I don’t know what this month was, exactly. A literary buffet? A punishment? A neurological experiment I conducted on myself without signing the consent form?
At some point, while moving from Can Xue’s dissociative love labyrinth to Chekhov’s snow-lit humanity, then from a Brazilian penal colony to an elderly man on an Italian beach trying very hard not to become his own mother’s ghost, I started to feel like my brain had become one of those airport luggage belts where objects appear with absolutely no explanation. A suitcase. A cello. A bag of frozen shrimp. Selma Lagerlöf riding past on a sleigh. Elizabeth Strout asking whether anyone in a marriage has ever known anything, ever.
It wasn’t a bad month. Actually, it was a very good one. But it was uneven in a way that makes reading feel alive. Some books opened slowly, like old houses with stubborn doors. Some fizzled out after promising me a séance. Some were so short I resented them for leaving before they’d properly introduced themselves to me. And one made me read about Taiwanese food for what felt like six to eight business years.
This was also the month I finished my small Nobel women project, which sounds grander than it was, because, alas, the list of women who have won the Nobel Prize in Literature remains insultingly short. Still. I finished it with Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win, and that felt right. A ceremonial closing of the circle. Like putting a candle in the window for all the women who wrote before literature decided to admit, begrudgingly, that they had hands.
So here we are. Ten books. A few masterpieces. A few irritations. One haunted warden. Several forms of loneliness. Too much food. Not enough goose.
Let’s begin.
The Old Man by the Sea, Domenico Starnone, translated by Oonagh Stransky, Europa Editions, 2025
I came to this because of the old rumour that Domenico Starnone might be Elena Ferrante, or might be married to Elena Ferrante, or might be one half of a literary trench coat situation. I don’t know. I’m not a detective, although spiritually I do become one whenever there’s a literary pseudonym involved. Obviously, my curiosity was piqued. A writer allegedly adjacent to Ferrante? An old man by the sea? Autofictional melancholy? Complicated mothers? Say less. I am already seated, slightly suspicious, holding a pencil.
The premise is simple. An elderly man arrives in a seaside town near Rome. He sits on the beach. He writes in a notebook. He observes locals, befriends strangers, inserts himself gently or not so gently into other people’s lives. He remembers his parents, especially his mother, who begins to appear everywhere — not as a ghost exactly, but as the kind of memory that does not visit so much as squat in the corner.
Here’s what’s clever: the narrative keeps folding back on itself, like sourdough. The old man writes, then questions what he has written. He chastises himself for cheap metaphors. He rewrites. He doubts his own sentences. The book becomes, at moments, less about what is happening and more about the act of making something happen on the page. Are these encounters real? Are they being shaped by the old man’s writerly hunger? Is he lonely, manipulative, observant, pathetic, tender, ridiculous, or just old in the terrifyingly human way people become old, which is to say, suddenly overrun by all the previous versions of themselves?
I liked the idea of this more than I liked the book itself.
I enjoyed watching the old man watch himself. I enjoyed the unease of him seeing his dead mother superimposed onto a young woman, which is exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds, and meant to be. I enjoyed the book’s preoccupation with language, with the way a sentence can betray you by being too easy, too pretty, too false.
But I kept waiting for the emotional development to become as interesting as the setup. It never quite did. It circled, glimmered, made a few strange gestures, then sat back down on the beach and looked at the water. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe ageing is precisely that: not a crescendo, but a series of returns. To the mother. To the self. To the same old wound, now wearing a linen shirt.
It passed through me like a pleasant wind that had once considered becoming a storm, then changed its mind.
On Earth as It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia, translated by Padma Viswanathan, Charco Press, 2025
Now this one. This one came in holding a machete.
I thought I was picking up a dystopian novel, but On Earth as It Is Beneath is less dystopia and more survival horror with political bones. It takes place in a remote penal colony in Brazil, a place built on land already soaked in violence. Before the prison, there was a slave concentration camp. Before the current cruelty, there were older cruelties, layered beneath the soil like something decomposing badly.
