel, and then she dropped Salvage the Bones four years later- that book won the National Book Award.  She won again in 2017 with Sing, Unburied, Sing, which I read during a period where I was reading all the National Book Award finalists.  It's a good book, obviously, but it didn't spur me to go back and read her other titles.

   I could tell the difference between Ward's prose and the run of the mill stuff on a couple of levels.  First, she was able to turn an otherwise prosaic landscape (the unheralded Mississippi coastline) with real grandeur.  She did this in a couple different ways.  First, she was a close observer of the physical landscape- her descriptions of crack houses and swamp parties sparkle with life.  Second, her ability to depict all five senses marks her out from the pack.   Great writers of literary fiction imbue the reader with a feeling that there is depth beneath the surface of the human activity being depicted, but they also provide a many-splendored surface, pairing stylistic flourishes with economy.   She does all these things in Where the Line Bleeds, which is sure to be my top title from Mississippi and a likely top five for the entire chapter.

Published 1/12/26

The Gone Dead (2019)

by Chanelle Benz

Money Road, Greenwood Mississippi 

Mississippi: 4/18

  It isn't often that the titles on the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America raise questions about the role of authenticity in fiction, but such was the case for The Gone Dead, by British American author Chanelle Benz. The plot concerns the interracial daughter of a dead-before-his-time African American poet (her father) and what can only be described as her severely misguided attempt to "get to the bottom" of the "mysterious" circumstances surrounding the death of her father.

  Clearly, the protagonist has not read the same books I have about this part of the country because it is just about 100 percent clear that any "mysterious" death of an African American man in the deep South is caused by white racists who are then protected by the local law enforcement and political establishment. I could have told this lady that in a five-minute conversation over a cup of coffee. Fair to say that I didn't linger on The Gone Dead, because reader I knew where this was headed. It was either the cops, friends of the cops or the cops when they were off duty that killed your daddy and you don't need 283 pages to tell the story.

Published 1/19/26

Mudbound (2008)

by Hilary Jordan

Mississippi Delta, Mississippi

Mississippi: 5/18

  Mudbound is a classic Susan Straight 1,001 Novels: A Library of America pick, a book that won some award that Barbara Kingsolver made up for unpublished books- it then got published and sold a bunch of copies.  The version I checked out from the library was the Ebook version of the Netflix cover version of the book from the Netflix version I'd didn't know about.  It's about a well-off but "spinster adjacent" white woman from the upper south who marries a youngish widower- she meets him because he is an engineer travelling around for Government projects during the Great Depression (I think).  Little does she know that it is his lifelong dream to go back home (the Mississippi Delta) and become a farmer.  It's "little does she know" because he does not bother to tell her during their courtship. 

 Nevertheless, Laura McAllan (her married name) is cognizant of her incipient spinsterhood and loves the old lug besides, so she agrees to the thing.  The title of the book is her somewhat whimsical name for the farm that Henry (the husband) takes over.   Henry has a damaged (by service in World War I) younger brother who is a manic pixie dream boy circa the 1940's.  The farm has several sharecropping families, some white and some black, and Jamie (the younger brother) befriends the oldest son of one of the black families, Ronsel, also a veteran, and a tank operator to boot (Jamie being a pilot). 

  If you've been reading this blog, you know how this is going to end up, not well for the African American World War II veteran.  And reader, it does not. 

Published 3/23/26

The Past is Never (2018)

by Tiffany Quay Tyson

Forest, Mississippi

Mississippi: 6/18

   I know when the book jacket copy references Flannery O'Connor and "Southern Gothic" that the book in question will be interesting.  The Past is Never is set in the Delta, but the story stretches to the Florida everglades, making this title a bit of a 1,001 Novels: A Library of America Mississippi/Florida cross-over. Like many of the books from this part of the United States, The Past is Never features three young siblings who are being raised in benevolent neglect in a rural part of the country.  Here, the relevant landscape feature is a forbidden abandoned quarry where the children like to swim during the hot summer.  This being a novel, tragedy strikes when the two older siblings who are the protagonists, misplace their younger sister.  Somewhat suspiciously, their money counterfeiting father disappears around the same time.

   The first half of the book features the brother/sister duo struggling with the repercussions of their sister's abrupt and final disappearance, and then the second half has them off the Florida everglades in search of their father, who "dies" under extremely suspicious circumstances in a Florida motel room after a decade of non-contact.  Everything is fecund and you can practically hear the mosquitos buzzing throughout.  Personally, I didn't find much that was Faulknerian other than the locale, let alone any themes or stylistic writing motifs that reminded me of Flannery O'Connor- it just seems like those are the two reference points for any white southern author with any literary ambition. 

Published 3/24/26

Can't Quit You, Baby (1988)

by Ellen Douglas

Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 7/18

  Ellen Douglas was a writer of southern domestic fiction (and the pen name for Josephine Haxton).  According to her 2012 New York Time obituary, her wheelhouse was domestic fiction with post-modern influences (she cited Milan Kundera as a primary influence).  In books like Can't Quit You, Baby, much of the action took place inside the home, with the characters telling each other tales from their past.   In this book, domestic servant Tweet and lady-of-the-house Cornelia, spend the entire time prepping a meal in the kitchen.  Within this framework, they both reminisce, with much of the spoke banter between the two revolving around the fact that Cornelia is both literally and figuratively deaf to Tweet's experience. 

  As the book goes on, the reader learns that Cornelia, too, has had her struggles, including escaping her mother's home to marry her Irish American beau during World War II and a son who marries a somewhat questionable mother-of-two against her wishes.  Tweet's struggles are center stage, particularly her experience with her dying guardian-Grandfather and her dissolute father, who returns only to steal her inheritance. 

Published 3/26/26

Waveland (2009)

by Frederick Barthelme

Waveland, Mississippi

Mississippi: 8/18

  Frederick Barthelme is the younger brother of noted American postmodernist author Donald Barthelme- who showed up in the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die list a couple times- enough for me to get the drift that he is a difficult writer to actually enjoy, and to be confused by his prose, which is kinda the point with his brand of postmodernism.  Frederick is a different kind of author, call him a minimalist or maybe a pointillist, in that he specializes in the minutiae of everyday life, often written from the perspective who are going through it.

   His protagonist here is a semi-retired, semi-divorced architect doing a whole lot of nothing in coastal Louisiana. Waveland's characters stood out to me because the protagonist, at least, seemed more like a familiar "coastal elite" of literary fiction than a southerner, let alone a Cajun. His ex-wife and the other characters are more southern specific.  Barthelme does a good job evoking the landscape, a combination of the acuity of his protagonist, the fact that he has plenty of time to sit around and look at stuff and the distinctiveness of the landscape itself.  For example, you know when there is a house on stilts that plays into the plot, you know you can only be in a certain region of the country.

