For my annual Russian novel, I chose a Tolstoy novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Of all the world’s literature, nineteenth century Russian is my favorite. Depressed people with patronyms and convoluted sentences. This is my happy place.

The title gives it away, but Ivan Ilyich dies in this book. He does so at the beginning of the story, leaving his family with not enough money to get by on. This sort of thing happens a lot in Russian literature.

Right after Tolstoy kills him off, we go back in time to see the course of his life as a living man. If this were twenty-five years ago and I were still an English undergraduate, I might care about this unconventional structure, but I’m middle aged and can’t be bothered.

Sometimes Tolstoy writes likeable characters, like dear sweet Pierre in War and Peace. This is your occasional reminder that I read War and Peace last year. I don’t want anyone forgetting. Other times Tolstoy writes assholes. You will not be terribly sad when Ivan Ilyich dies.

Ivan Ilyich cares more about wealth and power than he cares about, for instance, his wife. There’s one home decorating scene, where he’s deciding which furnishing and decorations will best show off his status, that calls to mind the vapid people on HGTV.

It’s while he’s hanging his wealth curtains that Ivan Ilyich stumbles and injures himself. It seems mild, but the injury turns into a chronic condition. Probably. Or perhaps something else causes the illness that slowly weakens Ivan Ilyich. The doctors aren’t sure, though they’re happy to take his money.

George Guidall is one of my favorite audiobook narrators, and he does a magnificent job here, as usual. If you’re curious about Russian literature, this is a fine starting point, especially since the book is fairly short, unlike War and Peace, which I read last year.

My other recommendation would be the George Saunders book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which combines Russian shorts stories with literary criticism. I know that sounds like homework but it isn’t. It’s delightful, especially as an audiobook.

Tana French remains my favorite crime novelist. The Hunter gives me what I’ve come to expect: Vibrant characters, strong Irish setting, prose that shines, and a plot that takes you unexpected places, but without rushing to get there.

Moving away from the police procedurals where she got her start, French takes us back to Ardnakelty, the small town where retired American detective Cal Hooper moved to a few years ago, in The Searcher. You don’t need to read that one to appreciate this sequel, though the first book introduces characters we see again in The Searcher.

Cal is resolutely not doing police work these days. He’s dating Lena, the young widow, and he’s teaching carpentry to Trey, the urchin from up the mountain. There’s a quiet sameness to the days, which is just how Cal likes it.

And then Trey’s absent father reappears, singing a song about gold buried in land, and carrying a posh Englishman in tow.

I especially liked this book because I correctly guessed who the murderer was, for a damn change.

If you enjoy audiobooks, I implore you to listen to the narration of Roger Clark, who nails the American and Irish accents. It’s a pleasure to listen to him shape the cadences of French’s characters.  

Today is American Thanksgiving, a holiday mired in whitewashed politics and history. I’m trying to unlearn the propaganda I imbibed as a child, trying to teach myself indigenous history.

So here I am reading a book by a *checks notes* white man…?

It’s a classic in the field. The way our systems and education and history have shaped things, most classics in most fields are written by white men.

William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (1983) is a seminal work of ecological history. Cronon studies how natives interacted with the natural environment and compares it to European interactions.

It’s a short book, but dense. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Bob Souer, and I will confess I zoned out at times. But the gist is: European-style, balls-to-the-wall exploitation of the land is not sustainable. Your crops will fail if you keep planting the same seeds on the same fields, year after year. Your multiplying sheep will trample the ground, compacting the soil so they have to graze further and further afield.

There is more subtlety in this book than “Natives good, Colonizers bad,” but I have to say, the Europeans don’t come out looking great. Also they were shit at honoring treaties.

I’m glad I read the book, since it is a foundational text of ecological history, but it was a slog. I used to have patience for academic writing. It was necessary when I was an undergraduate history major. I am losing that patience as an adult.

Apart from Stephen King, who is a category unto himself, my favorite horror writer is Christopher Buehlman. I read The Daughters’ War (2024) and immediately chased it with a reread of the sequel, The Blacktongue Thief (2021).

Both are sword-n-sorcery dark fantasy novels. The Daughters’ War follows Galva, a duke’s daughter marching into battle with the goblins. Most of the fighters in this war are women, since the goblins killed or maimed the men in previous wars. Her unit uses war corvids, an untested  new weapon concocted by wizards with a knack for experimental biology. Each woman fights with two of these giant murder birds.

Galva reappears in The Blacktongue Thief, set nine years after the events in The Daughters’ War, though now the point-of-view character is Kinch, a professional thief. They travel together, reluctantly, to find a missing princess. And this time the baddies are giants.