The colony is meant for men considered beyond rehabilitation. Society has done that neat little moral trick it loves so much: deciding some people are no longer people, then congratulating itself for tidiness. The prison is being shut down, the inmates are supposed to be moved elsewhere, but the warden, Melquíades, has gone absolutely rogue. Every full moon, he chooses two prisoners, gives them a thirty-second head start, then hunts them down with a gun like game.
This stripping of masculinity down to its ugliest rituals is what Maia did best here. The warden’s violence has a bureaucratic flavour, which somehow makes it worse. He frames murder as management. He treats slaughter as administrative maintenance. That logic is terrifyingly familiar — the way systems rename brutality until it sounds like policy.
The book blends literary fiction, horror, thriller, political allegory, social commentary, and something almost biblical in its sense of rot. The sadness at the centre of it is not simply that men are violent. That would be too easy, and God knows literature has given us enough violent men to fill a stadium and still have some waiting irritably in the parking lot. The sadness is the total erosion of affection. The loss of any remaining tenderness toward another human being. The moment at which a person becomes an object, a target, a disposal problem.
Now for the part that didn’t quite hit home, and this is a problem I had with several books from this month’s lineup. The book’s too damn short. The ideas are there, the atmosphere is there, the cinematic charge is absolutely there. You can practically see the film: the dry land, the moon, the gun, the men running through the dark, the warden sweating out whatever rancid mythology he has invented for himself. But the story often feels like a powerful outline rather than a fully inhabited nightmare. I wanted to sit longer with the prisoners, with the land, with the dread. With more room, this could have been devastating.
Still, I probably won’t forget it. The warden has already moved into the bad-men wing of my brain, where he is currently not getting along with several characters from Krasznahorkai.
Good. Let them fight.
The Story of Gösta Berling, Selma Lagerlöf, translated by Pauline Bancroft Flach, Lector House, 2020
With this book, I finished my journey of reading something by every woman who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. A small journey, because history is embarrassing. But a meaningful one.
And how fitting to end with Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel, and with her first novel, published in 1891. There was something almost ceremonial about it, although my actual ceremony involved reading in bed, losing track of who had betrayed whom, then rereading a paragraph because it was too beautiful to leave behind after only one pass.
The Story of Gösta Berling is not a book you read in the usual modern sense, where the plot is expected to march forward with a little briefcase and a sense of professional obligation. It wanders, it interrupts itself. It turns toward you suddenly, as if remembering you are there. It feels less like a novel and more like an old voice by the fire, telling you a story that has been told before, and before that, and before that, each time gathering another layer of snow.
Gösta Berling is a defrocked pastor, a ruined man, a charmer, a drunk, a romantic disaster in human form. Around him moves a whole world: the Mistress of Ekeby, the cavaliers, women betrayed or enchanted or both, villagers, myths, bargains, sleigh rides, moral collapses, sudden salvations. It is episodic, dense, full of folklore, melodrama, irony, grandeur, and the kind of emotional excess that would feel absurd if it weren’t handled with such control.
What impressed me most was not just its beauty, though it is very beautiful. It was the rhythm. Lagerlöf writes with this conversational, apostrophic energy, forever turning toward the reader, toward the tale, toward herself as the teller of it. She doesn’t hide the storytelling apparatus; she lights it up. You can almost hear the inhale before the next episode begins.
It took me months to finish it, but that was intentional. As you know, I read several books at the same time, which is either a method or a diagnosable condition. This one became something I returned to in small doses, like visiting a place outside ordinary time. I couldn’t read too much at once. Its rhythm was too different, too old, too winter-bound. But every time I came back, I felt my life slow down around it in a childlike way. In the way time used to stretch when you were little, and afternoons had actual interiors.
I will miss it. Not in the way I miss a plot or a character, exactly, but in the way one misses a room after leaving it. The Story of Gösta Berling gave me something I didn’t know I needed: duration. A book that refused the nervous system of the present. A book that did not care about my attention span, my deadlines, my phone, my stupid little errands. It said: sit down, the fire is still burning, the horses are waiting outside, the snow is not done with us yet.
And I obeyed.
The Witch, Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump, MacLehose Press, 2026
I both enjoyed and hated this one viscerally, which is not the worst state a book can leave you in. Indifference is much worse. Hatred at least has blood circulation.
The Witch is an odd little domestic spell of a novel. Lucie, a long-suffering housewife, initiates her daughters into a form of witchcraft passed down through the women in her family. Then her husband disappears, her daughters begin to move into their own power, and suburban life starts to tilt into something colder, less explainable.
That sounds incredible, right? Women, witchcraft, domestic suffocation, vanishing husband, inherited female power. I practically ran toward it with my little feminist lantern.
And some of it really is excellent. There are pages where NDiaye’s weirdness lands exactly right, where the atmosphere thickens, where the banal and the supernatural sit beside each other with no explanation and no apology. I liked that refusal. I liked the way the book approaches female inheritance not as a clean gift, but as something slippery, compromised, potentially useless, potentially dangerous. I liked the ghastliness of the characters because I am not here to make fictional people employable or pleasant at brunch.
But then whole chunks of it are so lacklustre they make your brain bleed. It feels thin in places where it should feel charged. It begins with promise, hooks you, opens a door, then seems strangely uninterested in walking all the way through. Things happen. Then more things happen. The oddness accumulates, but not always into meaning or emotional pressure. It fizzles where it should deepen.
I kept thinking: fleshier. I want this fleshier. The bones are good. The bones are fascinating, actually. Gender, motherhood, power, disappointment, domestic life as a low-grade curse. But bones alone do not make a body. At least not one I want to carry around after the final page.
Still, I’m not sorry I read it. There is enough here to irritate me productively, and I mean that as a compliment. A witch book without enough witching. A domestic nightmare that forgot to sharpen all its knives.
Love in the New Millennium, Can Xue, translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, Yale University Press, 2024
Very bizarro, this one. Often not in a good way.
I knew Can Xue would be difficult. I did not wander in expecting a tidy little dinner party with exposition and emotional closure. I knew I was entering the realm of the strange, the unstable, the surreal. I have a whole area of my brain that enjoys weirdness. It has candles. It has a velvet chair. It welcomes Kafka and Clarice Lispector and weird little books that make me feel like I swallowed a moon.
But Love in the New Millennium exhausted me.
The novel follows, or appears to follow, a group of women and their lovers in an unnamed Chinese city. There are factories, brothels, spas, shifting relationships, conversations that feel like riddles spoken underwater, scenes that mutate before you can understand what kind of world you’re in. Time does not behave. Desire does not clarify. People move through each other’s lives as if everyone is both real and allegorical and possibly made of fog.
There were moments when I enjoyed the mind games. I did. I could feel the appeal of creating a world in which nothing can be relied upon. There is a kind of intellectual pleasure in being unmoored, in surrendering to a logic that is not dream logic exactly, but dream bureaucracy, which may be worse. The book asks you to stop demanding stability. It laughs at your need for coordinates. It puts your little map in a drawer and then denies the drawer exists.
But there is a limit.
For me, the narrators cannot also be part of what I can’t rely on, at least not in this particular way. Here, I often felt stranded in randomness. One nonsensical scene gave way to another nonsensical scene, and instead of feeling challenged, I felt tired. Not deliciously tired. Not “I have climbed a mountain of difficulty and seen God wearing strange shoes” tired. Just tired.
Maybe I missed the metaphor. Entirely possible. I am not too proud to admit defeat, especially when defeat arrives dressed as a surreal Chinese novel and asks me to explain what just happened in chapter eleven.
But this was not my kind of cerebral. I emerged from its pages with the sensation of having attended a very long performance art piece in which everyone understood the symbolic meaning of the refrigerator except me.