 Unlike most of the books from this part of the country there are no horrific, traumatizing incidents involving race, gender, sexuality or some combination of the three.  Low stakes fiction, but a pleasure to read. Maybe I identified a bit too closely with his protagonist. 

Published 3/31/26

Biloxi (2019)

by Mary Miller

Willow Avenue and Volunteer Park, Biloxi, Mississippi

Mississippi: 9/18

   Louis MacDonald is a recently divorced 63-year-old man, someone who has retired early from an unspecified job/career in anticipation of a substantial inheritance from his deceased father.  As the book opens, MacDonald is at what you would call "loose ends": He adopts a dog under mysterious circumstances from a quasi-neighbor and spends time drinking full sugar Coca-Cola and ignoring warnings from his doctor about his incipient diabetes.  MacDonald is one of those adult American men who doesn't know how to care for himself- he is seemingly unable to cook for himself and mostly relies for sustenance on leftovers his sad-dad apartment compels neighbor brings home from his job cooking at a chain restaurant (are there any other kinds, here in Biloxi, Mississippi.) 

   I've hit a mini streak of his pathetic protagonists inside the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America. The southeastern Louisiana coast doesn't have a monopoly on the character type, but there is no denying the affinity between the bleak landscape and the bleak lives.  You could put this novel and Frederick Barthelme's Waveland back-to-back and maybe not notice the switch from one book to the next.   The third 1,001 Novels selection from this stretch of coastline is the similarly bleak Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward, which at least had the benefit of solidly depicting the landscape in a way that the protagonists in Biloxi and Waveland seem incapable of doing.  

  

Published 4/3/26

Pariah and Other Stories (1983)

by Joan Williams

Arkabutla, Mississippi

Mississippi: 10/18

   I read this slim volume of short stories sitting in court in a single afternoon, waiting for my matter to be called.   Pariah is geographically distinct because it is the northwestern location within the entire chapter spanning Florida to Louisiana.  Louisiana is further west but the northern border of Louisiana is miles south of the northern border that runs through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.  Thus, Arkabutla is closer to Memphis than any large population center in Mississippi. 

  Williams is best known as a protege of William Faulkner- her bare bones Wikipedia page is almost comical in its lack of biographical detail- surely Joan Williams is a candidate for a literary revival?  Perhaps though it's the perspective- like Flannery O'Connor her characters are losers and weirdos- the collection of short stories beginning with three interconnected stories about a mentally challenged person.  There is frequent and unkind use of the n-word- many of these characters can be described as poorer whites who fear and resent the incipient Civil Rights movement, a frequent subject of discussion among the characters.  

 I can see how folks might shy away from reviving stories like these, but I found the obtuseness refreshing, as well as the literary ambition.

Published 4/16/26

The Oxygen Man (1999)

by Steven Yarbrough

Indianola, Mississippi

Mississippi: 11/18

   Indianola is in northwest Mississippi, what I imagine to be "catfish country," where cotton farmers converted their plantations to aquaculture in an attempt to adapt to changing times.  Within the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America, The Oxygen Man is interesting because it is a debut novel on a small press- besides academic imprints there are very few non-major press books in the 1,001 Novels project, which seems like a lost opportunity.  Yarbrough writes in modernist style with the narrative skipping between time periods, for the benefit of the audience the years are added in between segments.  The main protagonists are a brother-sister duo of what can only be described as a white-trash family- Dad is an itinerant commercial painter, Mom is the town whore.   As a pair they have penchant for big fights followed by lusty make-up sex, and they are not afraid to do either in public, to the chagrin of their minor children.

  Unsurprisingly, this behavior impacts the children's lives and attitudes, with the fulcrum of the story hinging on a semi-public sexual encounter between the sister, witnessed by the brother and his friend.

Published 4/17/26

The Prophets (2021)

 by Robert Jones Jr

1833 Haining Road, Vicksburg Mississippi

Mississippi: 12/18

Author Robert Jones Jr.

Published 2/22/21

The Prophets (2021)

by Robert Jones Jr.

  An early front runner for the National Book Award longlist, The Prophets is the debut novel by American author Robert Jones Jr., about a forbidden love affair between two slaves on a Mississippi plantation in the early 19th century.   And although the hook should be enough to pique the interest of most fans of American literary fiction, this book is by no means "just" a LGBT love story set in the antebellum south.  Jones ably blends different voices- the white children of the plantation owner, women slaves on the same plantation as well as voices from Africa- which expand the standard parameters of the American slave narrative across the ocean in time and space.

  Like Marlon James, Jones Jrs' take on the African American LGBT experience is physical and intense.  His two protagonists, Isaiah and Samuel, are nuanced figures, even as their actions become increasingly direct.  Jones deserves plaudits for his frank and direct depiction of the trauma inflicted on the enslaved by their so-called masters, reserving special spite for the "progressive" white children of the planation over class. 

   Although I shouldn't have to say this in 2021, The Prophets is not "just" for people interested in LGBT issues in literary fiction.  It is a broadly appealing work, and it packs a narrative punch that will make you glad you picked it up.

Published 4/21/26

The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (1980)
Jackson. Mississippi

Mississippi: 13/18

  Looking at a Google Ngram that compares the popularity of Faulkner, O'Connor and Welty, Welty comes in third place.  All three authors have experienced precipitous declines in frequency since the turn of the millennium, with only O'Connor showing some resilience.   Having read the three authors, the simplest explanation is that at some point it became untenable to teach students with materials that use the "n-word," in any way, shape or form.  Welty's short stories are chock full of it, although since her stories cover such a wide swath of time, it is possible to observe some characters holding back from the term as time progresses into the Civil Rights era.  My understanding is that saying the n word in any context in a classroom is enough to get a teacher fired.

  I think Welty also suffers because she never got comfortable with the novel as a format- even her Pulitzer Prize winning "novel" The Optimist's Daughter, clocked in at 208 pages.  Short stories do well in literature courses but aren't as great for the buying public or critics. As I've brought up many times, trying to write a review of a book of short stories is straight up not a good time because you are either summarizing a bunch of plots, or trying to draw connections with little or no insight into the authorial mindset. 

 This was my first time reading her work- my major observation is that she sure did seem like a practitioner of "Southern Gothic" but did not like the term.   Perhaps the development of the entire literary genre was a reflection of the tastes of the audience for literary magazines based in the north- the New Yorker, for example.  It's not hard to imagine that editors at the New Yorkers thought that their audiences were interested in the freakishness of the south, and that they picked stories that reflected that, and that writers like Welty got the message.   Conversely, it is hard to imagine whatever literary culture that existed in the south being happy with the freaks in Faulkner, O'Connor and Welty.   Perhaps though it was preferable to literature which frankly addressed racial practices in the south in the mid 20th century.

Published 4/27/26

Joe (1991)

by Larry Brown

Oxford, Mississippi

Mississippi: 14/19

   I chuckled when I read the jacket copy, which compares author Larry Brown to Faulkner, Welty and O'Connor in the same sentence.  What you mean he writes like three of the five non-African-American authors that matter in the deep south?  If you look up the author online you will soon see that he is associated with a genre called "grit-lit."  The Good Reads page is a mess and lists titles from Faulkner to O'Connor and everything in between.  To me, it sounds like an attempt to rebrand Southern Gothic for the "modern" (aka 1990s) period.   The prevalence of freaks, and freak like behavior in literature from the deep south is unique within American literature, sure every state and region has its dysfunctional families, but the patriarch of the dysfunctional family in this book really takes the cake.  Calling him a knock-down, drag-out alcoholic doesn't begin to do his depravity justice.

Published 4/30/26

The Heaven of Mercury (2002)

by Brad Watson

Mercury, Mississippi

Mississippi: 15/19

     Living in California, it is easy to lose track of the relative size of places like it and New York to places like Alabama and Mississippi.  For example, the largest city in Mississippi is Jackson and it has a population of 146k.  In California, Jackson would be the 40th largest city, between Visalia and Victorville.  The total population of Mississippi, just about 3 million, is smaller than the CITY of Los Angeles, let alone the county or metropolitan statistical area.   Of course, the founding fathers foresaw this, which is why we are saddled with a political system which allows areas like the deep south and rural Midwest to put their candidates into the Presidency at the expense of places like California and New York.

     For places like Mississippi, it's not a question of the city/town/rural distinction of more populated areas, rather it is a question of small towns and rural areas.  Even the books putatively mapped onto urban areas in Mississippi take place in rural settings.   The Heaven of Mercury is a pure example of the small-town novel, nominated for the National Book Award for fiction back in 2002 about a local newspaper editor and his lifetime of unrequited love for a childhood almost-sweetheart.

    I've observed before that the use of a map to plot the titles in the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America presupposes certain kind of plots and narrators.  None of the book in the Mississippi chapter split their temporality between Mississippi and some other place.  Characters who leave Mississippi leave the novel.  This means you have a choice between people coming back from some other place and people who never leave.   Within that category Mississippi is almost unique in that NONE of the novels are about people coming back from some other place and ALL of the books are about people who never leave. 

  At least, with our newspaper editor character in The Heaven of Mercury we have a literate protagonist. 

Finus, the protagonist, is, I think, the most sophisticated of any of the protagonists in the Mississippi titles.

Published 5/5/26

Billy (1993)

by Albert French

Banes, Mississippi

Mississippi: 16/19

      Billy is one of the three books from Mississippi that I had to buy from Amazon because they are not available from the Los Angeles Public Library.   It is a work of historical fiction about the events leading to the state of Mississippi executing a 10-year-old for the accidental murder of a white girl during a fight.  Reading the book I surely thought that this was based on a historical case, but it was not.  It is true that American executions of defendants who were juveniles at the time of the murder occurred well into the 20th century, with Supreme Court cases approving the practice as late as 1989 (for 16- and 17-year-olds.)  Billy is yet another novel from this chapter where the use of the n-word is frequent- given the context of the plot (the murder of a white child by an African American child) I suppose it's "understandable" but it doesn't make Billy any easier to read.  Once again, the reader is heavily reminded of the incredible amount of simple hate that white people had and presumably have for the African American population.   As an example from this book, only two characters in the entire book- the defense attorney and the priest at the Mississippi state death house, express ANY reservations about the state executing a 10-year-old for a clearly accidental death.

Published 5/19/26

The Hate U Give (2017)

by Angie Thomas

Carnation Street, Garden Heights, Jackson, Mississippi

Mississippi: 17/19

   This YA novel was adapted into a pretty popular YA movie (with Sabrina Carpenter as the racist white friend from prep school).  It's about a young, African American girl (high school student) who is riding shot gun when her friend from the neighborhood is shot by a white cop.  Readers of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America will not be surprised by the events which follow, though Thomas deserves some credit for evoking the specific time and place (the following/unfollowing of a race-themed Tumblr blog is a minor plot point).  At 400 plus pages, I didn't really linger on the prose, but I think I got the drift of it. As a criminal justice practitioner I didn't find the details of this particular fictional shooting of a young minority man by a white cop in the deep south particularly troubling, as far as those circumstances go.   Here, the cop mistakes a heavy comb being stored in the front driver door for a glock, which is ridiculous, but also something that no African American south would ever do (one, what teenage male owns a heavy duty hair brush let alone keep it in their driver side door while driving around the deep south.

Published 5/27/26

Wolf Whistle (1993)

by Lewis Nordam

Arrow Catcher, Mississippi

Mississippi: 18/19

     The end of each state is a cause for reflection on my part- what I've learned, any avenues I am interested in pursuing further, etc.  Mississippi is a dead end- I think I'll always be interested in Faulkner because of his interesting canonical history, but the more books I read set in Mississippi, the less interesting Faulkner becomes.  Here at the tail end of the chapter, Wolf Whistle has been kicking around my Kindle for six months.  This is an example of the "post-Faulkner" genre of southern lit, where authors with literary ambition are compared to one or all of the handful of authors from here with any literary cache.  Wolf Whistle is a surprisingly "even handed" recounting of the Emmett Till murder, mostly from the point of view of the murderer.     Considering how many of the books in this chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America deal with the murder of an African American male at the hands of local white people, I'm not sure Wolf Whistle was a necessary pick, but no doubt my viewpoint of this book was largely informed by it's second-to-last place in the random reading order.

   

Published 6/8/26

A Time to Kill (1989)

by John Grisham

Mississippi: 19/19

    I'm elated, finishing Louisiana and Mississippi in back-to-back weeks.  Florida is a real (metaphorical) breath of fresh air after reading so much about racial hatred and race-based injustice.  Fitting to end Mississippi with John Grisham, Mississippi best-sellingist author and all-around good guy.  Artistically, it's hard to say much about the man beyond pointing to his status as a perennial best seller.  He doesn't have the literary fictionish touch of Stephen King, and the court room thriller doesn't have the cache of detective fiction or police procedural.  And, with a net worth estimated at 400 million, I doubt he cares, or at least, he doesn't act like someone concerned with his literary legacy.

