2026 Reading Log

February

15. Solvej Balle. On the Calculation of Volume II. New Directions, 2024. Tara Selter continues to live in a world in which November 18 repeats over and over for everyone but her. After a year of this, she longs for seasonal changes and so she heads out across Europe to experience all four seasons, despite the fact that it is always November 18. Balle’s novel continues to be compelling and contemplate issues concerning time and mortality. By the end of this volume, two more years have passed and Tara hints at a big surprise for Volume III. Translated from the 2020 Danish original by Barbara Haveland.

January

14. Andrew Lanyon. The Mist on the Moor Behind the Hall. Cornwall: self-published, 2023. Various illustrated anecdotes about several of the residents of Rowley Hall, with a few photographs and a number of drawings or paintings credited to several friends. Issued in a limited edition of 150 copies.

13. Andrew Lanyon and Chris James. Ambrose Fortescue’s Notes for a Memoir Discovered at Rowley Hall. Cornwall: self-published, 2024. Total nonsense from Lanyon (the writer) and James (photocollages) about an archaeologist and his “pack of lies,” such as the fact that croquet was invented in the 13th century in the Andes. Issued in a limited edition of 150 copies.

12. Andrew Lanyon. A Little More Light on the Rowleys. Cornwall: self-published, 2024. More absolutely wonderful nonsense about Rowley Hall and the three Rowleys from Lanyon, including the fact that Velazquez stayed at Rowley Hall for a spell and painted several nudes there. Issued in a limited edition of 75 copies.

11. Andrew Lanyon. A Persistence of Visions. Cornwall, self-published, 2002. The Rowleys of Rowley Hall make objects, create images of various sorts, and ponder the “imaginary war . . . between words and images.” A funny, mind-bending letterpress book with tipped-in photographs on every page, issued in a limited edition of 150 signed and numbered copies.

10. Willa Cather. My Mortal Enemy. 1926. A very short novella that examines the unhappy marriage of a girls’ aunt over the course of several decades. Like all of Cather’s work, it’s chock full of themes—class, money, gender. It’s a bit too obvious that Cather wants to be mysterious about who the “mortal enemy” of the title is, whether the aunt is her own worst enemy or whether deep down she despises her husband that much. Nevertheless, it’s a powerful short piece.

9. Lauren Russell. A Window that Can Neither Open Nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance. Milkweed Editions, 2024. Partly memoir, partly poetry, partly other. The latter category includes various kinds of geometric figures that are meant to be cut out and folded (an homage to Tyehimba Jess’s Olio) and torn paper collages depicting anthropomorphized cats. The collages use some photographic elements in their construction. The book deals with the author’s suicide attempts, love affairs, and Asperger’s, among other topics. Rimbaud, Roland Barthes, and David Wojnarowicz also appear. Books of poetry increasingly include a section called something like Notes at the end these days. The Notes in this title runs 24 pages long.

8. Nicholas Dames. Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, 2023. A sometimes daunting and utterly erudite history and philosophy of the chapter; how and why have authors and publishers divided books into segments, and what happens when modern writers like Laszlo Krasznahorkai write on and on without a break. I have never used a dictionary so often. The chapters on antiquity were largely for specialists, it seemed to me, but once he got to Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) I was all in.

7. Wayne Koestenbaum. Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations. Brooklyn: Cabinet, 2016. From 2010 to 2015, Koestenbaum wrote a column for Cabinet Magazine in which he responded to anonymous “found” photographs that its editor would mail to him. The results are wildly imaginative essay-fictions that know no boundaries. “I want my fantasies to coalesce into an architectural folly, like a gazebo or a rotunda.” In the title essay, Koestenbaum ponders the famous poem by William Carlos Williams. “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow // glazed with rain.” What’s so special about being “glazed? he wonders. The photographs and essays are both fun and thought-provoking.