There’s no shortage of books with these familiar elements: goblins and giants, wizards and witches, quests to find missing princesses. But Buehlman’s novels are far better than most of what’s out there. His prose is what I aspire to. His characters become real people to the reader, and the plot takes you places you do not expect, with thoughtful world-building and vivid settings.

Nikki Garcia does a terrific job reading The Daughters’ War, particularly in some of the battle scenes. Her narration stirred my blood and made me want to hit something. And Buehlman narrates The Blacktongue Thief. In his other career, he is a stage performer, and it shows. His reading is incredible.

Since moving to Minnesota in May, my pleasure reading has dropped way off. Things have been bananas, especially with the ongoing mold problem in my basement. I don’t know when I’ll get back to weekly book talks. Occasional book talks, that’s more realistic.

Departing from her signature mind-bending science fiction novels, e.g., The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Claire North turns to Greek mythology in Ithaca.

This is the story of a city populated by women and old people and very few children, because the men have been absent for years, waging war against Troy and/or sleeping with island witches.

When skirmishers attack Ithaca, it falls to the women to save the city. This is difficult for Penelope, who must be quiet and empty-headed, lest she give the impression that she means to wrest power from her husband Odysseus, never mind that he’s been gone for years without so much as a postcard.

Complicating matters, Penelope’s cousin Clytemnestra just murdered her awful husband Agamemnon, and now she has arrived in secret in Ithaca, seeking refuge.

North has a gift for words. She writes characters who stay with me for years, and while battle and action and drama are plentiful, she is a contemplative writer, giving care to details and inner thoughts even as the raiders attack.

If you’ve enjoyed the outstanding Greek retellings by Natalie Haynes and Madeline Miller, Ithaca will be up your alley. And if you enjoy audiobooks, Catrin Walker-Booth is a captivating narrator.

Tade Thompson’s Rosewater is one hell of a book, science fiction plus thriller plus horror. The prose is superb and the characters are uncommonly well developed.

There is so much plot going on here, so much, that I will not attempt a plot summary. It’s the year 2066, the aliens have landed in Nigeria, and consequently a few people are psychic now. That’s all you need to know.

One scene stopped me in my tracks, and I do mean that literally. I was walking Revvie and when I finished listening I stopped, said “Holy shit” aloud, and rewound to listen again. For those who’ve already read it, I am of course referring to the part where the starving carnivorous floating alien gets loose.

Last time I read a scene that good was in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, when the father and son stumble across the horror basement. That’s the level of Holy Shit I’m talking about.

The main character, Kaaro, is a dickhead. That’s also a risky move, but I hope I’m making clear that Tade Thompson has the storytelling chops for it. I’d also like to point out that we follow each other on Bluesky, which makes us best friends, basically.

The prose is excellent. That’s the most important thing to me in any book, the wordsmithing. And the audiobook is a joy. I just looked up the narrator to confirm that Bayo Gbadamosi is from Nigeria, surely he must be with that accent but nope, he was born in London. Anyway the narration is terrific, though at some point I need to go back and read the book in print. What with all various times and dimensions and plot line, I need to be able to flip back and forth on the page.

If violence is difficult for you to read, this is not the book for you. Cannot overstate that enough. I’m normally unfazed by fictional violence, but woof, this book got my attention. I learned about a form of death involving tires and unfortunately there is no way to unlearn that. I will have this knowledge forever. Also skip this book if you don’t like reading hot alien sex. Otherwise, strongly recommended.

I read The Employees, a science fiction novel written by Olga Ravn, translated by Martin Aitken, and narrated by Hannah Curtis.

First, a discursion. When discussing books, I go light on plot summary. A summary can tell you what happens, but that’s not a good indicator of whether you’ll enjoy the book. Better to describe the qualities of the plot. Are scenes action-packed with explosions and space lasers? Rooted deeply in the thoughts of a character? Predictable or experimental? Defined or ambiguous?

Is the plot even the main appeal of the book? That’s common with commercial fiction, less common with literary fiction, and often irrelevant with nonfiction. Cookbooks don’t have plots.
This logic sort of applies to music, too. “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” is a plot-driven song about good v. evil (though let’s be honest: the devil kicked Johnny’s ass in that duel). “Louie Louie” is about gibberish.

Other elements can be more important than plot. Character is the other big one. I don’t especially care who gets murdered or whodunnit; the reason I enjoy Agatha Christie is because of Hercule Poirot.