Ledger: Poems, Jane Hirshfield, Bloodaxe Books, 2020
After Can Xue, Ledger felt like someone had opened a window in a room where too many people had been speaking in riddles.
I needed minimalism, and Hirshfield gave it to me in heaps, which sounds contradictory but somehow isn’t. The poems are sparse, but not empty. Pared down, but not thin. Some readers may find them too restrained, but I think that restraint is precisely the beauty. In poetry, I am often most amazed by what has been removed. A good sparse poem makes absence feel engineered. It leaves enough white space for your own little disaster to walk in and sit down.
Hirshfield’s poems have something of the koan about them. They ask you to look, then look again, then stop being so pleased with yourself for looking. There are birds, kitchens, griefs, trees, objects, endings. Ordinary things, yes, but charged with that quiet pressure poetry can place on the world when it refuses to overexplain.
I sensed a bit of Mary Oliver in some of these, and that’s a good trigger for me. Not imitation, exactly. More like a shared attention. A willingness to believe that the natural world is not decorative, but diagnostic. That a bird or a stone or a bowl can reveal something about us if we stop treating revelation as something that must arrive with thunder.
I don’t mean they were soothing in an ordinary way. God forbid. I do not require my poetry to wear a robe and offer cucumber water. I mean, they were calming because they trusted quiet. They didn’t grab my face. They tapped once on the shoulder and pointed. Look there. No, really. Look.
A good poetry book should rearrange the oxygen in the room. Ledger did that gently, almost invisibly. By the time I finished it, I felt less scrambled. Not fixed. Let’s not be ridiculous. But less scrambled.
Which, after Can Xue, counts as a religious experience.
Fifty-Two Stories, Anton Chekhov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Penguin, 2021
Because this month had given me a lot of hits and misses, I eventually needed something bulletproof. So naturally, I turned to the Russians.
This particular trail began with a memory. I’d read, in an old New Yorker piece, about “A Joke,” a tiny Chekhov story in which a man whispers “I love you” to a woman as they fly down an icy hill on a toboggan, leaving her forever unsure whether the words came from him or from the wind. I became mildly obsessed with finding it, because that premise is so perfect it feels less written than discovered under snow.
So I found a collection that included it. And yes, “A Joke” is perfect. Cruel, playful, delicate, devastating in miniature. The kind of story that proves you can ruin someone’s emotional life in a few pages if you are sufficiently gifted and Russian.
But the whole collection was a joy. Not always cheerful, obviously. This is Chekhov, not a basket of puppies. But joyful in the sense of craft, range, human intelligence. You get such an astonishing cross-section of his career, from the early comic sketches to later, deeper, stranger pieces. You can actually witness the honing of his instrument. The blade getting finer. The ear becoming more exact. The compassion widening without ever becoming sentimental.
What amazed me most was how many voices he can inhabit. A woman, a peasant, a child, a dog. A dog! And somehow it works. He moves across late nineteenth-century Russian society with an ease that never feels lazy, because he is always looking closely. His characters are ridiculous, weak, selfish, bored, anxious, hopeful, petty, tender, and lost. In other words, people.
He sees human weakness with brutal clarity and somehow forgives it anyway. Not absolution — many of his characters are not noble. Some are fools. Some are cowards. Some are trapped in lives so mediocre they have begun to rot from the inside. But he observes them without contempt. That, to me, is the miracle.
He doesn’t arrive carrying answers, which is polite of him, because answers are often heavy and badly dressed. Instead, he gives us people suspended in their own weather. Boredom. Envy. Shame. Desire. The gradual fading of youth. The awful repetition of ordinary life. The question of how to survive mediocrity without becoming cruel.
And sometimes, through all that, a flash of beauty. A joke on a hill. A line of dialogue. A person seen clearly for one second, which may be all any of us get.
Reading Chekhov after several uneven contemporary books felt like drinking cold water after licking wallpaper paste. Reliable, yes, but never safe. Bulletproof, yes, but alive.
