‘Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples’ I tell people all the time that reading fiction is what keeps me from being a massive b (most of the time, we hope…) on the road. Sometimes a separate narrative feels like a protective membrane: it can burnish solitude, it demands a mental expansion beyond the reliable “I, I, I” beat of anxiety. However, I’m much more reliably motivated by pleasure than well-being, and mostly I love experiencing literature while traveling because new settings make me feel especially porous, ripe for that delicious phenomenon that occurs when you encounter writing affecting and distinct enough to permeate and reshape your own thought patterns. I love how a story and a city can tinge one another, and look forward to the double exposure of text and setting that persists in memory and renders both more special. I’m not in Ohio but I’m closer than usual, and have really enjoyed exploring autumnal Ann Arbor while being immersed in this tender, plaintive short story cycle about a small Ohioan town. • • • #sherwoodanderson #annarbor #reading #shortstory

A pithy dish! Reading this novel was like sucking on a sour lozenge, tangy and quenching. Elbowing the Seducer, which was published in 1984 and is currently - absurdly! - out of print, focuses on a group of bookish New Yorkers whose literary voracity is matched only by their lascivious (often adulterous) desperation. These are the type of debauchers who get banned from aeries atop Village bookstores because they “used a signed first-edition Jack London to elevate the hips of a lover.” Trudy Gertler’s satire is fueled by her sharp linguistic play- she writes one liners that individualize with such stunning precision. On the very first page, she communicates the distinct flavor of a slogging marriage in 8 words: “He disliked breakfast, a meal she found comforting.” Of a principal philanderer: “Howard preferred literate sex. Of course, if that wasn’t available, he’d take anything.” I wanted to sheath myself in the novel’s initial tone, which is that of a permanently arched eyebrow. Gertler’s characters are all somewhat ruthless and arrogant; fittingly, she denudes them by allowing them to share their own bald self conceptions: “He stopped himself, knowing he had no justification, and admired himself for his honesty.” “She thought of herself as fierce and devouring, one unending demand for an unknowable benediction” “He broke rules soon after he made them, and reflected ruefully but admiringly on his own impetuousness.” This novel is acerbic and wry and genuinely funny, but it’s too grimly observant about the pathetic urge for power and the abysmal sexual politics of the 80s to be a romp. It’s as if the delight and perspecuity of sex and the city met the snarky disclosures of a literary Twitter feud met the erudition and cruelty of a pan review in NYRB. I think it would pair best with a daytime martini. #elbowingtheseducer #tgertler #trudygertler #books #bookreview #novel #fiction #vintagebookcover

“Tell me this: Can a man who can cast a spell ever really grow up?” Big meh for me. I was intrigued by the premise- a fantasy novel about ruinous fantasies, magicians who harbor 2009 Brooklyn malaise attending an upstate wizardry school à la Hogwarts on the Hudson. But I found the world building and characterization soooo flimsy and the plot extremely convenient and puerile. Bought it at Newark at 5 in the morning so it served its purpose as a bleary eyed entertainment but not gonna commit to the trilogy The Magicians by Lev Grossman

“Anna and Tom had grown up with the notion that individuality manifested itself as a set of visual differences, immediately decodable and in constant need of updating” Anna and Tom are “expats” from Southern Europe living as digital nomads in Berlin. They are millennial paper dolls who came of age with the internet and whose emotional roots grew along the lines of its acquisitive bloat. Anna and Tom live surrounded by the detritus of a lifestyle in which representation has eclipsed experience, in which social conscience is a central identity but any IRL activism feels like “an outstanding rendezvous with history.” Both are instantly, chillingly recognizable as people who have ceased to deviate in any meaningful way from their their own algorithmic doppelgängers. The Perfectionists by Vincenzo Latronico

