this month I went back to michigan and finished a book while strolling down an entirely unpopulated sidewalk. what luxury! I am, however, ready for fall in new york, when the city is at its best and when I can just sit near an open window and read for hours.

here’s what I read in august 2025

*denotes favorite

denotes book club

*The Museum of Unconditional Surrender - Dubravka Ugrešić

• we read her Baba Yaga Laid an Egg for book club which inspired me to finally read this one, which had been kicking around my TBR for ages. thrilled to have finally gotten to it. this novel starts by listing the contents of a walrus’s stomach and goes on to explore pieces of a life in exile. the narrator, when there is one, is someone who very much resembles Ugrešić. she is a writer, a woman separated physically and historically from what used to be her country. she was yugoslavian and now yugoslavia no longer exists. can a person be an exile if the place they are from is gone? the writing itself leaps from fragment to fragment, through story, reminiscence, diary. it suggests that any sort of after the fact narrative is by nature as discrete as objects in a museum, joined together by curation and not nature. down with plot, up with form, you know me.

The Original - Nell Stevens

• the premise of this historical fiction novel is compelling: a face-blind art forger cannot tell if the man claiming to be her long-long lost cousin is who he says he is. this has more than familial import. if he is her cousin, he inherits instead of her (thanks, england). it’s paced like a thriller, so it’s a quick read. I didn’t have a bad time with it! it was diverting and clever. however, I am going to use it to gripe about my larger problem with a lot of contemporary historical fiction: no jokes.

  to be fair this is something I complain about widely, not just as it relates to historical fiction. even in the bleakest settings, people find levity. sure sometimes it’s gallows humor, but it’s humor nonetheless. it’s part of the human experience! wearing corsets and having shitty guardians does not by default require Utter Seriousness. this novel takes place at the end of the 19th century. some novels written and published in that time period include: Three Men and a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome, quite a lot of Anthony Trollope, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. while only one of these is a certified laugh riot, even the one that you KNOW ends badly has moments of joy and humor in it. it’s the leavening of the bread, ok? just because people didn’t smile in pictures/paintings then doesn’t mean that they NEVER SMILED. Hilary Mantel is incredible at bringing humor in the Thomas Cromwell novels alongside more obviously serious themes. there’s a great scene in Bring Up the Bodies where no one can stop laughing at this one guy’s ridiculous hat. a few pages later Thomas is considering what does and doesn’t qualify as torture (that scene is also a little funny if I’m being honest). I realize we can’t all be one of the best to ever to do it, though. tbf there is a scene in The Original that is essentially the Nathan for You I hope you’re hungry for nothing meme, but it is played entirely straight-faced.

Monkey Grip - Helen Garner

• I read and loved The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner last year, and I still think it’s a perfect short novel. Monkey Grip is longer and looser, more diaristic (probably because it was based on her actual diaries) and diffuse. this felt like what I wanted Beat literature to be when I was a teen — it’s about drinking, heroin, and bad romantic choices but without the constant misogyny. Australia in the ‘70s does not seem like a bad time.

*Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald

• thrilling. I see why so many of my favorite writers cite Sebald as an influence. I am not going to go deep here because I’ve been asked not to mess it up for a specific person who wants to read it, so I’ll just say that if you have an interest in form, nested stories, or the art of the digression and like to be unsettled by the twentieth century, this is for you. (my truly insane description is: warped Tristram Shandy that has to contend with the atrocities of WWII.)

Mina’s Matchbox - Yoko Ogawa

• I’ve read two other books by Yoko Ogawa and they were both much bleaker than this. I wish I had read this novel in a hammock on a perfect June day, preferably while watching a pygmy hippo roll around in the mud like the heroine of this novel of memory and gentle childhood nostalgia. it’s not as sinister or biting as some of her other work, though it has its touch of bitterness (as even the most idyllic childhoods do). it’s really about storytelling and its power to sustain, which sounds cheesy but is in practice meditative and charming. over the past few months, the question “why write” keeps occurring to me and this offers a careful answer.

The Nine Tailors - Dorothy Sayers

• text me for my takes about why people need to stop doing Agatha Christie adaptations and bring me a new Peter Wimsey instead. (real gothic and almost magical realism ending here that I quite liked but if you care about “““believability””” in your mysteries then you might find it implausible.)

Crossing the Mangrove - Maryse Condé

• Maryse Condé won the New Academy Prize in Literature in 2018, which was created as a Nobel alternative (there was no Nobel in Literature that year). she is a significant writer doing cool things with language. I think most people would call this a minor work, but it made me want to read more of her.

*The Director - Daniel Kehlmann

• hell yeah, if you’re gonna do historical fiction this is how to do it. really hit the fiction part! if you’ve chosen to write a novel and not a biography, why not play with form and style? why not invent characters? what sings here are the chapters that convey a feeling, a sense of place and atmosphere. does it matter if various luminaries of an age were or were not in the same bar at the same time? it does not! outside of my little rant: this is a novel about a director trying to make films with artistic merit while trapped in the third reich, and it is also a novel about the compromises of art compared to its consolations. I think about this a lot when people talk about the power of art to defy certain aspiring fascists. in the words of Gilbert Sorrentino, art cannot save anybody from anything.

*Sugar and Other Stories - A.S. Byatt

• if you know you me you know I love A.S. Byatt. I like to read her short fiction to remind myself how to be considered with language. these particular stories tend to be about being haunted by writing and the persistence of thought.