Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel

“Henry the Eighth. He was a shit.”

— Alan Partridge

I heard of this book from the Guardian’s recent list of the 100 best novels. Taking place over an eight-year period (apart from a brief prologue set during Cromwell’s teenage years), Wolf Hall chronicles a turbulent period in English history through the eyes of one of its architects: Thomas Cromwell, a low-born Englishman who became the key confidant and advisor to Henry VIII, masterminding his break with the Catholic church and the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, allowing him to marry Anne Boleyn.

Cromwell is portrayed as a staid and principled man, in contrast to the dogmatic and vicious Thomas More, who abhors the King’s efforts to break with the church. In this respect, it serves as a riposte to A Man for All Seasons, which casts More as the enlightened hero and Cromwell as the conniving villain. I have no idea which is the more accurate depiction, though Mantel’s book is meticulously researched, for whatever that’s worth.

I did note that the Cromwell of the novel was so preternaturally talented across fields as to feel a touch Mary Sue-ish, effortlessly picking up languages and vocations, street-toughened in contrast to the tenderfoot aristocrats around him while lacking none of their education or honed eloquence. Perhaps he really was that exceptional, but it did make me roll my eyes at times.

The book provides a character summary in its first pages, which I consulted often, but even with this guide I struggled at times to grasp who was who. It is a sprawling and ambitious book, worth reading for anyone interested in that period of history.

(Also, it serves as a reminder that it was really dangerous to be named Thomas and serve a king of England. The list of Thomases who were one-time confidants but later executed is surprisingly long: Becket, More, Cranmer, Cromwell. Wolsey only escaped because he died before the King could kill him. I’m sure I’m missing some).

V. - Thomas Pynchon

I’ve given up on trying to follow the plot of Pynchon’s novels. I accept that there is one, but I lack the sustained attention and investigative prowess to suss it out with any great accuracy. Instead, I treat them as a series of loosely connected scenes and images to be enjoyed in sequence. They are more like roller coasters than novels, vehicles for visceral reaction with a theme one senses more than deeply grasps.

V. has some good images. Benny Profane (allegedly the protagonist, in fact appearing in probably less than 10% of the novel) hunting alligators in the New York sewer system. The tragic result of an innovative but faulty form of plastic surgery utilizing inorganic materials. Flares of mid-fifties bohemian bedlam and bacchanalia.

The book’s throughline concerns its other supposed protagonist, Herbert Stencil, who is on a lifelong quest to uncover the identity of a mysterious woman in his father’s wartime journal, an elusive figure known only as V. Through conversations and archives, Stencil dives back into moments of crisis over the last several hundred years, during which we catch glimpses of V, who appears to manifest in multiple forms. There’s more, but my recollections are impressionistic and I’d be hard-pressed to give an actual summary of the story beyond that.

Maybe I’m not smart enough to read these books. But I do enjoy them for what they are.

The Vietnam War: A Military History - Geoffrey Wawro

“Nine times out of ten, you ask me what I’m thinking about, it’s the Vietnam War”

— Ben Marshall

Vietnam was a strange war, in that it was a conflict the United States could neither win nor lose. America’s economic and military might were such that the North Vietnamese could never truly vanquish them, yet nor could the Americans do away with the Viet Cong, whose guerrilla tactics constituted a kind of judo, with the lumbering strength of their opponent turned against them. America could take a village and hold it, but what then? They couldn’t stay forever, and the moment they left, the Viet Cong would trickle back in. The villagers, all to aware of this, hesitated to provide any sort of support to the Americans, who further failed to ingratiate themselves through defoliation, civilian casualties, and, eventually, massacre.

This, in a nutshell, was the Vietnam war: American kids who didn’t want to be there conquering land they couldn’t hold on behalf of villagers who didn’t like them to support a government no one believed in. A pointless sinkhole that swallowed prestige, riches, and lives. And the Presidents who waged that war knew of its futility, but felt strangely compelled to continue anyway, as if leaving would break something fundamental in the American psyche.

It was a war of ironies. LBJ kept fighting because he thought pulling out would lose him the presidency, and so stayed in and as a direct result lost the presidency. Nixon scuttled a peace deal in 1968 through back-channel trickery, only to accept the same deal four years and tens of thousands of lives later. He so feared this chicanery getting out and destroying his presidency, he ordered the burglary of the DNC headquarters, and so destroyed his presidency.

All of this Wawro captures very well in his sweeping historical account. He does not mince words or qualify America’s engagement, showing clearly how obvious it was that the war was doomed, and chronicling the bull-headed choices that drove it forward anyway. It is, as described, a military history, and so focuses largely on the flow of battles, with the social and political events described more superficially. I can’t fault it for this—it says “a military history” right in the title—but I think the battles themselves are the least interesting part of the war, since they were so similarly futile, and apart from Tet did little to change the face of the war writ large.

I Was Wrong: A Real-Time Chronicle of the Iraq War 2001-2008 - Andrew Sullivan

Everyone was always against the Iraq War—now.

From the universal condemnation heaped upon it from right and left, it’s easy to assume that it was Cheney and few other neocon hawks who dragged America back into the gulf against its own volition. In truth, the war was pretty popular at first, enjoying majority support by a comfortable margin. It was only as the blunders compounded—the WMDs that weren’t, the absence of al Qaeda, the bungled debaathification that left a disaffected middle class and provided a key opening to jihadist insurgents—that public opinion soured.

Now, over twenty years post-invasion, it’s hard to find anyone who’ll claim that the war was a good idea, or even admit that they ever supported it (I’d love to see a poll asking respondents of sufficient age whether they supported the Iraq War back in 2003 and compare it with polls from that era. I have a feeling the numbers won’t match).

It is thus with refreshing honesty, and even a bit of bravery, that I Was Wrong compiles Andrew Sullivan’s blog posts from that era, laying bare the flawed reasoning and faulty assumptions that made him one of the wars earliest and most vocal boosters, and chronicling his concern, dismay, and ultimate horror at how the war unfolded.

Sullivan never reneges on the core moral argument that impelled him to endorse the war—namely, that Saddam was a monster and deserved ousting—but he is ruthlessly critical of the outcome, and freely admits that, even if a shaky democracy were to eventually emerge from the chaos (which, eventually, it sort of did), it wouldn’t have been worth the chaos and bloodshed unleashed among Iraqis, nor the irreparable damage to America’s vision of itself tarnished forever by Abu Ghraib.

Sullivan is an excellent writer, and I found myself propelled by the prose even as it rehashed old ground in some spots (as blog posts are wont to do). I found Sullivan’s intellectual honesty refreshing, even as his snide dismissal of liberal concerns about the war in the early pages could be grating. Some of his calls were also hilariously bad with the benefit of hindsight—a passage that made me laugh out loud: “ I do think however that this crisis means an obvious shift in terms of Bush’s successor. Two words: Rudy Giuliani”—but his early assessment of Obama as a political force was spot-on.

I was aware of the war as it happened, but didn’t follow it closely, so while I knew the broad strokes, there were details and players that were new to me. I enjoyed learning about it in more depth, but it was also strangely fun to take a brief tour of a period of time that spans my teens and early twenties, reliving stories and events through Sullivan’s scrutinizing lens. The framing of the posts, beginning with the trauma of 9-11 and ending on the eve of the 2008 election with Sullivan’s endorsement of Obama, suggests an optimism that feels undermined by current events, but does offer a through-line that makes it feel more like a book than a simple collection of blog posts.

If you can forgive a man his mistakes—even those with deadly consequences—this book is worth reading.

Silas Marner - George Eliot

It took me almost 40 years to get around to reading George Eliot, but damn it, I got there in the end. I’ve owned a paperback copy of Silas Marner for maybe half that time, but whenever I went to pick it up something else would catch my eye, until a couple of weeks ago when I needed a new book to bring with me to the Nordik Spa and wanted a paperback small enough to fit in a bathrobe pocket. Perhaps not the ideal reason to choose a book, but you get what you get.

The story has an elegant, almost fairy tale simplicity, and is told in such a fashion, with Eliot maintaining a descriptive distance form her characters. The eponymous Marner is a weaver who lived in a strict religious sect. When framed for robbery by his best friend, he faces exile to a small English town where everyone knows everyone else and outsiders remain outsiders for life. There he sets up a profitable business weaving textiles, accumulating riches that he pores over with rapture at every free moment. He has no real wants and is not saving the money for any purpose, but merely values its accumulation.

The village is ruled over by the aging Squire Cass, whose fortunes will go to his oldest son Dunstan. However, Dunstan is under the thumb of his younger brother Godfrey, who is blackmailing him in exchange for not revealing that he was secretly married to a commoner in another village. Dunstan agrees to let Godfrey sell his prized horse, but Godfrey foolishly gets it killed before he can close the deal. On his way home, he comes across Silas’s cottage and robs him of his gold. Silas, despondent, goes to the town for aid. His loss endears him to the townsfolk, who had previously considered him strange and aloof.