   A Time to Kill is, of course, his first novel, about a young-ish criminal defense lawyer in small-town Mississippi who is hired to defend an African American accused of gunning down the two white men who raped his ten-year-old daughter.  It's the kind of crime that transcends racial prejudice, a fact which is key to the plot in many different ways.  For me, it was all very "busman's holiday"- reading about my day-to-day concerns of being a criminal defense lawyer.  I think, though, you can tell that Grisham wrote this book without an inkling that he would became a mega seller of popular fiiction.

Milk, Blood, Heat (2020) by Dantiel W. Moniz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Milk, Blood, Heat (2020)

by Dantiel W. Moniz

2771 Monument Road, Jacksonville, Florida

Florida: 6/21

    Besides this novel and the other novel from Jacksonville on this list (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw), the only thing I know about Jacksonville is that it has a professional football team. Before the 1,001 Novels project I doubt I would have been able to pick it out on a blank map of Florida.  Looking at a map of Florida now, I would have thought is was closer to Tallahassee or Tampa Bay.   It doesn't come across well in Milk, Blood, Heat, a debut collection of short stories by an African American woman with links to McSweeney's, and the prose is that of a crisp stylist.  Moniz's characters are at the margins, though like other contemporary writers of literary fiction from all over the United States, the margins seem to be the place to be.  It was very refreshing to read an entire book from this chapter where race is explored in terms over than overt day-to-day oppression and stultifying racism.  I get the sense that Florida is more of a promised land than anything else for African Americans in the southeast, a refuge for those who wanted something than the Atlanta metropole. 

Yesteryear (2026)by Caro Claire Burk

Book Review

Yesteryear (2026)

by Caro Claire Burk

   I do love me a hit, and Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burk, is one.  It's a Number one New York Times bestseller, Anne Hathaway snapped up the adaptation rights, and of course every book club in American is seemingly getting on board.  I read the first half in an eBook edition then switched to the Audiobook version.   The log-line is "trad wife influencer wakes up on a real 19th century farm...and hates it."  However, like many works of successful contemporary literary fiction, Yesteryear is really a story about a smart young woman from a difficult background trying to come to terms with her role in society.  As someone who is already mildly interested in the "trad-wife" movement (mostly monitored by following the Peter Thiel-backed lifestyle brand for women, Evie, I was interested in what Burk had to say about the movement, as well as its critics.  I was not disappointed.  Burk proves an adept observer of internet culture while not pursuing any stylistic tics that would put off a would-be reader.  Beyond the lit fic high concept, Yesterday is a traditional novel about the difficulties of being a young woman in contemporary society, as related to Emma Bovary as it is the tik tok account of Nara Smith.

   I had issues with the pacing at times, and the fact that the protagonist was so very unlikeable, but that is the point with an unreliable (?) narrator.  

Nonesuch (2026) by Francis Spufford

 Audiobook Review

Nonesuch (2026)

by Francis Spufford

    I really enjoyed English author Francis Spufford's last book, Cahokia Jazz, an alt-history work of detective fiction where Native Americans survived and evolved in parallel with Euro-Americans in the Midwest.  I really, really loved the alt-history part of Cahokia Jazz whereas the actual story was a pretty straightforward take on detective fiction.  Here, my preferences swung in the other direction, I wasn't wowed by the scenario, but I found the actual plot and characters interesting.   In Nonesuch, Spufford has moved back to the UK, where he finds his protagonist, Iris Hawkins, staring down the barrel of World War II.  Hawkins is a self-described "Suburban Slut," and a second generation "City" girl, where she works for a stockbroker of the Jewish persuasion and dreams of achieving financial success as a female stockbroker (literally illegal in that time and place.)   

    One night she ditches her date and finds herself at an avant-garde film party where one-reel art films are played over phonographic records.   There, she meets her romantic interest, Geoff, a technician in the nascent television department of the BBC as well as her nemesis, Lady LaLage Cunningham, a British Aristo Fascist.   The plot involves the occult, and an attempt by the British Fascist movement to travel back in time and prevent England from coming into the war against the Nazi's.   Along the way she learns about her feelings and has a decent amount of lit fic sex- Spufford must have been keeping tabs on the romantasy trend, because there was exactly zero sex in Cahokia Jazz.

Beasts of the Sea (2023) by Lida Turpeinen

Audiobook Review

Beasts of the Sea (2023)

by Lida Turpeinen

Translated from the Finnish

by David Hackston

  Beast of the Sea caught my eye simply because it is translated from the Finnish, and this is only the seventh book translated from Finnish to make to this blog (Unknown Soldiers (1954) by Vaino Linna, Crossing (2019)by Pajtim Statovci, Meek Heritage (1938) by Frans Eemil Sillanpää, Year of the Hare (1975)  by Arto Paasilinna, The Summer Book (1972) by Tove Jansson and the The Manila Rope (1957) by Veijo Meri.  Sillanpää is an obscure Nobel Prize winner, and the rest are one-translation wonders.   

  The hook for Beast of the Sea is that it is only loosely a "novel", really more a set of connected novella's/short stories centered around the geographic area where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered and hunted to extinction within a generation of being "discovered" by the west.  So one bit is about the naturalist on the expedition where the Steller's Sea Cow was discovered. Another bit is about a Finnish naturalist who came to possess one of the only skeletons of said Steller's Sea Cow after extinction. Then you've got a part with the English wife of a Russian Governor of Alaska (rough gig). Each chapter contains conventional novel stuff with more scientific stuff.   The link that runs through each chapter is just as much the place where the Sea Cow came from as the Cow itself. 

Ice (2026) by Jacek Dukaj

 Book Review

Ice (2026)

Jacek Dukaj

  Ice, arrives as a bit of a Polish-language literary sensation, and English language audiences have been waiting for the translation since 2017, when London based published Head of Zeus acquired the rights.  The translation, by Ursula Phillips finally dropped in January and of course I had to purchase this 1200 page alternate history fantasia as soon as I learned it existed.   Ice is hard to describe properly for a number of reasons.  I've seen it described as a cross between science fiction and alternate history and steam-punk lit, but we all know that steampunk isn't a literary thing and alternate history is, in fact, a sub-genre of science fiction.  

  The catalyst is that the object that crashed into the Earth and caused the Tunguska event in June 1908, transformed the landscape in some poorly understood way, causing a novel kind of ice to shoot out from the epicenter and spread across the world.  Presumably as a result of the consequences of this event, there was no World War I and no Russian Revolution, meaning that the alternate history of the book is essentially a world where the 20th century didn't happen in Europe but the industrial revolution of the 19th century did.  The protagonist is a Polish national (Poland is/was part of the Russian Empire), who is set a task by the Czar's secret police:  Locate his long-missing father who is rumored to be an agent for "the ice." 

  They then put him on the trans-Siberian express- a journey which consumes at least half of the 1200 pages of the book, and he is then buffeted by mysterious forces, some who support the ice and some who want it gone forever.  The supporting cast includes real life scientist Nikolai Tesla, here an agent of the Czar sent to defeat the ice.  The train is hundreds of pages of philosophical debates which is surely meant to remind the reader of 19th century Russian author-philosophers, while at other times the tone is decidedly Pynchonian minus the songs and laughs.

  By far the most challenging aspect of Ice is the fact that Polish allows authors to write in a kind of second person singular style where the narrator is the protagonist, but the author is not using personal pronouns.  I've had the same experience reading other Polish authors- most recently Olga Tokarczuk, but here it was particularly hard to follow.   Not hard to follow- hard to appreciate, I guess you could say.

Seascaper (2025) by Benjamin Wood

 Audiobook Review

Seascraper (2025)

 by Benjamin Wood

  I'm sure I only heard about Seascraper, by English novelist Benjamin Wood, because it was longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize.  It was a good pick for an Audiobook because it is set in seaside village in the English countryside, so you get some good regional accents.  There is also a strong musical element in the plot, and in the Audiobook you actually get to hear the song that the protagonist writes in a moment of inspiration.  The setting is literally atmospheric- with dense, wet fog playing a key role in the development of the plot.  And, winningly, Seascaper is brief enough to be considered a novella, thought personally I would go with short novel.

Your Steps on the Stairs (2025) by Antonio Munoz Molina

 Audiobook Review

Your Steps on the Stairs (2025) 

by Antonio Munoz Molina 

  I really enjoyed To Walk Alone in the Crowd (2021), the English translation of Munoz' 2018 book- not quite a novel, not quite non-fiction, about the pleasures of walking a city i.e. ode to the flaneur.  Personally, I love strolling through a city, even if my chosen city, Los Angeles is not on anyone's list of top cities to perform this activity.  By contrast, Your Steps on the Stairs, is clearly a novel, even as it shares the same digressive DNA as Crowd.  It's about a late-middle aged Spainard, who, at the beginning of the book, has been "forcibly retired" from his corporate job in New York City, and is engaged in preparing a Lisbon apartment for the arrival of his partner, a female scientist.   From page one, any reader is likely to suspect what I suspected- something is amiss.

   As the plot slowly winds, Munoz treats the reader to all sorts of observations about Libson, New York City and contemporary relationships.  There are some surreal moments, such as when the narrator attends a terrible party given by a pop star who has recently purchased one of the mansions on the edge of Lisbon and realizes that most of the attendees are hired for the night- by his own handyman.  It makes for great Audiobook listening- ideal really, I highly recommend anything you can find by Munoz in translation.

The Pretender (2025) by Jo Harkin

 Audiobook Review

The Pretender (2025)

by Jo Harkin

   The Pretender is a rare 2025 Audiobook listen, written by English author Jo Harkin, one of the cover quotes describes it as "Glorious Exploits meets Wolf Hall" and I agree. Specifically, I agree with the comparison to Glorious Exploits which brought some contemporary characterization into a historical milieu while still keeping things from getting anachronistic.  There's a pot of gold for any writer of literary or historical fiction who can pull off this trick- see the endless attempts by the film industry to recharacterize and repurpose novels from the early 19th century.  Clever stuff, recommended. 

Luminous (2025) by Silvia Park

 Book Review

Luminous (2025)

by Silvia Park

     2025 was a down year for literary fiction neither the race for the Booker nor the National Book Award interested me- I didn't even recognize the semi-finalsts for the National Book Award.  Luminous, by first time novelist Silvia Park, stood out to me this year as an excellent combination of genre (science fiction) and literary fiction themes.  Luminous moves in a couple different directions and handle all its issues in a way that isn't overly didactic or stereotyped.    Luminous is one of the first really vivid visualizations of what a post-human society might look like- here we have characters who are part robot, part human, humans who have familial relationships with robots and robots that definitely, definitely want to be human.  At times, the literary fiction element made me feel like I was reading a contemporary I, Robot as written by Virginia Woolf, but my take is always that a difficult to read novel is interesting in a way that an easy-to-read novel simply is not.

  I'd highly, highly recommend picking up a copy of Luminous if you can find it in a book shop.

Helm (2025) by Sarah Hall

 Book Review

Helm (2025)

by Sarah Hall

  The New York Times review of Helm by Sarah Hall was enough to get me to check out an E-book copy from the library.  I'm a fan of ANY novel that stretches the format of the novel in any direction and a novel about a specific, named wind in the northeast of England qualifies in that department.  Hall picks out different characters over time:  A prehistoric shaman-ess, a 19th century scientist, a contemporary teenage girl with a mental disorder, and places them in relationships with Helm, who has their own, distinct, narrative voice.  It makes for engaging reading.

Katabasis (2025) by R.F. Kuang

Author R.F. Kuang

Audiobook Review

Katabasis (2025)

by R.F. Kuang

   I'm not a fantasy novel guy- I haven't read Babel, R.F. Kuang's big fantasy hit, nor her multi-volume epic Poppy War trilogy.  I know those books were hits, that they won genre specific award, etc.  I did however read Yellowface, her first NON fantasy novel, and I liked it, I have to say I was deeply impressed by Kuang on a number of levels, most of which are contained in the intro to her Wikipedia entry, which is one of the best I've ever read:

Rebecca F. Kuang (born May 29, 1996) is an American writer of mostly fantasy novels. Kuang was born in China and schooled in Texas before she studied Sinology at Cambridge and Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar. In 2025, she was completing her PhD at Yale University.

   She went to college at Georgetown for college, but I get it, and more importantly, I feel like I get her.  First and foremost, this is an author writing these books in her spare time, while she is still a full-time student.  And I mean this with the greatest respect, but she isn't writing from a well of life experience. That's also part of the appeal, this tremendously acute perspective but also so youthful. 

  Yellowface wasn't a masterpiece or anything, but it was good, and it was fun and it was wicked- so few books in the world of literary fiction are fun in any way shape or form, and fewer are wicked.  It's a rare trait that I personally associate with English/British writers like Will Self and Ian MacEwan.  When I read that Kuang's new book was a "campus novel goes to hell" I sighed.  I don't like the campus novel, but I've read a few because of their propensity to make it to canon level status. It certainly has something to do with the fact that the primary audience for literary fiction is people who are literary professionals- teachers, students of literature, graduates, would-be writers, actual writers, professionals who write as part of their job.

 In my mind the weakness of the campus novel as a genre is that it is too "inside baseball," certainly the stakes are invariably low from an objective standpoint (Will person X obtain a successful academic career against odds y or will a struggling mid-career academic manage to rescue a sense of self from the compromises required by everyday life.)  In that sense, Kuang again proves herself a savvy author by transporting her Cambridge Analytical Magic undergraduate protagonist to hell.

  In the book, magic is real, but from a metaphorical standpoint magic appears to be a stand-in for critical theory and/or philosophy.  Kuang invents an entire backstory for the role of magic in this world that parallels the story of 20th century critical theory/logic/philosophy with the central players being magic analogues of the Anglo-american analytical/logical philosophy.  She also draws up a very interesting take on hell that combines Eastern and Western traditions in a thoughtful and consistent way. 

  She contrasts the literal journey through hell by Alice Law and her male counterpart, Peter Murdoch, with flashback chapters from both perspectives.  Those chapters were tedious, an excuse for a highly successful author being able to write her campus novel with what presumes is minimal pressure from her publisher.   I'm not sure Kuang really grasps the depths of the human heart but frankly I do not give a fuck.  There are enough of those books- give me a writer with a quick wit and a sense of adventure. In that sense, Katabasis does not disappoint. 

What Can We Know (2025) by Ian McEwan

Audiobook Review

What Can We Know (2025)

by Ian McEwan

   There is no author more synonymous with the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die project than Ian McEwan.  The author continues his movement into the realms of speculative fiction- following Kazuo Ishiguro, arguably.  In 2021 he published Machines Like Me, his android book.  What Can We Know is his future-dystopia take, about a literary scholar in the farish future trying to reconstruct/discovery a famous lost poem written during our present.  In addition to the expected third act twist, What Can We Know has the distinct pleasures both of McEwan's take on the decline and fall of civilization from the perspective of someone who is living on the other side and his recounting of our present.  Clever choices, well executed, I agree with the New York Times whose headline read "The Best Novel He's Written in Ages."

Published 12/5/16
The Cement Garden (1978)
 by Ian McEwan

  The Cement Garden is another example of a classic that was only retrospectively awarded that status after the author obtained a critical and commercial audience with the success of a later work.  In this case, that later work is Amsterdam, which won the Booker in 1998.  He had another hit with Atonement, the movie version of which won an Oscar.   He continues to publish new titles, and his hits are airport book store mainstays.  His q rating among people who have actually purchased a book in the last twelve months is probably close to 100%.

  Which is all to say that The Cement Garden, a dry, sparse, horrific tale about three siblings who suffer the natural deaths of both parents within the space of a few months.  They are alone, without family, friends or even neighbors, since they occupy the single standing home in a development of abandoned, decaying, lots.   There is also an explicit incest theme which ends up playing a critical role in the denouement.   It's no wonder that The Cement Garden was not the hit that McEwan needed, but it was his first novel, and so here we are.

Published 1/16/17
The Comfort of Strangers (1981)
 by Ian McEwan

  Ian McEwan lost an astonishing five titles (of eight) that were deemed worthy of inclusion in the 1st edition of the 1001 Books list in the 2008 revision.   This decision tells you all you need to know about the flaws of the first list: An over-representation of late 20th century authors who achieved a measure of popular and critical success as judged by editors in the very early 21st century.  Ian McEwan and J.M Coetzee allegedly represent 2% of the books one needs to read before one dies, according to the first edition of this list.  That is insanity.  You can't tell me that during 2000 plus years of literature, EIGHT Ian McEwan novels make the list and The Odyssey, Dante's Inferno and The Canterbury Tales are all found wanting.

  Perhaps the justification is that a large majority of readers are likely to have read books like The Odyssey, and therefore they don't need to be included, but how many people who bought the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die book had read either Atonement or Amsterdam, McEwan's huge critically acclaimed, prize winning, spectacular novels?  I would bet that is over 50% of the potential  audience for the 1001 Books list.

  Which is not to say that The Comfort of Strangers, McEwan's second novel, isn't worth a read.  This novel, along with his first, earned him the nickname "Ian Macabre" and based on this novel and the Cement Garden it's not hard to see an alternate universe where McEwan turned into something like an English version of Stephen King.    The Comfort of Strangers follows a middle-aged English couple on holiday in a nameless city.  They come into contact with a strange local couple and what happens next... will shock you.  Suffice it to say that Christopher Walken plays the husband of the shadowy pair the English couple encounter in the movie version.

Published 4/26/17
The Child in Time (1987)
by Ian McEwan

  McEwan placed an ASTONISHING number of titles on the first edition of the 1001 Books list: 8!  Five of them were dropped in 2008.  Another title was dropped in 2010, leaving him with only two core titles:  Atonement (his biggest hit) and The Cement Garden (his first novel.)  McEwan is an author I've always had an attitude about- I've never read Atonement, never read Amsterdam, never seen any of the movies, would laugh at someone who expressed appreciation for his talents- typical hipster bullshit attitude stuff.  But I was impressed by The Cement Garden- which is spoooky as hell, and this book- The Child in Time- which is his breakthrough in terms of his- I think- characteristic ability to warp the workings of time and space.  I think that's where he's headed in his big monster hits, though I can't quite be sure.

 It's true that your authors from the 1980's who combine critical and popular success tend to couple solid, if uninspired technique with power packed twists, much in the same way a movie works to develop suspense.  Here, McEwan starts with a horrifying event: the abduction of a 3-year-old child from a grocery store checkout counter in London and traces its impact on the life of the father, the protagonist, and his wife and family.    The Child in Time obviously lacks the immense swagger of his later blockbusters, but all the elements are there.

  But losing six out of eight original titles- would clearer evidence could one have of the extremely arbitrary and biased process of canon making exercise. "Yes, let's include eight books from a guy who literally everyone who buys this book will have already heard of, because he's popular right as we are publishing this book- that's a good idea."

Published 1/20/18
Enduring Love (1997)
 by Ian McEwan

  The problem with writing about the books of Ian McEwan is that he specializes in the third act twist, and any casual discussion risks ruining the pleasure the reader might derive from McEwan's expertise in plotting.  Enduring Love, about two strangers, both men, whose lives become intertwined after they jointly witness a horrific ballooning accident, falls squarely into this description.   Joe Rose, 47, a failed physicist and successful writer of "pop science" non fiction, is having a quiet picnic in the countryside with his Keats-scholar girlfriend when they see a hot-air balloon with a small child in the basket, threatening to escape the grasp of the operator.

   Rose, along with several other men in the area, try to stop the balloon from flying away.  One of the would-be good Samaritans continues to hold onto the rope while all the others, including Rose, let go.  The man who remains holding onto the rope plummets to his death from a great height shortly thereafter.  In the aftermath, one of the other witnesses, a sad loner named Jed Parry becomes obsessed with Rose and this obsession drives the rest of the book. 

  The third act twist, when it comes, is as satisfying as any. Reading McEwan is always a pleasure.  His achievement is to write books steeped in dread and bad feeling that are easy and fun to read.  His successful combination of literary function and the pleasures of genre fiction mark all of his books.

Published 1/6/18
Amsterdam (1998)
 by Ian McEwan

  There is no doubting that Ian McEwan is a top flight writer of literary fiction, with genuine cross-over potential- see best seller's on both side of the Atlantic and an Oscar winning movie version of his biggest, most ambitious work, Atonement.   And he is still very much active and writing, with six titles in the last decade-ish.   McEwans' rise is well chronicled in the 1001 Books list.  Atonement, published in 2001, six years before 1001 Books first edition came out, was his huge break out, but he actually won the Booker Prize in 1998, for Amsterdam, which bears strong elements from his "Ian Macabre" phase, but also the exquisite plotting and character development that (I guess) made Atonement such a smash.

  Like many of his books, there is something to lose by a thorough description of the story.  There is no question that McEwan's rise has been at least partially to his darkness and dramatic third act denouements.  If you make your way through his stuff in a leisurely way, each book comes as a mild surprise.  If there is any surprise to reading Amsterdam it's that it won the Booker Prize.  It's a short book, not three hundred pages long with decent sized print and generous margins.  There is no diversity element- all the character are well off Londoners.  The plot does concern itself with contemporary social issues in a certain way- that gives Amsterdam an element that his earlier stuff lacks.

  But I think the Booker Prize was just a "damn this is a great book by a great writer, and he sells, too, let's do this!"  That is how I imagine the Judges discussion that year.  Or maybe it was just a weak year- I don't recognize any of the other books on the shortlist from 1998.

\

Published 3/9/18
Atonement (2001)
by Ian McEwan


  Another in a remarkable succession of books that were critically acclaimed, commercially succesful and the basis of succesful film versions,  Atonement is the kind of novel that really deserves to be called "meta fiction," with a narrator who is a novelist who is writing a novel about a "real" event about her life, and a novel about her life.  That person is Briony Tallis, who starts out as a young woman who wrongfully identifies her sister's new lover as a rapist, leading to his false imprisonment.  The title refers to her atonement for that false accusation.  Revealing that much is no spoiler, since Briony presents the initial accusation with a preface that she regrets what happened.
   And although there is a very personal and intimate betrayal at the heart of Atonement, which is classic Ian McEwan, there is little else to link this book to his earlier works, except the generally high level of execution and a history of twist-like third act resolutions.  He's not know for historical fiction, and Atonement is mostly a work of historical fiction.  No one is murdered, no animals are tortured.  You could almost say he was selling out, were Atonement not based on a blatantly false mis-identification and subsequent imprisonment.

Published 4/18/18
Saturday (2005)
 by Ian McEwan

  Ian McEwan is an author who immediately challenges the "Early/Middle/Late" principle of 3 works for any author in the literary canon.  Saturday is the last of seven books he place in the first edition of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die.  Since 1001 Books was published in 2006, he's published six more novels, one of which (On Chesil Beach, 2007) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  He has yet another novel coming out this year, which would seem to indicate that there is no clear point at which to demarcate the periods of McEwan's writing except for the beginning. 

  As far as the beginning goes, The Cement Garden, 1978, which is his first published novel, makes a great choice.  None of his other early books clearly surpasses it, and it was published first, so pick that one.   The next question is, what is the cut-off point for mid-period Ian McEwan, and of course, here the difficulties begin.  At least setting the boundary between early and middle should be possible.

  I think the proper dividing line is Black Dogs (1992) and Enduring Love (1997).   Enduring Love is the first book that really explores his mid-period combination of the exquisite workings of fate with specialized medical and scientific knowledge wielded for good and/or evil by a troubled protagonist.   Picking a middle period representative is pretty easy, probably Atonement (2001), which is his best seller, his most famous and maybe his best book as well.  It's the cut off for the middle period where his continued productivity causes problems.

   It could be anywhere, really,  On Chesil Beach, his last book to be nominated for a major literary prize, makes a certain amount of sense, or the next book, Solar (2010).  The late period representative is impossible to determine.   Cutting out the other five books brings his 1001 Books total down to two, which seems about right for a truly representative canon.

   Saturday, then, is a cut. It is squarely inside his middle period, about a single day in the life of a neurosurgeon who has a chance encounter with a Huntington's disease suffering cockney gangster in a fender bender caused by Iraqi war protestors.  The liberal use of brain surgeon language makes Saturday an ideal Kindle read- being able to touch a particular term and bring up the Wikipedia page before progressing was invaluable in this case, and you can count on McEwan for a reasonable length for all of his books. 

Published 5/10/19
Machines Like Me (2019)
by Ian McEwan

  Ian MacEwan is a giant of literary fiction in the United Kingdom, in the United States he isn't as popular, but MacEwan is still one of those non-American writers of literary fiction who sells enough to merit a United States specific press campaign and book tour.   I therefore had high hopes for Machines Like Me, MacEwan's latest book, sparking a wave of MacEwan related press and excitement, but alas, it seems like the public reception for Machines Like Me  has been muted. 

   It was hard to read Machines Like Me without thinking about Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.  Both books take place in a parallel science-fiction past/present where technology has advanced beyond that of our own world while at the same time maintaining a retro air in the area of aesthetics and creature comforts.  In Never Let Me Go the sci fi element where clones grown for organ transplants, in Machines Like Me, the hook is artificially intelligent androids, produced in a limited edition of 26, 13 Adam's and 13 Eve's. 

 Charlie Friend, the narrator of Machines Like Me, purchases one of the Adam's, the Eve's already sold out.  Friend is not the kind of independently wealthy gentleman you would imagine buying such a cutting edge technological innovation: he has recently inherited some money after the death of his mother, and he scrapes by day trading and engaging in a desultory affair with his upstairs neighbor, who may or may not have framed a man for rape.

