My review of Perla Suez’s novel “Winter’s Fury” has gone up over at Literal Magazine.
This book offered quite a change of pace for me—it was a short, matter-of-fact tale covering a slice of history I wasn’t otherwise aware. It was understated, but not vague, and had a kicker of an ending.
From the review:
Suez’s novel ably shows the immense dangers of unthinking, and gives a new twist to Socrates’ proclamation about the unexamined life.
My review of Álvaro Enrigue’s latest novel has gone up over at Literal Magazine. I loved Enrigue’s last novel, “Sudden Death,” in part because I’m a long time tennis player, but also because few authors I’ve read seem to really nail historical fiction in the way he does—by achieving a voice to the writing that makes the characters and situations truly feel like they happened a long time ago. (Hilary Mantel was one of the others.)
You’ll have to read the review to see if I liked “You Dreamed of Empires” as much as “Sudden Death.” Writing the review was mostly a battle with autocorrect for correctly spelling “Enrigue” and not “Enrique.”
My first published poem, “The Siege of Baghdad,” is live over at The Bookends Review. It’s about a topic I’ve found myself writing on “again and again.”
My review of Jazmina Barrera’s novel Cross Stitch is live over at Literal Magazine. You can read it here.
This novel definitely made me think twice about all of the weaving, stitching, and other similar metaphors I’ve used in reviews and essays.
My review of Ana María Shua’s microfiction collection “House of Geishas” is now up over at Literal Magazine. From the review:
Ana María Shua may be one of the best living practitioners of [microfiction]. Though the Argentinian has written novels, poetry, and children’s books, she is best known for her microfiction, often described as the “queen” of the genre. Indeed, there is so much going on in the pages of House of Geishas, but somehow more going on off the page, which is a credit to the author’s ability. In the book, she demonstrates her complete mastery of the form, providing incisive and cutting tales that question, wound, bemuse, and befuddle.
For the last 15 years, I’ve been tracking my reading. I thought I’d share a post with some of the notable things I’ve read in 2023.
After all these years, though, I’ve come to see tracking as double-edged sword. On one side of the blade, tracking gives one strong insights into what information one has digested, fictional worlds entered, and lets one look back and remember books one may have otherwise forgotten. On the other side, all of this tracking can sometimes making reading seem to be “another thing,” or a task to check off a list.
While I intend to keep tracking in 2024, I may sit out the “challenge” in Goodreads. Reading, for me, is something I find personally engaging and fulfilling—it’s not a competition.
I use Apple Notes to keep the running list, along with other detailed information, but I also track in Goodreads and using the BookTracker iOS app.
This year I finally read Founding Brothers by Joseph Ellis. I’d read his most recent book, American Dialogue, connecting the founders with contemporary issues, and had snagged a hardback of this Pulitzer-winner at a library sale. “Founding Brothers” was astonishing—I find Ellis to be much more engaging than some of the other historians of the period, especially psychologically. I’m recommending Ellis to anyone who loves reading about the founders as much as I do. I purchased a copy of “American Dialogue” as a gift for my dad.
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s latest, was the finest novel I read this past year. It’s a masterpiece. This was the first Kingsolver book for me, after a glowing recommendation from my wife. Her characters are rich and so distinctly clear products of their environment and upbringing, something not often seen in the American literary fiction I’ve read, at least.There is more Kingsolver in my future.
One of the six books I reviewed this year, Fernanda Melchor’s This is Not Miami, was perhaps the finest. And it’s also my favorite book of the year, alongside “Demon Copperhead” and “The Family Roe” (more on that last one later). If you want to see more of my thoughts on it, head overto Literal Magazine.
The Tyranny of Merit, by Michael Sandel, was another one of those nonfiction books I’ve read recently that has clarified my perspective on things. His central insight is that the rhetorical or political focus (often by Democrats) on meritocracy has an insidious side, that of making folks who didn’t “win” the meritocracy—really, most of us—feel disillusioned while those that did—say, the Harvards and Yalies—feel that they deserve their success perhaps more than they really do. Sandel is self-aware enough that being a Harvard professor doesn’t interfere with his clear understanding and clear-eyed insight into the way his students have changed, but not for the better.