6. Laura Cumming. Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & a Sudden Death. Scribner, 2023. Partly an homage to and memoir about her father, a painter and art instructor, Thunderclap is a very personal tour through Cumming’s deep love for 17th century Dutch art (Vermeer, Rambrandt, etc.). In particular, though, it’s about the painter Carel Fabritius, who painted “The Goldfinch, 1654 (made more famous by Donna Tartt’s novel of the same name) and the powerful gunpowder explosion that tore up the city of Delft on October 12, 1654, killing hundreds of people, including Fabritius. This is art history with a powerful, but mostly bearable, dose of art-is good-for-us philosophy. The small, sometimes tiny reproductions made me want to immediately get on a plane to visit the museums of the Netherlands and London.

5. Solvej Balle. On the Calculation of Volume I. New Directions, 2024. Utterly original and highly inventive. Tara Selter and her husband Thomas run an antiquarian book business out of their home in rural France. One morning she awakens to discover that the world will repeat November 18 over and over, but only she will see it as a new day. Nothing else will change, not the weather, not the routine of her husband, nor his memory of what has transpired on any of the previous November 18s. Volume I of a seven-volume series focuses on the nature of time, on more becoming closely in touch with her surroundings, and trying to puzzle a way out of this dilemma when the first anniversary arrives. In fact, some routines are different on the 365th November 18, but we won’t know what that means until Volume II. Translated from the 2020 Danish original by Barbara Haveland.

4. Dan Sinykin & Johanna Winant, eds. Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century. Princeton University Press, 2025. For better or worse, I generally avoid academic texts. I have never regretted my decision not to pursue a Ph.D. This title sounds like it ought to result in hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing—and sometimes it did: twenty-one chapters in which academics close read the close readings of other academics or critics to show how they did it. The book can actually be used as a textbook. Its goal is to demonstrate what close reading is, does, and has been, the idea being to help make better close readers and better writers of close reading. I found about half of the essays really engaging and half drove me nuts. I learned a few things!

3. Philip Pullman. The Golden Compass. 1995. On its thirtieth anniversary, I finally read volume one of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. It’s nicely written and very-well imagined. More adult than I expected. Castration? I didn’t expect Pullman to connect his story back to the actual words of the Book of Genesis, but he did that ingeniously. Only time will tell if I continue on. At moments, it brought back those feelings you can have as a kid that there really is some magic in the world and it’s embodied in one child hero.

2. Brenda Wineapple. White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Knopf, 2008. This is a far richer book than the tale of a friendship. Based upon articles that Higginson had written for The Atlantic, in 1862 Emily Dickinson wrote him and asked if he would offer criticism for her poems. As a result, they corresponded until her death, met several times, and he participated in editing her first two books of (posthumously) published poetry. But White Heat is also an incisive look into Dickinson’s poetry, a portrait of the entire Dickinson family, and a biography of Higginson, who turns out to have been a fascinating man. An ardent abolitionist, he actually led the first U.S. regiment of Black soldiers in the Civil War, the First South Carolina Volunteers, made up of freed slaves (who knew?).

1. Enrique Vila-Matas. Montevideo. New Directions, 2025. Translated from the 2022 Spanish original by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott. In the latest of Vila-Matas’ novels to be translated into English, returns to a subject we hadn’t seen much in his books for more than a decade: writer’s block and a kind of psychic paralysis that seemed to keep him (or his narrators) from being decisive. Several of his earlier novels dealt with the themes of writer’s block and “literature sickness,” as he called it. Then came several books that focused more on contemporary art. Montevideo blends both trends, with Vila-Matas (or his narrator) globe-trotting in search of inspiration and finding himself suddenly fascinated with hotel rooms and doors. The first such room is one in Montevideo, Uruguay, where the Argentinian writer Julio Cortazár reportedly stayed and witnessed a secret door one night. The second is an art installation resembling a hotel room being constructed by a fictional artist. Vila-Matas is given a key to the room in hopes that whatever he experiences inside will end his writer’s block. Given that the author is Vila-Matas, the book is considerably more convoluted.