Setting can be a major appeal factor. When I read historical fiction, it’s usually because I’m interested in that era or location.

And for me, the single biggest factor is the prose style (and illustration style for graphic novels). I care more about how the story is told than what story is being told. George Saunders, who gets my vote for best contemporary American wordsmith, wrote a book of literary criticism and I devoured it. No one goes around devouring Harold Bloom. At least I hope not.

Thank you for indulging my two-hundred-word excuse for not describing the plot of The Employees. I didn’t follow what was going on. I enjoyed the book, but I’m not real sure what it was about, beyond humans and humanoids interacting with alien objects on a space ship.

Nor can I name a single character. In The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides uses a collective narrator, a technique that left me feeling off kilter. Same disconcerted feeling here. I never got my bearings.

But I enjoyed it! The book was atmospheric and moody and weird, more literary than I normally go for, but it was a short book so I felt willing to try something strange. I didn’t love it, the way I adored the atmospheric and moody and weird writing of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation or Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, but I’m glad I spent time in that world.

I draw a distinction between good writing and good storytelling. Not every author is good at both, and commercial publishing favors the latter. Plot-driven books sell better than language-driven.

Personally, I look for strong, competent prose. I don’t need ornate language or undreamt-of metaphors, but I will stop reading for mechanical clumsiness: overusing dialogue tags, slipping artlessly into comma splices, beating that subject-verb-object triple play for every dang sentence.
Adrian Tchaikovsky delights on both counts, writing and storytelling. He’s best known for his Children of Time series, but I got started with Elder Race, a quick read with excellent audiobook narration by John Lee.

It’s a perfect genre blend of fantasy and science fiction. An overlooked younger princess goes on a hero’s quest to find a wizard to save the realm from a demon. The wizard is in fact an anthropologist second class, living out whole centuries in suspension while he waits for his fellow scientists to retrieve him from his outpost.

It hits all my favorite notes: thoughtful internal character development, adventure tempered by human politics, magic clashing with technology. And no goddam romance. Sorry—but I don’t like love stories in my fiction. That’s a tender spot for me.

The depressed and lonely weird wizard dude with literal horns growing out of his forehead, thanks to futuristic body mods, does not end up with the courageous and beautiful young woman. Like they don’t even flirt. It’s wonderful.

There are any number of reasons why you might not like a genre. I just explained why I don’t like romance novels, so I’m in no position to hector anyone about not reading science fiction or fantasy. But if the reason you abstain is because you’re only familiar with shoddier examples, I’d invite you to give speculative fiction another go. This one will only take a few hours of your time.

Bloodchild collects seven stories and two essays by Octavia Butler. She died in 2006 but remains a fixture of science fiction and fantasy.

Of these stories, my favorite was “Amnesty,” about humans adapting to extended-stay alien visitors. The story invites you to consider if and how you would resist invasion. The whole story was strong, but the last couple of lines left me all shook up.

But all of the stories are strong, with themes of illness and alien encounters show up repeatedly. And the essays are about Butler’s life and her thoughts on writing. They’re lovely.

I quite enjoyed the audiobook as narrated by Janina Edwards. It’s a quick listen or a quick read, and a good entry for readers who aren’t familiar with Butler.

I listened to Black Indians (1986; rev. 2012), written by William Loren Katz and narrated by Bill Andrew Quinn. It examines the intersection of Black and indigenous cultures in North America and what would become the United States.

Okay, I just looked it up and Katz died in 2019 (age 92!) so it won’t hurt his feelings if I criticize the book a little. I was hoping for more discussion of the broader themes of race and culture, but that is perhaps a contemporary bias. I shouldn’t expect much sociology in a forty-year-old history book.

A kinder perspective would be to appreciate that Katz, a white man, did scholarship about minoritized groups well before that was common in the literature, even if it does wander sometimes into the noble savage stereotype.

Katz is strongest when speaking about individuals. Of the people he describes, three stand out:

• Wildfire, also known as Edmonia Lewis, was born in 1844(?) to a Black father and a Chippewa mother. After studying sculpting at Oberlin, she made a career as a sculptor and was an active abolitionist.
  
• Labor hero Lucy Parsons, born 1851 or so, became a social anarchist and, finding that too mild, ultimately landed on anarcho-communism. Her ancestry is uncertain, but she was born into slavery and claimed a Mexican and Native American heritage.
• Bill Picket (born 1907?), of Black and Cherokee ancestry, was a showman who invented the rodeo.

The book has aged better than you might expect. It’s not flawless, but it’s a quick read and I learned quite a lot.