What do you think of when you think of an indulgent read? Is it romance? Fantasy? A cozy mystery? Me, I like a good nothing novel. If Goodreads users are complaining that “nothing happened,” or, better yet, that they were bored, my interest is immediately piqued. I don’t need things to happen! Enough with the happenings, already. Give me a book about a person sitting in a room. Maybe standing, or stretching, occasionally. Thinking. Give me “Practice,” British author Rosalind Brown’s exquisite first offering to the world of nothing novels.

The protagonist and subject of “Practice” is Annabel, and I mean subject in a true scientific sense. Annabel is her own meticulous observer, the architect of her enclosure, always thinking about how to optimize, how to adjust her conditions. And for what? What is the subject’s task? Today, it is to write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. And we need only concern ourselves with today. (We will find that for a subject as sensitive as Annabel, this task is enough for a whole day, enough for a whole book.) Continue reading “Staff Review: Practice by Rosalind Brown”

“The light, in the morning, in the kitchen, was a thing I did not hate. There was something about the slant of it, the way the room seemed to glow from the floor upward toward the ceiling. I sometimes thought, in moments when I could sit in that kitchen alone, in the morning, with everyone else away, how tolerable it was.”

So muses Dennis Monk, ever the optimist, protagonist of California writer Michael Deagler’s introspective debut “Early Sobrieties.” I love this moment, when Monk (who everyone calls by his last name) considers the morning light, softened by how bearable, almost lovely it is. The image reminds me of the opening scene of Zadie Smith’s “The Autograph Man,” when a hungover Alex Li-Tandem notices “a flush of warm light” through his bedroom blinds. Only Monk isn’t hungover — at this point, the 26-year-old is a few painstaking months sober, which is perhaps why this kitchen sunlight very nearly touches his soul, but not quite. Have you ever felt like that? Like the beauty of living was imaginable, but not quite accessible? Continue reading “Staff Review: Early Sobrieties by Michael Deagler”

Patricia Highsmith’s second novel, biographer Joan Schenkar writes, “was so marked by her secret obsessions that writing it felt like a birthing. ‘Oh god,’ [Highsmith] enthused, ‘how this story emerges from my own bones!'”

72 years following its publication, “The Price of Salt” has long been regarded as a groundbreaking novel in lesbian literary history. Every review I read noted its departure from the tropes of the times — how neither woman is ultimately forced into heterosexuality, nor suffers a tragic death (both true, though I hesitate to call the ending a happy one). All that to say, I was excited to read this book, and I’m glad I did. I’ll start with the good… Continue reading “Staff Review: The Price of Salt, or Carol by Patricia Highsmith”

“Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidentally, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect.”

So writes Michael Cunningham in his 2014 novel “The Snow Queen.“ It is a gentle novel, the kind that builds slowly, in waves, rather than the kind that whisks you away. But there are moments like this one, observations about love and life that induce a powerful feeling of clarity and reflection, that give the story real weight.

We meet Barrett first, in his own moment of observation. To be more precise, what Barrett observes is a giant light in the sky hovering above Central Park one winter night. The light arrives at a good time — Barrett is recovering from the sudden termination of another relationship, and coping with a general feeling of floundering as an adult human living in the new millennium. The light seems to promise something, though he’s not sure what. At the very least, just bearing witness to such a thing makes him feel like there might be something special, something worth examining about his earthly experience after all. Continue reading “Staff Review: The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham”

Even if you aren’t interested in dragons or dark academia, chances are you’ve heard about “Fourth Wing” by Rebecca Yarros. It is all over social media and the holds list is quite long. There are read alikes at the bottom of this blog to check out in the meantime, but first I’m going to give a mostly spoiler-free review, so skip ahead if you want to go in knowing nothing.

Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, but the commanding general (her mother) has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is weak, death is only a heartbeat away because if the training doesn’t kill you, the dragons will. And the other candidates would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter. Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise.

I really didn’t love this book. Continue reading “Fourth Wing: Staff Review and Read Alikes”

In 2019, a reporter interviewed a notable presidential candidate on a well-kept secret. The reporter? John Hendrickson, just a few months into his new job at The Atlantic. The candidate? Former vice president of the United States, Joe Biden. And the secret: his stutter.

At that point, we didn’t know much about Biden’s speech disorder — he’d become an expert at hiding it, working around his stutter with word substitutions, and maneuvering strategically out of difficult moments. But Hendrickson saw through the maneuvers, noticed the thoughtful pauses that were really the “blocks” characteristic of stuttering. He identified the coping mechanisms because he’d used similar ones his entire life. In January 2023, four years after writing an acclaimed, vibrantly human story on the potential president-elect’s lingering stutter, Hendrickson published a book detailing his own experience with the disorder. Continue reading “Staff Review: Life on Delay by John Hendrickson”