2026: Saturday July 4: Second Quarter Reading List

 Here we go: 

Broome County Public Library

Julian Barnes, Departure(s) A Novel, (2026). This was so good and so unusual I don't know where to start. He's just a master of his craft, and this was his farewell to that craft - he tells us early in the novel it will be his last book. Saying anything more feels like I'm trivializing the lifetime that made this possible. I'm judging all other books against this one, which isn't really fair, but I can't help it. 

Hanging out on our bookshelves

Julian Barnes, Arthur & George, (2005). So, after the masterpiece of Departures, I pulled this off the shelf. Turns out I'd read it before, but couldn't remember most of it. Two sweeping life stories entwined around each other. It was pretty good. Maybe a little stuck and long in places. But impressive. 

Autumn Leaves Used Books, Ithaca

Alvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires, (translator Natasha Wimmer), 2024. I wanted to like this more than I did. It was ambitious and clever and beautiful, with a couple of superb characters. But I got bogged down in the complex palace intrigue and the interconnected layers of conquering forces and lineages. Perhaps that was the point. 

Broome County Public Library

Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees, 2021. Several people told me they loved this, so I was excited to read it. And sure, it had some promise, but honestly needed a couple more drafts and a pushier editor. Characters were flatter than they should have been, and I didn't care about them as much as I was supposed to. It had the feel of YA for Grownups. 

Broome County Public Library

Liz Moore, The God of the Woods, 2025. I don't usually read mystery/crime fiction, but this swept me along with multiple characters all affected by the crime in question. I wanted to know who dunnit, and I wanted to know what happened to all the characters. I don't think it is Great Literature. But it was fun to read and cleverly constructed. 

Look at me using the public library again like a pro. 

Catherine Chidgey, The Book of Guilt, 2025. Chidgey is a New Zealand author who has been on my radar for a while and I finally found her at the library in Binghamton. Very readable, asks some important questions about what we're capable of, uses Point of View skillfully, I enjoyed reading it, but it didn't stick with me and I'm struggling to find interesting things to say about it. 

Broome County Public Library

Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go In The Dark, 2022. I feel like I've read a lot of books lately that sweep through multiple generations to try explore the current human existential crisis. Okay, maybe it has only been three or four books like that. I think I find them hard because I am just getting to understand a character and then the story moves on. This is a totally valid way to tell stories and I get how a writer gets fascinated with examining an issue or question from multiple perspectives, I just don't think it is my favorite structure as a reader. 

 Broome County Public Library. Again! 

Anne De Marcken, It Lasts Forever And Then It's Over, 2022. Spoiler alert, I don't think it is actually over, and I don't know how it ever can be because this is a book about an immortal zombie. It is intensely interior meditation on life and death with a dreamy quality, unmoored from reality (even more than you might expect from a novel about a zombie). But its cleverness never really stopped being the focus of the writing. 

On the shelves at the lake rental house in Alpena, Michigan, where we stayed last week. I read it while we were there, then put it back on the shelf for the next guests. 

Daniel Mason, North Woods, 2023. Not only have I read a good number of sweeping-through-long-expanses-of-time books lately, I've also read a good number of look-at-us-destroying-the-world books. They're an understandable preoccupation in this day and age, but they do get a little rough on a body. Science fiction used to be imagining futures I'd never see, but I might end up seeing some of this. It was lush, dense with descriptions of the woods, and Mason did manage to tie a lot of the characters together across time using multiple different story-telling approaches, which I enjoyed (in a wistful kind of way), and also appreciated because I was a bit disappointed when I realized that we were moving fast through each character's time period. I got a little drunk on it, and I'm carrying that North Woods hangover (I had a good time and now I have a bit of a headache and need a glass or two of water) into the book I'm halfway through right now - Richard Power's Playground - also lushly grounded in a physical world we're in the middle of losing. But that's a story for another post.