I like it more and more the longer I sit with it! Much quieter and more melancholic than Dune 1, Messiah unfolds like a Teleixlaxu contraption, its most tragic mechanisms cannot be perceived until it’s too late. Read in anticipation of Dune 3, an adaptation that I expect will be wonderful and will change a LOT. (Spoiler ahead)- minus a couple points for no worms. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

I decided to reread Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels in anticipation of turning 30 later this year. I read the series for the first time over a decade ago, and it had a huge impact on the philosophies I adopted and toyed with as I entered my 20s. I felt compelled to return to it now as a sort of foundational text, one whose notable themes- vulgarity, feminism, legacies of violence, the right to privacy- have also been central to “the discourse” of the past years. Ferrante’s novels are deeply specific in their evocations of 1950s Naples girlhood, an experience that very few of her readers share, but her writing is so emotionally precise that we feel beckoned, implicated. The books fly in the face of the designation “unrelatable,” a remark wielded on social media as a confusing criticism/ dismissal of anything that doesn’t directly pertain to the commenter. The term is one of my chief pet peeves, and only upon this reread did I realize that I can trace the seeds of my annoyance- I remember conversations I had, at 19, with older men who responded to the mention of these books with “oh yeah, but that’s chick lit.” “As a guy…” Cut to 2026, “unrelatable” sends me spiraling, partly because it grates like an errant your/ you’re but mostly because it is a really limiting way of evaluating art, a perspective that deprives its bearer of a wealth of imaginative experience. These books offer a much more vivid, generous alternative. Better than relatable, they inspire sincere recognition, a kinship that, like the friendship they depict, is established through the germinal effort of expression. I love this novel, the first of the quartet, just as much this time around. I find it just as impressive, as scalding and precise, but also much sadder. Further away from the adolescence the book describes, I see more clearly the tragedy of Lila’s early brilliance. She can burn brightest only in childhood, when she is pure potential, before her context- her sex and class, the history of her neighborhood- ossifies around her. Ferrante is able to capture the sweep of history in precise characterization, Lila + Lenu, girls who contain, but don’t have to represent, everything.

“A simple relay race between symbols… To dismantle the world into a saraband of anagrams, endless.” That always sunny meme if Charlie’s board was the last few millennia of European history spliced with occult conspiracies hermetic synarchy and the Knights Templar. I thought Foucault’s pendulum might read like a more ambitious, granular Da Vinci Code, but I was wrong- it’s so much more expansive, a whole tone poem of uncanny resonances. It’s Milan in the 1970s, and three highly educated + hubristic book editors mine occult knowledge to cook up a joke “Plan” with their newfangled computer “Abulafia.” It’s an occult theory of everything, a mockery whose material is so seductive it makes “the world [explode] into a whirling network of kinships.” What follows is a mfing omnibus opus of encyclopedic references- Cabalist rites, Druidic readings, twisting telluric Templar cryptarithms, virgins and umbandas and alchemical heretical occultist auscultations. Wikipedia and merriam Webster apps were running cardio this whole book but it’s absolutely impossible to keep up… which is the point! The Plan is infinitely flexible and flimsy and overwhelming and dazzling because its entire structure is an ouroboric reflection. There’s no huge reveal at the heart of this novel; instead, a Borgesian spiral into obsession, a Proof of the deep human need for a spiritual quest. Pandora’s box should stay closed, not for the danger of its knowledge but because humanity would be bereft if we did not ache for its secret. I can’t wait to reread this later in life. TY to my mom who gave me this to read in Paris in anticipation of visiting THE very pendulum from the book <3 Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco

Belated post in honor of One Battle After Another taking the big one home! Vineland is too careening, paranoid, and rangy for any literal translation to screen- OBAA is a loose adaptation, but I enjoyed the two as distinct adventures and the lacunae between the book and the movie are shapely enough to tell their own story. There are almost no right angles in Vineland- transitions are seamless and cinematic. Pynchon will zoom in on a detail in a room or a conversation and then pan up into a new decade or a distant memory. Twenty years and two generations of countercultural history ooze into one psychedelic blur, hippie pietist projects smear into family secrets, Reagonomic recalibrations percolate myriad side plots about UFOs, Japanese Bigfoot attacks, ninja death touches, Californian zombie communities. It’s really remarkable directorial control and impeccable framing, and makes the whole book feel viscous, trippy, and ever-present. When I first watched OBAA, I saw much of it as pretty pessimistic, viva la revolución on a treadmill. Pynchon is much more explicit about the bitter seed in his revolutionary’s failure: in Vineland, the 60s hippies’ rebellion expresses their latent desire for the parental authority of the state, their fatal flaw is but humanity’s burning lust for submission. That being said… there’s persevering sweetness in both stories, and cynicism about victory is tempered by a belief in action itself. Vineland by Thomas Pynchon

A treat to read this engaging quickie about Vermeer paintings while ensconced in Dutch light! Perfect Rijksmuseum pregame

Neat (nifty) and also neat (a little too tidy). Lost Lambs is a madcap tale of familial love and folly set in an unnamed American town and lavishly seasoned with witty wordplay. There’s a roving bris service titled “Take an Inch, Give a Mohel,” an adolescent terrorist plot aimed at the Church’s “Our Lady of Suffering’s Inner Beauty Pageant,” an ice cream shop called “Anne Frank’s Dairy,” and an open marriage showdown at the bar “Olive or Twist.” Lost Lamb’s Pinterest board would mount Franzen and Pynchon quotes next to a Wes Anderson screengrab, a cutout of Elizabeth Holmes aside a crucifix tied up with a Sandy Liang bow. It’s fun and inventive, but also wields an aegis of ironic mockery that sometimes feels like a tired internet import. I wanted it to relax its stance, allow its sweet eccentricities the space to bloom sincerity. Still a good time!

“Hans leaves the old times behind, and the newer times and their insoluble irrelation, when he barges through the massive wooden door to Katharina, his lover, who is as young as he, in his salad days, once was.” East Berlin in the 80s, an affair between Hans, a married writer in his 50s, and Katharina, a 19 year old student. Hans and Katharina’s relationship ambers the idealism and volatility of their time- they are obsessed with their utopian origin story, they surveil their present and insist, despite its acridity, on the glory of their future together. Katharina’s childhood coincided with a new world, time has rendered Hans’ own youth a dubious artifact. Their age gap, across historical abyss, is a form of cultural exchange. At the heart of Kairos is a deep faith in the arts as the insufficient, but also the only, things capable of grappling with and translating the unfathomable loss of time past. Occasionally excruciating to read but I loved it. “Whose job is it to go down into the underworld and tell the dead that they died for nothing?” Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

All I ever want for Christmas is a book in which I can fully, luxuriously lose myself the ensuing liminal week!! This year’s choice was a present from my mom, a novel that reads like the Secret History meets Nabokov meets Gilmore girls if Lorelei was a tweedy patriarch. Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a murder mystery in the guise of notes for an academic course, with several syllabi worth of literary, historical, and film references (real and imagined) and a “final exam” at the end. It’s written by high school senior Blue- precocious brainiac, awkward impressionable teenager, and the daughter of Professor Gareth van Meer, who is depicted as a sort of despotic dreamboat with the hots but sans the gentle humility of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. Gareth’s annunciations animate Blue’s pages like oracular edicts. He’s a genius PoliSci professor but opines like the worst puffed up faux-leftist you know, so high on his own supply of ethical theory he cannot deign to practice his lofty ideals on the level of daily interpersonal interaction. In the beginning, Blue and her father are rather insufferable, their erudition seems to wrest wholly upon condescension. However, as the story got juicier, annoyance gave way to engagement, I was lapping this up into the wee hours multiple nights in a row! The plot twist is genuinely surprising and satisfying, the Easter eggs are titillating, and I did really love how the whole mystery unfolded. Thank you mom! Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl