I don’t know what kind of reader I’ve become lately. I used to go about this with the somewhat unshakable belief that a really very good book would reward good attention, that if I just showed up fully, it would too. Like in life. Like with people. But these days, this month, I was much slower than usual. I don’t even know if slow is the right word. Maybe, in a way, I was less patient. Turned my nose up at the kind of writing that either just entertains or merely instructs. I was much hungrier for books that aim to unsettle, to reveal ugly truths, to ruin me a little.
I know why this is, actually, of course I do. During my years-long love affair with books, I’ve always made them my mirrors. What I am, they become. What I feel bleeds into what I read. The book in my hands becomes a ghost that strikes a chord I didn’t know was exposed, that whispers truths I’m not ready for. So, because this month I’ve nursed a quiet kind of grief – the kind that lingers in the background while you go about your days, pretending you’re fine – the books I chose shone a harsh light on that. Because something that meant a lot to me fell away, and I’ve been left to reconcile the absence, the loss, the stillness, I chose books that met me where I was, I chose books that hit different because I was different.
So yeah, I’m having a bit of an issue calling this a list or a roundup. This month, it feels like it’s more than that. It’s more like a messy, meandering memory palace of the things I’ve read recently that have done something to me. Some picked at my scabs, others I quarelled with angrily, because they were trace evidence of things I was trying to forget.
They feel very personal to me now, while I’m writing this. So I can’t pretend I’m recommending them to you objectively. But come to think of it, did I ever? Pick them up, why don’t you? Maybe they’ll nudge you toward something. Which, frankly, is all I ask of any book these days.
Palaver, Bryan Washington, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025
This is a novel that reads like something looser, more fluid. It spirals and backtracks like a conversation you’ve had a hundred times in your head but never dared say out loud. The kind that begins with “just checking in” and ends with everything between the lines. It follows a man living in Japan, detached from the life he grew up with in Houston, and his mother, who suddenly shows up in his world, uninvited, unmoved by the barriers time, distance and language have tried to erect. The prose is slippery, elliptical, tentative, and it felt exactly like being inside a difficult relationship you’ve inherited rather than chosen
There’s something slow-burning about it, yes, but also something bruising. If you’re familiar with Washington’s writing, his gift is to make you feel the skin-on-skin friction of two people who cannot speak without hurting each other, but try anyway. There is tenderness, but it’s complicated tenderness, full of unhealed things and things that won’t be healed.
I kept circling back to the title: Palaver. On one end of the word, it’s noise, babble. On the other, it’s colonial, a translation of failed or tense dialogue between cultures. Both meanings apply. The mother and son talk, but they don’t talk. They perform and deflect and occasionally strike something raw and true. And maybe that’s what love is like in families. Or at least in families that have fracture written into their very grammar.
I don’t know if it hit me harder because of what I’ve been going through, but I kept seeing myself in their orbit. Their failed attempts to bridge something that doesn’t have a name anymore. Their loneliness didn’t feel stylized or literary. It just felt like life. I used to say “loneliness is a feeling,” but this book reminded me that loneliness can be a structure, a way of speaking, a set of choices made years ago by people who didn’t know how to be close, passed down in silence.
After the Divorce, Grazia Deledda, translated by Susan Ashe, Northwestern University Press, 1995
I’m not quite sure why I picked this one up; maybe it had something to do with remembering, vaguely, that D.H. Lawrence was an avid admirer of Deledda. I must’ve read that years ago, in college, and tucked it away in some dusty corner of my brain. Maybe it was the Sardinian setting, maybe the Nobel thing – she was the first Italian to win it, the second woman ever. Or maybe I was hoping for something revelatory, a quiet lesson on love and loss and heartache, one that transcends time and place and memory.
But the truth is, the novel itself didn’t move me as much as I hoped. First published in 1902, the plot felt too melodramatic, too soapy in a way that made me feel distant rather than drawn in. A woman divorces her incarcerated husband and marries a wealthier man to survive. Yes, there’s power in that setup, in its refusal to judge her for it, but I still found myself skimming past the plot and leaning into something else.
What did hold me was Sardinia. Not the Sardinia of postcards or myth, but the way Deledda writes the land. She renders it with such detail and poetry that it almost lifted the story out of its more pedestrian drama. Those passages kept me going. It’s the kind of nature writing that doesn’t feel ornamental, but rooted in something deeply known. I found myself imagining the same hills and stone houses, the sunlit patches of field, the wind-swept silence, and suddenly, the characters became more believable by proximity.
There’s something else too, something I’m trying to make sense of. I felt guilty not loving this book. Like I was supposed to – for historical reasons, for feminist reasons, for literary reasons. But the truth is, it just didn’t speak to me in the way I wanted it to. And maybe that’s okay. Not every book has to be a perfect match. Sometimes it’s enough to sit with something that was once revolutionary, even if it doesn’t ring revolutionary to you now. Sometimes it’s about seeing the space between then and now and realizing how far we’ve come, and how much still stings the same.
Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil, translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, Routledge, 2002
Back at the end of January, I read Living Death in Our Times by Jacqueline Rose. It’s basically essays on Camus, Freud, and Weil. I didn’t click with it fully, but it left me with one clear to-do: read Gravity and Grace. I made a mental note of it, then put it off for almost a year. I think I knew, in some quiet, intuitive way, that it was going to be heavy – on my heart, on my brain, on my limbs. And I was right. I think I chose it now because I needed something deeper, more vast, to match my ache.
It’s not a book you read for comfort. It’s not even a book you read to understand. Most of the time, I felt like I was just holding space for it, letting it pass through me like a current. While I was reading it, in deep fascination of her great mind, I kept telling myself I’m not old enough to understand her philosophy. But will I ever be? Are any of us ever old enough to grasp what this Platonist Christian Jewish mystic is trying to convey in her severe, luminous, dispassionately piercing words?
I can’t in good conscience even try to review it. What I can say is that reading her now, at this point in my life, struck something primal. She speaks of pain in a way that leaves no room for metaphor. It’s not something to overcome or fix, or outrun, but something to be met face to face, and to remain untainted by. Not romanticized, not resisted, just fully seen. We should not seek to suffer less, but to remain untainted by suffering, she writes. And somehow that didn’t feel like cruelty to me, but discipline. Pain reveals reality, if you don’t look away, if you pay full attention to it. This idea of attention – radical, undivided, almost holy – hit the hardest. That there is grace in simply not flinching. In looking directly. That the act of paying attention, fully and without defense, is a kind of spiritual act. And that maybe, when everything else collapses, attention is the only form of love we have left.
I will return to this. Again and again, once a year, like a quiet act of devotion. Or maybe like a corset. Something I put on to remember the shape of what it means to live truthfully.
There Lives a Young Girl in Me Who Will Not Die: Selected Poems, Tove Ditlevsen, translated by Jennifer Russell and Sophia Hersi Smith, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025
Though these poems were written between 1939 and 1973, what startled me most was how familiar they felt. A different era altogether, yes, but the wound of a love gone wrong, the shame and sorrow of womanhood, the rage, the quiet undoing of the self – it’s all still here. Ditlevsen could’ve written this yesterday. Or I could’ve written it. Or you. There’s a universality in her ache, and reading her in the wake of my own separation, I saw myself – newly cracked, tender, raw – in almost every line. There’s a young girl in all of us who refuses to die, even when the world, and ourselves, try to bury her.
I picked up this book somewhat frightened, thinking it would press salt into the gaping wound I carry around these days. But instead, it offered me a window. I sat at it for a while, resting. Breathing. Letting the gust of another woman’s grief pass through me like wind through a house someone has left. That metaphor, by the way, is hers – one of the last lines in the poem The New Owner, and one I don’t think I’ll ever forget: “I am a house someone has left.” The poem doesn’t try to redeem the loss. She’s not looking for meaning in it, or strength. She’s not trying to transcend the emotion. There’s just the ordinary cruelty of heartbreak and its echoing silence. No one to yell at anymore. No one to fight for. Just a locked door. “I miss nothing,” she writes, “but on this night / I mourn that there is nothing to miss.” And isn’t that what real loss feels like? A ghost of absence. A grief without an object.
I was also struck by how subversive her so-called sentimentality is. Her refusal to edit or aestheticize her emotions is exactly what makes them powerful. Her sensitivity is not weakness. It’s survival. A woman’s emotional life is rarely given the space to just be what it is, foolish or not. Maybe that’s why this book hit me the way it did. My own pain made me hyper-attuned to her deep and devastating honesty about what it means to still be that young girl inside, long after the world has told you to grow up and shut up. And she will not die. She’ll hum and spin through the daily grind of motherhood and loneliness and memory. And one day, maybe she’ll look out that window and not feel quite so alone.
Vaim, Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls, Fitzcarraldo, 2025
One sentence. The whole novel. A single winding stream of consciousness about a man in search of a needle and thread to sew a loose button. That’s it. That’s the plot. This is Fosse’s first novel after the Nobel and the first in a trilogy, and the thread he weaves (pun definitely intended) is as confusing and simple as life itself. Do I think it holds a candle to the luminous depth of Septology? Not really. Septology was monumental. But though Vaim is smaller in scope, quieter, looser, it’s still buzzing with that peculiar Fosse electricity. It’s unmistakably his.
And that’s why I loved it. I loved it so much, guys. It gave me a strange, unplaceable joy. Not loud joy, more like the kind that settles in your bones. Like slipping into a warm bath and sighing at the way the water holds you. With its stuttering repetitions, Vaim is more sensation than story. It doesn’t explain itself. It just is. And in being, it becomes almost a prayer. A man looking for a needle and thread, and by doing so, resisting despair in the most Fossean way possible.
I feel for the readers who picked up this book as their first Fosse and walked away unimpressed, confused, a little smug even, like they were owed something more decipherable, more showy. They missed the point. This is not a book that invites you to understand it. It invites you to sit with it. To breathe with it. To let the quiet strangeness soak in. And if you can do that, it will reward you. It will anchor you.
It grounded me, that’s for sure. I, too, am searching for the needle and the thread – not literally, obviously, but you know what I mean. That small thing you need to mend something torn. The thing you lost track of, maybe long ago. The thing you suspect might still be waiting for you somewhere, if only you knew where to look.
I’m rambling now. Just read the damn thing, will you?
La Maison Vide, Laurent Mauvignier, Minuit, 2025
This year’s Prix Goncourt winner, and a masterpiece I read in the original French (which is how it should be read, honestly; it’s not translated yet, but even when it is, I doubt I’d want to touch anything but the original). I’m still trying to find a way to talk about it. Where do you even start with a 752-page novel that somehow never loses tension, never flattens? The writing is exquisite. Long, coiling sentences that reminded me – as they were meant to – of Marcel Proust. (The name Firmin Proust isn’t exactly subtle, either.)
What moved me most wasn’t the plot, but the thick, generational layering of silence and grief and endurance – a matrilineal transmission of trauma so densely woven it almost becomes invisible. A novel where the women don’t just populate the story – they are the story. Even when they’re silenced or erased. In fact, especially then.
It’s a novel of war – both World Wars, in fact – but the battles fought here are often indoors, in kitchens, behind closed doors, inside crumbling houses and marriages. Women survive. Women endure. Women carry the weight of absent men, cruel men, weak men. The men go to war or disappear or betray. The women stay. And stay. And stay.
There’s Marie-Ernestine, trained for a life she never gets to live, shut up with her piano and bitterness. Marguerite, her daughter, who never gets to be a child, who’s sent to work at thirteen and is immediately devoured by the world. And Paulette – God, I loved Paulette – with her big mouth and unfiltered wisdom, calling Marguerite a gourdasse and offering something like a blueprint for survival.
What stunned me was how the novel seems to be about how we remember what we cannot possibly know. The narrator admits it: some things can’t be imagined; they resist; they stay hidden. And yet the act of narrating becomes an act of reaching into that void. Language becomes excavation, stitching together what time has unravelled. It made me think of how families fracture not only because of what’s said, but because of what isn’t – what’s swallowed, what’s buried, what’s forgotten on purpose.
This is a novel about the violence of love withheld. About the bruises women inherit in silence. About the things that echo long after the people who caused them are dead.
I loved it. Every branch, every wound, every sentence.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai, Hogarth, 2025
Another 700-plus-page giant, yes, but this one wrapped me in a completely different kind of spell than La Maison Vide. Still an epic saga, still about family and inheritance and love and longing, but its movement felt gentler somehow, less about excavation and more about immersion. There’s this tender, all-encompassing intimacy to it. You open the book and fall into a universe so fully realized, you never once feel adrift. Desai takes your hand and guides you through multiple timelines, geographies, and characters without ever letting the thread slip. You never wonder, “Wait, who is this again?” You always know, and it’s kind of magic how she pulls that off.
Also, it’s funny. It’s genuinely, sharply, gorgeously funny. That almost startled me. I’ve read a lot of immigrant stories over the years – heavy, tragic, sincere to the bone – and I’m not saying this one isn’t those things. It is. But it’s also so alive. The grief is rendered in soft pencil strokes, the displacement feels lived-in, and the solitude comes in little details, moments that prickle rather than stab. No one is spared – not family, not tradition, not America, not even the pain itself. It’s funny in the way that only real loneliness can be funny. You laugh because otherwise you’d dissolve.
Some people say it could’ve been some hundred pages shorter. I couldn’t disagree more. I didn’t want it to end. I needed it not to end. It felt like a kindred spirit, a companion to sit with, to get lost in, to watch these quiet, absurd, aching little lives unfold with. The characters felt like people you’ve known forever, but can’t quite place. Their hopelessness made me feel seen. Their routines gave me something to hold onto.