Some time later, Dunstan’s first wife rides to town with the intention of confronting hm with his daughter. However, she dies en route and the daughter finds her way to Silas’s cottage. He takes guardianship of the girl and through parenthood finds peace from the loss of his money.

There is more o the book, but this arc serves as a parable that guides the overall story. Despite its focus, Marner himself can go whole chapters without making an appearance, and much time is spent with the townsfolk, where Eliot sketches a mocking but affectionate picture of small town provincialism.

The prose is very much of its era, with the omniscient narrator often summarizing events rather than describing them. The style can strike the modern reader as didactic and dry, but Eliot observes with a keen eye and breathes life into archetypes. A good book worth reading.

Perhaps I’ll get to Middlemarch by the time I’m 80.

The Traitors Circle: The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany—and the Spy Who Betrayed Them - Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Freedland is a columnist with the Guardian, which is where I came across his book the Traitor’s Circle. The book recounts a true story of German dissidents during World War II. They met regularly at the house of one of their members to discuss their disgust for Hitler and dim outlook on the war. Some of them committed true acts of heroic bravado, including one escapade that involved smuggling a trainload of Jews into Sweden, but mostly their only “dissidence” was a refusal to abandon their morals and accept the legitimacy of the Reich. For this, they were punished severely, after a mole infiltrated one of their parties and denounced them for the crime of “defeatism.”

The story is engaging and does a good job of showcasing that even among the groups that benefitted from his rule, support for Nazism was not absolute among the German people. Freedland has a tick of ending every chapter wit ha cliffhanger that started to feel a little forced, but overall the writing did a good job of capturing the moment and conveying the different narratives in a clear way. Worth reading.

The Sundial - Shirley Jackson

Now this is more like it.

While her earlier novels show flashes of the vicious insight and dark, surreal tone of her last two works, The Sundial is the book where Shirley Jackson truly finds fourth gear, a speed she will maintain for the rest of her tragically short career.

Here we have all the key trappings of her later works: a stately but decrepit manor house, a family whose aristocratic origins have tarnished with age, a surrounding village with an air of ineffable distance and malevolence, a family where murderous hostility roils beneath a skein of politeness, and above all an atmosphere of quiet, stuffy dread, where malign forces, unspoken but keenly sensed, crouch behind every syllable.

The plot concerns Orianna Halloran, matriarch of the Halloran family, who has recently inherited the family home following the untimely death of her son—a death for which her son’s widow Maryjane suspects she is responsible. At a family gathering, Orianna’s sister Fanny goes for a walk through the grounds, where she receives a vision of her late father declaring the coming apocalypse, from which only those in the family home will be spared.

The family’s relatively casual acceptance of this revelation is one of the surreal elements of the novel. While in some ways unrealistic, it fits with the slightly warped characters who occupy the mansion. The rest of the story concerns their efforts to prepare for doomsday, and he interplay of relationships and grievances between the characters.

Unlike Hill House, nothing provably supernatural happens in the Sundial, for Fanny’s visions could simply be hallucinations, and the visions of the future Gloria glimpses in the oiled mirror are undercut by the fact she announces them in advance, which means the family could, consciously or not, connive to make them accurate. Yet the sense of exterior forces extends beyond mood at times, such as the skeptic Julia’s efforts to leave the mansion, thwarted through the inexplicable malice of a cab driver and a prevailing fog that shepherds her back to the grounds.

The Sundial is a worthy companion to Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. A must-read for fans of those books.

Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History of the American Lumberjack - Stewart Holbrook

Well by the thunderin’ Lord Jesus, hereby hangs a tale. In Holy Old Mackinaw, historian, writer, and former logger Stewart Holbrook spins the saga of the American lumberjack, charting a century’s journey from the forests of New England, through the Midwest, and to the final primeval bastion of Oregon. Interspersed with this history are accounts of semi-mythical figures in lumberjack lore and snippets of life in the camps, from the food to the songs to the spartan conditions of the bunkhouses. There are technical descriptions, too, where Holbrook recounts the painstaking process of felling trees, dragging them over open country and fluming then downriver to mills where they are made into lumber.

While Holbrook doesn’t undersell the challenges of the job—rough weather and rougher living conditions, long hours with meagre pay, a deep and panging loneliness—there is an undeniable romance and affection in his telling that makes his love of this lifestyle and the men who lead it clear. This is especially clear in the books final pages, where he opines the dying of this strange and noble breed of man, tragic victims of their own industry. It’s funny and a bit jarring to read Holbrook’s lamentations on a changing society and comparisons between the lumberjack of lore and the modern woodsman, only to realize the modern era he’s discussing is nearly 100 years old.

Holbrook tells it all in colourful prose, with rich images and sly irony. This is a book rich with history, but it is by no means a dry academic tome. Highly recommended for anyone with even a passing interest in an often overlooked but essential aspect of Europe’s colonizing of the west.

Dracula - Bram Stoker

I last read Dracula in university. I remembered liking it, and wanted to pick up an example of an epistolary novel for something I’m working on, so it seemed a good time to revisit it.

Recounting the story seems redundant, if not outright insulting. It’s Dracula. I doubt there’s a person alive who doesn’t at least know the basics. However, for those who never encountered the book, they might be surprised at how little the titular vampire actually appears in the story. They certainly talk a lot about him, but apart from the early pages chronicling Johnathan Harker’s journey to the Count’s Transylvanian castle, his actual appearance is relegated to a view ominous glimpses and a line or two.

This is largely due to the novel’s conceit as a compilation of letters and diary entries. Dracula is not among the correspondents, so the perspective instead revolves around Harker, his fiancé and later wife Mina, and Dr. Seward, as they first come to terms with the supernatural threat facing them, and then seek to stamp it out.

The writing is, to be honest, not incredible. Allowances must be made for its era, but even taking this into account, there is a lot of effusive praising of masculine virtue and pronouncements of undying fealty that get a little tiresome. The dialogue likewise has its awkward moments, namely Stoker’s excessive fondness for eye dialect, which is especially jarring given that we are supposed to be reading accounts from the narrators. Why they would bother extensively quoting some bumpkin by painstakingly capturing their pronunciation is a question left unanswered.

As a novel, Dracula hasn’t aged terribly well. But in its villain, he drew from a tapestry of eastern European folklore to create a complex and sinister creature that has not merely become a pop culture icon, but fundamentally defined the vampire for all future horror fiction in the same way Tolkien defined the elf for fantasy. Even books like Twilight that deliberately undercut the usual trappings of the vampire are still, in their rebellious way, working from Stoker’s template. Few authors will ever make so deep an impact.

The Road Through the Wall / Hangsaman - Shirley Jackson

I got on a Shirley Jackson kick late in 2025 and decided to read her novels in the order in which they were published. I finished the first two, The Road Through the Wall and Hangsaman, in a row, but other things drew my attention during The Bird’s Nest and so I’ve put it aside for now (not for want of its quality; I’m sure I’ll revisit it later). I’m combining the first two in one entry as I don’t have a ton to say about them individually.

Jackson’s prose is polished from the start, and there is no awkward phrasing or self-conscious overwriting common to new novelists, particularly those writing “literary fiction.” The writing is excellent, but the stories are not yet as strong as they will become. Jackson is, at her core, a short story writer, and in these early books, she doesn’t seem to have fully mastered a lengthier form (something she would ultimately do to tremendous effect with The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle). Though enigmatic and far from action-packed pulps, those latter works showed a flow and rhythm that suited their length. Her first two, by contrast, can feel formless at times.

The Road Through the Wall feels the least “Jacksonian” of the bunch, which makes sense given it was an early work. the voice is deft and laconic as ever, the dialogue demonstrating the clipped niceties and hostile undercurrents that would become a common thread, but the structure and subject matter are unlike her later works. It isn’t set in New England, for one, but in a sunny California suburb, where it chronicles the lives of half a dozen households, most of Which contain working families with young to teenage children. There is no clear protagonists, and the jumble of names can be hard to keep track of. Not a great deal happens until a sudden and shocking act of violence in the final pages, which feels largely like a contrivance of literary fiction at the time than something authentic to the story.

Hangsaman feels more like vintage Jackson. Common themes emerge here that would find homes in her later novels and stories: the mousey and troubled young woman, the cozy superficial camaraderie of women that betrays sharp angles beneath, the petty theft and intrusion on personal space. There is also a surreal fatalism from the book’s college age protagonist Natalie, which would find a much more impactful resolution in Hill House, The Lottery, and some of her other short stories.

These are still good books and worth reading for those who intend to explore Jackson’s broader body of work. But her final two novels reign supreme. It is a shame she died as young as she did, as all signs point to a writer who was continuing to hone her craft.

Dark Tales - Shirley Jackson

Why do all these amazing female American authors die so young? Flannery O’Connor was 39. Carson McCullers cracked 50, but only just. Shirley Jackson, who died when she was 48, falls in between the two. (at least we got Ursula Le Guin for a good long while).

I mourn the lost novels and stories that died along with these women, and though I would consider O’Connor the greatest literary author of the three (check that, I consider Flannery O’Connor the greatest literary author, male or female, to have ever lived), I think it is Jackson’s unrealized later work that I pine for the most. Her stories distilled horror down to its purest essence, eschewing Lovecraftian lore or Kingian brutality for an understated but palpable dread that thrums in every word.

Nothing all that bad usually happens on the page in a Shirley Jackson story. There is an occasional death, but the method isn’t gruesome and there are no cosmic, world-ending stakes. There is only the flawlessly articulated sense that something is off, the subaural hum of menace that rattles your fillings even when its too faint to pick out a note.

The plots in Dark Tales are vague and minimal, the endings often ambiguous (occasionally a bit too ambiguous if I’m being honest), the characters hasty sketches by a talented hand. What is left is a mood, realized with a precision that may very well be unmatched by any English author. You feel a Shirley Jackson story. It gets in your blood.

I could provide summaries of some of the stories, but there’s little point. It’s not about what happens, but how it happens (if it indeed happened at all). Which brings me to another point: Shirley Jackson feels like an author of supernatural fiction, but supernatural things rarely if ever happen in her stories. There are a few elements in Dark Tales, but even they could be tricks of the mind rather than actual occurrences. They read like ghost stories, even if the ghost in question may only be a gust of wind or a creaking floorboard.

Some Thoughts on the Blue Jays

I haven’t been reading as much as usual lately, and the books I have read (To Lose a War—essays on Afghanistan, fine but I would’ve preferred a cohesive book on the subject; Never Flinch—King on autopilot; Songs in the Key of Z—a regular reread, fantastic) I haven’t felt like writing about. In September, the reason was mostly Silksong. In October, it was the Blue Jays.

When the season began, after a dismal 2024 and what felt like an insufficiently active and bemusing offseason (Santander? Yay! Gimenez? Another glove-first middle infielder, great, only got about 20 of those; Straw? So, what, are we the Guardians’ personal Value Village now? Do they have any old sweaters they need to get rid of?) I wanted one thing: for the Jays to win a single post-season game.

Not a series sweep, not even a series win. Just a game.

Sports narratives are often speculative and always stupid, but they carry with them a prophetic aura that can be hard to shake. The story around the Blue Jays as perennial postseason chokers was a vicious poltergeist that needed exorcising. Do six losses over five years actually carry any statistical significance, especially when the rosters involved are different? Probably not. But they happened, and only a postseason win could wash away the resulting stink. Win just one, and future playoff berths would no longer be met by the baseball world with a collective eyeroll and the words “Big deal, they’ll just get swept again like they always do.”

All I wanted was a little hope. One win’s worth of hope. I promised myself I’d be happy with that much.

Turns out, I got ten.

I clutched that promise to myself all through the postseason, but it got slipperier with every win. Humans are naturally greedy, and while I wish I were an exception, I’m not. Sure, one win is great, but now that we’re here, I want to beat the Yankees (because who doesn’t?). Wait, we did it? So, it’s Seattle now. They’re a great team, Cal Raleigh is as terrifying as his nickname is unfortunate, we lost the first two at home, let’s just keep from getting swept. Oh, wow, we’re back in Toronto, down two. Can we win one of them? Both of them? George Springer says yes we can!

And so came a sight I didn’t dare hope to see again in my lifetime: the Blue Jays playing in a World Series. Of course, the Dodgers would steamroll them, right? They were 9-1 through the postseason so far, and the Brewers, who with their gritty bat-to-ball playstyle and middling power were very much the Blue Jays’ NL equivalent, got flattened without landing a single punch. This was the kind of team kids assembled when flagrantly cheating at fantasy baseball. The Jays had no chance.

And yet, chance after chance presented itself, and the Blue Jays kept seizing them.

Until they didn’t.

It’s a truism in sports that close losses hurt worse than blowout losses, and while the visceral blow is certainly sharper, coming as it does all at once in one critical moment or another (two outs! Two measly outs!) in the long run, I’m not sure it’s the case.

Because unlike the Yankees in 2024, the Blue Jays could have won this series. Not merely in the technical sense that any team can beat any other team on any given day—sim a million best-of-sevens between the Dodgers and the White Sox; Chicago will come away with a few hundred Commissioner’s Trophies at least—but through proof of play. The series pivoted on a knife’s edge. And that knife cuts both ways: just ask the Seattle Mariners.

Even though they lost, I believe the Blue Jays had the more magical season. No disrespect to the Dodgers, but “reigning champions with largest payroll in all of sports win again” is not a made-for-Hollywood story. And I don’t mean that as a sour grapes dig at their spending, nor do I think they bought themselves a championship. As the Mets will tell you, championships aren’t for sale. Money is huge, but money spent wisely makes the difference. (I will, however, pause here briefly to note for Jays fans grumbling about how the team failed to cash in runners when it counted, that in Game 7 alone the Blue Jays faced over $1.3 billion in pitching. So, yeah, hit some doubles off of that).

Contrast all that with the story the Blue Jays can tell: a group of castoffs and homegrown heroes shook off a year in the AL East cellar and made it to the pinnacle. There they faced a dragon that had roasted alive all those that came before them, and while they didn’t quite slay it before they fell, they lopped off a wing and showed it a fear it hadn’t felt in years.

And they did it with such joy, and with a love—of the game, of each other—that overflowed the dugout and washed across the field. Every player, to a man, had a career-defining moment this year. Bo’s two-run homer against Texas to shake off the Spring doldrums and kick the team into a higher gear. Mason Fluharty striking out Ohtani with the bases loaded. Clement’s postseason renaissance. Barger’s pinch hit grand slam. Springer in ALCS Game 7. And Yesavage, my Lord, I cant wait to see that kid in Spring Training.

Watching them this postseason was like watching a group of kids who got to play out past their bedtime. The goofy, rambunctious energy. The reckless joy. The air of side-glancing disbelief, as if thinking I can’t believe we get to do this.

Ross, Mark: bring them all back next year. Not just Bo (but yes, definitely Bo) but all of them. I don’t care if Max Scherzer is turning 42. I don’t care if there’s a better starter than Chris Bassitt on paper you can nab. I don’t care if Clement is due to revert to the mean and you can get a prospect haul for him in the offseason. Bring them all back. Let the boys play out a little longer.

God knows they’ve earned it.

Falconer - John Cheever

Falconer is the first thing I ever read by John Cheever, which is funny, since I think it is his least Cheevery novel. It may also be his strongest, though I haven’t read them all and my memories of The Wapshot Chronicles and Bullet Park are hazy.

Cheever is first and foremost a short story writer, and you can see that in Falconer, given its minimal plot and the episodic, word sketch nature of its scenes. The story is in third person, but he sneaks an “I” in there early on that suggest to me that the main character, ex-professor and drug addict Ezekiel Farragut, is actually the narrator, and is using third person as a device. Certainly the novel clings tightly to his point of view, and there are moments in the prose that suggest a bias in his favour.

The book serves as a chronicle of prison life, with petty indignities, rambling conversations between inmates, and Farragut’s reflections making up the bulk of the action. Notably, the main action of a the book, a prison riot where the inmates take hostages and demand greater rights, occurs at a different prison, and Farragut (and by extension, the readers) only learns tiny snippets trawled from contraband radios and gossip.

Cheever’s prose is on point, rich and evocative, and he does a great job capturing different characters’ voices. The ending my be a little implausible, but I thought it was a nice alternative to the more realistic stasis. I enjoyed rereading this, and it’s got me back in a Cheever mood. I’ll probably pick up some more soon.

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

I first read the Sound and the Fury when I was nineteen and I was not ready. Consequently, I remembered almost nothing about it and understood even less. Revisiting it two decades later, I can say this time I remember a lot more and understand at least some of it, so that’s progress.

The story, if you can call it that, concerns the Compsons, a once-prosperous white Mississippi family that has been brought low by time and circumstance. Each of its four parts ostensibly takes place over a single day (Parts 1, 3, and 4 over Easter weekend in 1928, Part 2 in June of 1910), though the recollections and musings of the different narrators send them sprawling over a much wider range of time.

The first section is told by Benjy Compson, who is mentally disabled and speaks with a limited vocabulary. One would think this would simplify the prose, but Benjy’s section is if anything the hardest to follow. He has little to no grasp on what he sees, which means the reader has to infer events from puzzled descriptions, and he frequently confuses the past with the present.

The second part takes us back in time to Quentin Compson, and intelligent but disturbed figure who spends the day planning his suicide. Faulkner leverages a lot of stream of consciousness passages to portray his frazzled state, though Quentin at least understands his circumstances and describes things in a somewhat comprehensive manner.

Back in 1928, Jason Compson narrates the third part. Jason is a crude and unpleasant man who begrudges his family for their reliance on him. His plainspoken prose is the clearest in the book, though he too is an unreliable narrator in a sense, as his hard-done-by posturing and self-absorption cause him to paint his actions in an unrealistically flattering light.

The fourth section steps back from the characters altogether, relying instead on an impartial omniscient narrator. Here we finally get what seems like an honest picture of the characters.

There are some plot elements, but they are buried under Faulkner’s style and don’t seem terribly important. The book feels more like it is to be experienced than understood. Faulkner wrote it at a time where he thought he’d never be published again, and so threw himself headlong into obscurity almost out of spite. The result isn’t a joy to read, but Faulkner’s skill is tough to deny.

An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser

“Well, this certainly looks like a lot of words”

— Jay Peterman

I missed any reference to Dreiser in school, but his name has come up a few different places as an important voice in early 20th century American literature, so I thought I’d check him out.

The first word that comes to mind when I think of An American Tragedy is thorough. This is neither a compliment nor a criticism, merely an observation. Dreiser mines his characters lives, motivations, and daily actions with painstaking detail, plumbing pages-deep into psyches and chronicling activities with a relentlessness that can be numbing at times. The exhaustive (and at times exhausting) description was most distracting early on, and I nearly put it aside, but as the pages passed and the story emerged from its lengthy preface, I found the sheer weight conjured its own momentum, and the last half of the book was genuinely compelling reading.

The story focuses on Clyde Griffiths, a boy of no means who wishes to make it in the world, and almost does so by the grace of having a successful uncle who runs a large collar manufacturing concern outside of Albany (a region that, in a bit of serendipity, I had heard referenced less than a week before picking up this book as the 19th century collar manufacturing capital of the world; the source of this reference, of all things, was the radio broadcast of a Frontier League baseball game).

Once established as a department manager, Clyde catches the eye of Roberta, one of his employees, and despite a proscription on inter-company romance, the two begin an affair. At the same time, Clyde becomes enamored with a wealthy and attractive socialite named Sondra. Improbably, Sondra begins showing reciprocal interest in him, offering a window into a world of wealth and privilege that he had, by grace of his surname, glimpsed, but because of his meagre beginnings could not otherwise truly reach. It is at this moment that Roberta announcing she is pregnant, leading a desperate Clyde down a dark and treacherous path.

Though published in 1925, the distant omniscience of the narrator and baroque diction of the prose make it feel more like a Victorian novel than something of an age with Faulkner, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald. Readers might be off-put by this literary atavism (not to mention its sheer length), but I found the book ultimately rewarding.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder - Salman Rushdie

In the desultory manner of my reading habits, I picked up Knife when I took my kids to an indoor play structure and forgot to bring the book I was currently reading. Fortunately, the building was right beside a branch of the Ottawa library, and they had Rushdie’s newest book available. I probably would’ve gotten around to reading it eventually regardless.

I was, of course, familiar with the central event of the book, as I remembered the news of his attack. I’ve also read The Satanic Verses (which is more than can be said of his attacker) and admired its scope and dense lyricism, even if I admit it didn’t grip me all that viscerally as a story. Knife is told in much more straightforward a manner, with Rushdie’s literary gifts still present but dialed down to a more straight-forward discussion of the attack and his recovery, punctuated by some philosophical explorations of the event. He does not spare gory details, but he doesn’t relish them, either, treating them with a clinical equipoise that likely took some time and distance to manage.

There are some diversions to up the page count, and an extended imagined dialog with his attacker that tiptoes up to pretension without flinging itself over the edge. All told, it was an engaging book, and I read it more or less in a single sitting (I had to finish the last twenty or so pages at home that evening).

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Wolfe

I wanted to like To the Lighthouse a lot more than I actually did. As a work of art and a formal experiment, I admire it and the skill Wolfe displays in writing it, but as a novel I simply couldn’t connect with it. Everything about it is so relentlessly internal, a rushing river of thoughts from the first mountaintop dribbles along the many winds and tributaries of its watershed to the final languid delta where the waters meet the sea.

Virtually everything that happens, happens in the characters’ heads. Outside of these musings, the plot is (by design, admittedly) so trivial that just describing it sounds like I’m insulting it. A boy and his mother want to go visit a lighthouse but can't; later the boy does but the mother is dead. A man tells a lady that women can’t paint pictures but then she paints one and it’s pretty good. As far as external conflict goes, that’s about all you get.

Wolfe’s prose is rich and evocative, and her characterization is effective even when the characters themselves do little. I don’t deny it’s a good book, perhaps even a great one, but it wasn’t for me.

Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon

Wonder Boys is the sort of book I shouldn’t like. Set on the campus of a liberal arts college (I think unnamed?) in Pittsburg with a prominent creative writing program, taking place during one weekend when said program is hosting a literary expo called WordFest, and populated by characters who are almost exclusively writers or writer-adjacent figures, its almost aggressive focus on authors and the Art of Writing is something I normally find self-congratulatory and cloying.

And yet I adore this book, liked it even better the second time, reading it as a jadedly middle-aged semi-pro writer instead of a grad student in a creative writing program with eyes on literary immortality. The key, I think, is that Chabon, while obviously an admirer of great writers and a keen lifelong student of the written word, doesn’t gloss the subject with the air of haughty reverence I often sense in similar work.

Grady Tripp, the narrator and protagonist, is a rake and a pothead who moves through the world like a bull busting through a rotten old barn, leaving a trail of psychic debris to trip up and besliver everybody unfortunate enough to cross his path. This is a trope common enough to be cliché, the drunken genius to pure and broken for society, except that with Grady none of this seems romantic. He’s a likeable guy, but his recklessness isn’t the engine of his genius. If anything, it’s his biggest roadblock. WordFest spurs on a reunion with his long-suffering editor, who has expected a finished copy of Grady’s novel (the eponymous Wonder Boys) for years and is finally slapping down an unspoken but clearly sensed deadline. Only Grady is up to 2,100 pages and nowhere near finished, the constant flood of detail drowning his story and the characters within it.

The same feels true of the other characters, who are in their own ways flawed, but in a manner that seems relatable and human. Chabon cues this idea thematically through the successful writer Q., who gives a pompous lecture stating that every writer has a doppelganger that emerges periodically, torpedoing the hapless writer’s life to ensure a rich source of material to draw from. Precisely the sentiment I find so annoying, but I get the sense Chabon does, too; Q. emerges from the book as a garden variety asshole.

I also enjoyed rereading Chabon for his prose, which, with its effortless erudition and insistence on grandiose imagery, is probably a bigger influence on my own writing than I’d realized. But it’s the characters that really sell the book for me. I enjoyed spending time with these people—even if I would hesitate to invite any of them to my house.

Cuba Libre - Elmore Leonard

I wasn’t all that into the last couple of Elmore Leonard novels I read, so it was nice to find Cuba Libre, which fuses Leonard’s brisk capers with his background in westerns. The story takes place in Cuba in 1898, before and during the Spanish-American War. Ben Tyler, a cowpoke and bank robber recently released from Yuma prison, teams up with an old friend to run guns to the Cuban rebels under the guise of horse trading. Things go expectedly awry, and Tyler becomes enmeshed in a plot to defraud a wealthy sugar merchant of $40,000 paid off for a phony kidnapping.

The story has all the trappings you’d expect from an Elmore Leonard novel: a rugged outlaw for a lead, a steamy romance, snappy dialog, double-crossings, a bastard villain who gets what’s coming to him, a scheme and schemers on both sides. He writes as always like a man who would rather die than be called lyrical, but who’s too talented to write dry. A good book.

A Separate Peace - John Knowles

Most of what I knew about A Separate Peace before reading it was that it was one of those 20th century curriculum books like Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies that schools like to assign, and that Lisa and Grandma Simpson hate it. I also struggled to see how it fit in with Knowles’ other work until I realized I was mixing him up with John Fowles. That’s what they get for having names that rhyme.

The story takes place at a New England boarding school called Devon during the middle years of World War II. The narrator, Gene Forrester, is a top student who is enamoured with his roommate Phineas, a preternaturally gifted athlete whose breezy way of life and effortless charm make him Gene’s perfect foil. Despite their difference, the two are close friends, though Gene harbours a one-sided resentment of Phineas that festers into a paranoid assumption that his pranks and amusements are intended to undercut Gene’s academic success.

Gene eventually realizes his mistake, but rather than clean the infection, understanding merely drives it deeper, ultimately causing him to knock Phineas out of a tree and cause him a life-altering injury. The rest of the book deal with the consequences of this action. Like the bone in his leg, Phineas’ friendship with Gene reforms in the following, lumpy and misshapen yet in some ways stronger than before. Much is left ambiguous regarding why Gene did what he did, how conscious of an act it was, and to what extent Phineas realizes what happened. He rebuffs Gene’s initial confession and the whole things gets papered over, though later revelations make you question how Phineas really feels.

The book is interesting and well-told, convincingly narrated by an educated man looking back on his life. Perhaps not truly the ninth-grade level for a precocious student, but hardly pre-school.