Lastly, The Family Roe was perhaps the best nonfiction book I read in 2023. It took Joshua Prager a decade to write it, but the effort was worth it. Prager is not an apologist for the court decision, nor a loather of it, instead focusing on the people involved: from unhappy and enigmatic Norma McCorvey, or “Jane Roe,” to the eccentric lawyers, and even more eccentric (and tragic) abortion opponent Mildred Jefferson. He discovered a lot of new information, especially about McCorvey. The book also makes one think hard about the role of courts and legislatures when it comes to abortion—but not in a partisan or black-and-white manner.
More novels this year by Toni Morrison; Richard Dooling (my old law prof!); Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis, which might be the finest book of his I’ve read); Cormac McCarthy; and Richard Yates, among others.
Perhaps because I’ve returned to the practice of law, my reading on legal things has stepped up this year. Among the selections: Supreme Inequality by Adam Cohen; The Shadow Docket by Stephen Vladeck; “The Family Roe,” Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America by Wil Haygood; and The Most Dangerous Branch by David Kaplan. The Kaplan was a nice balm for me, with good critical analysis of activism by both the “conservative” and “liberal” justices, which was needed after reading the more left-leaning critique of Cohen. It’s a strong defense of judicial minimalism. Vladeck’s analysis of SCOTUS’ usage of its non-opinion writing power—a good recent example of “judicial triumphalism,” I bet Kaplan would think—was also fairly balanced, it seemed to me, even if Justice Alito apparently hates him and Vladeck is transparent about leaning left. Haygood, meanwhile, further convinced me that Thurgood Marshall would have been a top-25 American of all time, even if he hadn’t served on the Supreme Court. (Though Kaplan did note that, despite his overwhelming greatness as a lawyer, Marshall sometimes may have phoned it in on the top bench.)
In 2023, I read a bit more poetry than I have in years past—seven or so full length books of verse. First, I kicked off the year by finally reading through all of the original edition of “Leaves of Grass,” having read bits of Whitman for years, ever since I crashed a Whitman conference on campus as a college student.
The highlight was Donald Justice’s New and Selected Poems. I’d never encountered Justice, the “poet’s poet” before, but I found his poems to be engaging and startlingly relevant. (“Men at Forty” being the most on the nose.) Perhaps it was this poetry reading that inspired me to start submitting poems of my own. (My first published poem, “The Siege of Baghdad,” is forthcoming at Bookends Review.) Other highlights include a series of poems from the perspectives of jurors by Rita Dove, and several startling Louis Glück verses.
My short story “Space Tears Can Hurt” was featured over at Pulp Literature’s Throwback Thursday. You can buy a copy of the journal with “Space Tears” in it directly from Pulp online. Digital is only $5.
My review of Alejandra Oliva’s “Rivermouth: A Chrinoncle of Language, Faith, and Migration” is now live over at Literal Magazine. From the review:
In the book, Oliva interweaves her own life as a bilingual child of Mexican immigrants with the frustrations and exigencies of the southern border of the United States: its bureaucracy, the inhumanity, and frustrations. The book straddles the line somewhere between memoir, philosophical meditation, and policy criticism. It is most successful when Oliva uses her sophisticated views on translation as an entré into immigration.
There was a lot to like in this book, but I would only recommend it to someone particularly interested in translation.
Reading this story the other day—about the first efforts to systematically clean up the debris orbiting the planet—couldn’t help but remind me of my short story “Space Tears Can Hurt,” which was published over at the lovely journal Pulp Literature in 2016.
“Space Tears” is a sort of #MeToo story that took place aboard a craft dedicated to cleaning up junk. I’d first learned about such debris in a law school “Space Law” class, and it felt like the perfect place to stage a subversive sci-fi story.
My review of Fernanda Melchor’s fabulous collection of nonfiction “This Is Not Miami,” has appeared over at Literal Magazine. Here’s a sample from the piece:
The best stories seduce. They draw you in and make you fall for them, become infatuated with them, and you lose focus on the rest of the world and only want to know what is going to happen next, what the character will say or do, how the story will end. You stay up late. Neglect your family, your work, your other hobbies. You breathe only at the periods.
Fernanda Melchor is no stranger to such seduction.
This one of the best books I’ve reviewed recently, and I highly recommend you check it out.