The Russians: terrible for your mood, excellent for your standards.
The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout, Viking, 2026
Olive Kitteridge is one of my favourite books of all time, which means Elizabeth Strout could publish a grocery list and I would read it immediately, then probably underline “eggs” and call it emotionally devastating.
So of course I read The Things We Never Say as soon as I could.
This one centres on Artie, who is not Olive, and let’s be clear: few characters are. Olive is a weather system. Olive is a municipal emergency. Olive is one of the great literary creations of our time, and I will not be taking questions. Artie is gentler, less monumental, less prickly in that thrillingly radioactive way Olive can be. But I loved him nonetheless.
Outwardly, Artie has a good life. A job he loves, a son, a long marriage, friends, neighbours, routines. Inwardly, he is lonely, anxious, quietly collapsing under the weight of the world and of his own unspoken things. The story takes place around the time of the 2024 election, and the political dread is very much present. I chuckled while reading because I could already hear the one-star reviews forming in the distance, tiny conservative storm clouds gathering over Goodreads. And yes, I later saw exactly that: complaints about “hate politics,” about lectures, about hopelessness.
Which made me laugh, because have these people met Elizabeth Strout? She has always written about how the private and the public infect each other. Families do not exist in sealed jars. Loneliness does not politely ignore elections. Anxiety does not check whether political commentary is convenient for the reader.
I’ve also seen people complain that Strout writes the same book over and over: small towns, family secrets, memory, regret, people who know each other for decades and still don’t know what they’re carrying. Good. Let her. In my book, consistency is not a crime when the thing being repeated is so deeply, beautifully human.
Strout’s genius has always been the way she makes small revelations feel enormous without inflating them. A person says one thing instead of another. A marriage shifts by half an inch. Someone remembers something they have spent years not remembering. Someone fails to ask the question that might have saved them. This is where she lives: in the emotional dust gathered under the furniture.
The writing is stunning, as always. Plain prose that never reads as small.
Artie may not be Olive, but he doesn’t need to be. He belongs to Strout’s great, ongoing congregation of the lonely and bewildered, people standing in kitchens, in cars, in classrooms, in marriages, wondering how they got here and whether there is still time to say the thing.
The answer, in Strout, is usually: maybe. But say it badly if you have to. Silence has already done enough damage.
The Premonitions Bureau, Sam Knight, Faber & Faber, 2023
I picked this up because of The Things We Never Say, actually. There was a thread of precognition there that made me curious, and once curiosity gets its little teeth into something, I become impossible. I started researching whether anyone had written about premonitions in depth, and wouldn’t you know it, Sam Knight had. My favourite New Yorker editor, appearing exactly when needed, like a literary ghost in a sensible coat.
The Premonitions Bureau tells the story of psychiatrist John Barker, journalist Peter Fairley, and a strange experiment launched after the Aberfan disaster in 1966, when several people claimed to have foreseen the tragedy before it happened. Barker and Fairley became interested in whether premonitions could be collected, logged, tested, perhaps even used as warnings. The idea was both haunting and faintly absurd, which is often where the most interesting nonfiction lives.
I liked this book. I did. But I also think it starts out wanting to be about one thing and then becomes about several other things, not always with full permission from itself.
The central idea is fascinating: what do we do with the human hunger for signs? How do we distinguish pattern from coincidence, intuition from noise, grief from prophecy? The Aberfan material is devastating, and Knight handles it with care. It’s deeply moving, watching people try to make meaning around disaster, even when that meaning trembles between consolation and delusion.
But then the book wanders. Into biography, psychology, psychiatry, paranormality, mathematics, philosophy, newspaper culture, eccentric British men doing eccentric British things. And because I am apparently a sucker for unplanned, marginally connected forays into exactly those subjects, I enjoyed the ramblings anyway. I just sometimes wondered whether the book had quietly slipped out of its own house and gone for a walk.
Maybe that’s part of its charm. A book about premonitions probably shouldn’t be too orderly. The subject itself resists neatness.