  MacEwan doesn't stint on his alternate history/past, a world where Alan Turing refused chemical castration, avoided suicide and emerged as an apostle of open world science (and artificial intelligence).    MacEwan is known for his interest in technical research in many of his books, sometimes it is intimately intertwined with the plot, other times it just kind of sits there.  Machines Like Me is more of the later than the former,  at times the exposition is closer to what you would find in genre fiction. 

 Like every Ian MacEwan book, events take a dark turn.  He didn't earn the nickname, "Ian Macabre" for nothing!

The Möbius Book (2025) by Catherine Lacey

 Audiobook Review

The Möbius Book (2025)

 by Catherine Lacey

  I loved The Biography of X, Catherine Lacey's 2023 combination of alternate history, downtown New York art scene report and LGBT character study.  I listened to the Audiobook, then had someone track down a hard copy in New York at a time when I couldn't find a copy here in LA, then read the hardcover, then told everyone that I loved it.  It wasn't quite enough to get me into her back catalog, but it was enough for me to check out her new work, The Möbius Book, which is billed as a combination memoir/fiction with a typographical stunt where the nonfiction is written in one direction, and then the fiction is written in the opposite direction.  Honestly, I would have bought a copy on my recent travels, but I couldn't find it anywhere.  Instead, I checked out the Audiobook from library.   Apologies to authorial intent.  

  It occurred to me, as it did to the reviewer in the New York Times, that Lacey might be playing a trick on the reader, as she is wont to do.  The Times wasn't the only review to make that point- a quick internet search revealed a feature from The Observer published in June which named her ex-husband, author Jesse Ball.  The memoir portion calls Ball "The Reason" and depicts a number of behaviors which, objectively speaking, border on the abusive.   I'm not talking in any criminal sense- the worst it gets is Ball/The Reason breaking things near the body of Lacey but it is disturbing stuff.   The fictional portion also deals with a woman, Edie, struggling with the end of a relationship, and her friend also dealing with the end of her lesbian marriage.  It all sounds pretty mundane, but Lacey is bonafide interesting author and I enjoyed the topic in spite of myself because of the wit and insightfulness Lacey brings to the table.  I think it is time to get into the back catalog.

 Also Happy Booker Longlist day!!!

Vanishing World (2025) by Sayaka Murata

 Audiobook Review

Vanishing World (2025)

by Sayaka Murata

Translated from the Japanese by Sayaka Murata

  I'm not an anime watching fetishist, but it is hard to deny the emergence of East Asia on the global cultural stage since World War II.  Compare the popularity of cultural products emerging out of markets like South Korea, Japan and Taiwan to places like France and Germany.  When was the last time a German act played Coachella?   Generally speaking, if the New York Times does a full length or capsule length review of a work of fiction translated from Japanese, Korean or Chinese, I'm going to take a look and if I see anything like "speculative fiction" or the like I'm going to check out the Audiobook and maybe even read an E-copy on my Kindle.   It's one of the most interesting areas in global fiction- East Asia and South Asia I'd say, but South Asia gets a boost because of the large number of English language speakers. 

   Vanishing World has it all: It's a work of disturbing speculative fiction, and it takes place in an alternate present where Japan turned to IVF after World War II, and where traditional sex between a married couple has become akin to incest.   It is a fascinating world, drawn out with the kind of wavy realism that I associate with Japanese literature read in translation.  Getting the Audiobook was a real stroke of luck. I spend so much time waiting for Audiobooks in the library queue. 

  But this was one of my top books of the year for sure. 

Perspective (2025) by Laurent Binet

 Book Review

Perspective (2025)

by Laurent Binet

   This is pretty clearly a Laurent Binet riff on Umberto Eco or, more recently, Alvaro Enrique- i.e. a medieval who-dun-it with real life characters.  The plot involves a risque portrait of a duchess (or somebody like that) and the efforts her scheming father will go through to retrieve the portrait and her honor.   I was disappointed and barely paid attention, a sad miss for Binet, from my perspective, or at least not the kind of inventiveness I'd expected from his other books. 

Brother Brontë (2025) by Fernando Flores

 Audiobook Review

Brother Brontë (2025) 

by Fernando Flores

 I checked out the Audiobook of Brother Brontë from the library based on the capsule review in the New York Times book review promising Latin American themed/dystopian/literary fiction, and it was that, though perhaps it suffers from the narrow viewpoint common to many protagonists in post-apocalyptic fiction.  If you don't know anything different, what is there even to say about the situation.  Here, Flores hedges his bets by making one of the young-ish characters a "last bookworm" sort of heroine.   Various elements flash into view and then disappear, rendering the proceedings closer to literary fiction, but less exciting than genre.  Only the setting, which I imagined to be something like Brownsville, on the Mexican/Texas border, really stirred by imagination.    My issue with Brother Brontë is similar to my issue with the YA and child narrators from the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America list:  They don't go anywhere, they don't do anything, and they aren't particularly interesting people, being under 13 and poorly educated.   The sameness of the inner experience of the lower echelons of the socio-economic ladder across genre and geography is something that is never commented upon by literary critics, but I think it is worth noting. 

A Crooked Tree (2021) by Una Mannion

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

 A Crooked Tree (2021)

by Una Mannion

Valley Forge Mountain, Pennsylvania 

Pennsylvania: 1/27

   New Year, New States!  I've run out of easily available Audiobooks from the last chapter (Maryland through South Carolina) so I'm moving forward on two fronts- back north to Pennsylvania and continuing south through Georgia and Florida while I try to polish off the Ebook/physical book portion of the prior chapter.   The first book from Pennsylvania is A Crooked Tree by Una Mannion.  This novel is from the most common category of the 1,001 Novels project:  A bildungsroman written from the POV of a adolescent girl in difficult socio-economic circumstances, sub-category white, sub-category debut novel.  Like almost all of the books in this category we've got a narrator who is trapped in her family home, in the middle of nowhere (played here by someplace called "Valley Forge Mountain.")

  Here, our narrator is Libby, an awkward 15 year old girl living with her single mom and three siblings (one older sister, one older brother, two younger sisters.)  Driving home from school at the beginning of the book, her younger sister angers her Mom to the point where mom abandons younger sister on the side of the road, forcing her to walk home.  Sister is picked up and mildly assaulted by the sinister "barbie man" an albino type dude with long blonde hair.  Sister jumps out of barbie man's moving vehicle to escape and reaches Libby's weekly babysitting gig, promising her to secrecy so that their mom doesn't get in trouble.  Events move forward from that point in somewhat predictable fashion- I was surprised at the number of reviewers who expressed enthusiasm at the plotting in A Crooked Tree but it might be a function of my day-to-day experience in the criminal justice system.

     The world of "the mountain" is well-depicted, but I wasn't particularly enthralled by Libby or her troubled family.