I don’t want to spoil a single plot point. This isn’t about that. This is about the way the novel feels, how you carry it around with you, how you keep hearing its voice in your head when you’re walking home from work, or brushing your teeth, or lying in bed trying not to text the person you shouldn’t text. If you’re the kind of reader who loves long books, not in spite of their length but because of it – because they give you time to settle in, to disappear, to be held – then this one is for you. It was definitely for me.
Pick a Colour, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Knopf, 2025
I picked this one up mostly because it won the Giller Prize – and since I loved last year’s winner (Held by Anne Michaels), I figured I’d trust the jury again. And I mean, I liked it. I did. But I also read it right after The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which was this deep, sprawling, funny, sad, everything-all-at-once kind of book, and Pick a Colour… wasn’t. Which isn’t the book’s fault.
It’s short – not even two hundred pages – and follows one day in the life of Ning, who works in a nail salon where every worker is named Susan (at least according to their name tags). She used to be a boxer, and there are glimmers of that life, fragments of her past, her thoughts on the customers, her immigrant experience. It’s a quiet and sparsely introspective book. I liked how it portrayed invisibility so plainly, like stating a weather condition. Nothing dramatic to see here, folks, just a fact of living.
But still, I felt like the book was… just vibing. Meandering. Never quite asking me to feel much. Or maybe it was asking, and I just didn’t hear it – I was still too deep in Desai’s orbit to tune in properly. Maybe it needed more room to breathe, or maybe I needed to show up more fully for it. Maybe it’s one of those books that hands you all the pieces and waits for you to do the work – and I wasn’t in the mood to puzzle it out.
That’s on me, probably. Or maybe it’s just the kind of story that doesn’t aim for impact so much as resonance. A low note held in the background. Either way, I wouldn’t steer you away from it. I’m genuinely curious to hear what you think. Come back to me with a knowing nod or a deserved slap on the wrist. I’ll take either.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad, Knopf, 2025
Let’s get something straight right from the start: this book should be required reading. No debate, no footnotes. Just: read it. I don’t care who you are, where you land politically, or how exhausted you are by the noise of it all. This is the kind of book that walks into the room, turns the lights on, and makes sure you’re fully, uncomfortably awake.
Now, what you need to know about me is that I’m a liberal. I’ve been accused of being a leftist – and fine, I’ll take it. I care about people. I care about the world. I like to believe I’m empathetic. If that’s “too heavy” for a liberal and means I’m leaning left, sure, why not. You do you, baby. But back to the point at hand. This book cracked something open in me, because what El Akkad does – without grandstanding, without sugarcoating – is expose, with scalpel precision, how utterly insufficient liberals’ so-called empathy can be. Especially when it comes to Palestine.
There’s a line that gutted me: “…the well-meaning liberal who…can shrug their shoulders and say, Yes, it’s all so very sad, but you know, it’s all so very complicated.” That’s me. That’s us. That’s so many of the people I know. The ones who claim moral clarity but don’t have the guts to name the genocide in a full stop sentence. Who flinch at discomfort, who stay silent just long enough to keep their social currency intact.
I winced. I felt physically sick. And it wasn’t because El Akkad was telling me anything new – it was because he wasn’t. He wasn’t trying to persuade me of anything; he wasn’t begging me to care; he didn’t demand sympathy. He assumed I already knew the horror stories of occupied Palestine. And he was right. I did. What he wanted from me was mirror-held-up-to-your-face honesty. The kind of honesty that leaves you without excuses.
To me personally, this book felt like an indictment of complicity. It wouldn’t let me pretend I’m doing enough. I felt it like knives on my skin. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe I should be hurt by this. Maybe we all should be hurt by this. Maybe the moral bruises matter more than our comfort.
Maybe you should ask yourself, like I did – not abstractly, but in the here and now – When it matters, do you side with justice, or do you side with power?
And if the answer shames you, maybe don’t look away.
Closing Words
I don’t know if these books will stay with you the way they stayed with me. I don’t even know if they’ll stay with me. Not all of them, anyway. Some will fade in the distance, like actors leaving the stage after playing a minor – albeit intense – part. Some I’ll definitely reread, because they’re not finished with me. Nor I with them. Some I’ll quote during an evening night out with friends, without remembering where the line came from.
That’s okay. That’s how memory works. That’s how reading works, too, if you let it. What matters is that each one – in its own voice, at its own volume – asked something of me. Some sort of reckoning. Definitely some hard(er) questions. And maybe that’s exactly what I needed from each one. Not to fix my ache, but to help me witness it by pressing a gentle palm to the bruise.