What stayed with me was not whether premonitions are real. I cannot say this book convinced me of that, and I don’t think it needs to. What stayed with me was the emotional architecture around belief. The way people want the future to whisper before it screams. The way a warning, even a useless one, can feel preferable to randomness.
We want disaster to have sent a letter ahead of itself. We want to believe someone could have opened it in time.
That, more than the paranormal, is what makes the book sad.
Taiwan Travelogue, Yang Shuang-zi, translated by Lin King, And Other Stories, 2026
My least favourite from the International Booker shortlist, and I’m sorry, but there it is.
Taiwan Travelogue is set in 1930s colonial Taiwan under Japanese rule and follows Aoyama Chizuko, a Japanese writer who travels across the island accompanied by Ō Chizuru, a Taiwanese translator and guide, whom she calls Chi-chan. Their relationship develops through food, travel, translation, cultural observation, and an increasingly visible power imbalance. One woman writes. The other is written about. One consumes culture. The other is expected to serve, explain, accompany, absorb.
On paper, this is extremely up my alley. Female intimacy under empire? Translation as power? Food as archive, seduction, and colonial appetite? Yes, yes, yes, bring me a plate, I’m hungry.
Unfortunately, the book brought me approximately six hundred plates.
This is, more than anything, a love affair with Taiwanese food. And listen, I love food writing when it does something beyond making me feel like I should have ordered better. But here, the endless descriptions of dishes, eating, preparing, tasting, discussing, naming, and then eating again became exhausting. Every couple of pages, there she was, “scarfing down” something. The phrase became a mnemonic for me, but in a bad way. A little bell of irritation. Ah, yes. We are scarfing again. Everyone remain calm.
I understand what the author was trying to do. Food functions as more than food. It is culture, territory, desire, appropriation, memory. The colonial gaze doesn’t just look; it tastes. It consumes. It compliments what it consumes, then turns the compliment into ownership. There is something potentially brilliant in that.
But for me, the central dynamic was cemented too early and then never evolved enough to justify the length. Aoyama is oblivious to the imbalance. Chi-chan wears her “Noh face,” holding back, performing politeness, becoming legible only in fragments. The tension is clear almost from the beginning, and the book then spends a very long time waiting for the narrator to realise she’s a dirty coloniser instead of raising enough additional questions to complicate that realisation.
At a certain point, I was no longer thinking about empire. I was thinking, please, no more dumplings. I am full. Politically and digestively.
A novel about consumption that, ironically, overfed me until I lost my appetite.
Closing thoughts
Looking back, this month feels like it was secretly about the stories people tell to survive the stories they’re trapped in.
Maia’s warden invents his own murderous logic. Starnone’s old man writes himself into strangers’ lives because his past won’t stop leaking. Can Xue dissolves narrative and refuses to apologise. NDiaye puts a witch’s hat on domestic frustration and walks off before finishing the spell. Hirshfield and Lagerlöf both slow the world down enough to be properly looked at, though one does it in four lines and the other in four hundred pages. Chekhov and Strout sit beside human weakness without turning their heads. Knight chases the human wish that disaster might send a letter ahead of itself. And Yang Shuang-zi — well, Yang Shuang-zi mostly just ate.
Did I plan this? No. I never plan my reading months with anything resembling strategy. I just wander from book to book like a woman in a nightgown holding a candle, occasionally opening the wrong door and finding a penal colony.
But patterns appear anyway. They always do. Maybe that’s why I keep writing these. Not because I think reading makes life orderly. It doesn’t. If anything, reading several books at once makes life more crowded, more haunted, more full of opinions no one asked for. But it does give the chaos a shape. A shelf. A monthly excuse to ask: what was I drawn to, and what did it do to me?
This month, apparently, I was drawn to old age, madness, brutality, folklore, witches, surrealism, poetry, Russian compassion, American loneliness, paranormal grief, and too much soup.
Not bad, honestly.
Not tidy either.
But then again, neither am I.
