Books: Third Quarter Review
The numbers aren't numbering but have I got the book of the year for you! August through October was a real reading dry spell but I've got some new strategies...
Books Read, Fiction
- Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino ⭐️
- I Who Have Never Known Men, Jacqueline Harpman ⭐
- My Sister, the Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite
- Piranesi, Susanna Clarke ⭐
- The Teacher’s Match, Kristi Hong
- Yellowface, R.F. Kuang ⭐
- Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
- Orbital, Samantha Harvey
- The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Well, we’re rounding the corner into the last few months of my 2025 book journey and the numbers are not looking good. With a goal of forty fiction books by the end of the year, I’m going to safely say that I’m not gonna make it. If I hit half that number I’ll be lucky!
I recently read this article from The Cut about how people get their many many books read in and one takeaway I got was to just read in small spaces. Got ten minutes? Read a chapter. Waiting for something? Read a chapter. Before, I had been setting time aside to read with my trusty forty-five minute timer, but that has not exactly worked out. Now I’m going to try this small bites strategy.
The downside is that I don’t think I like reading this way, as I’d rather ingest large chunks of a book at once, but I’m willing to give it a go. So, instead of reading my many articles, catching up on RSS reader stuff, trying to inbox zero my newsletters—which I’m very diligent about now—I need to try to fit in some book reading during the small moments in time.
The other thing I need to add is a “first thing when I wake up” or “last thing before I go to bed” reading time. Some people mentioned that they read for X amount of time as soon as they get up. This seems like an intriguing activity, as I’m usually launching straight into notifications or trying to get out of bed fast enough that I don’t fall back asleep. Perhaps I can use a light book read to pry my brain awake. The “read before bed” thing won’t work because it’ll make me sleepy right quick and I’m currently using pre-bed time to watch lots of NBA/NFL highlights. Is sports the best use of my consumption life? Definitely not, but I’ve revamped my fantasy basketball team this season and also joined a guillotine football league so I’m (temporarily) very invested in both.
In short, much reading will need to be done in the next two months, to hit any sort of benchmark.
So what have I read in August, September, and October? Well, only five books actually, but some of them were absolute bangers! I will speak now on my declaration / theory that there are “perfect books but not perfect movies.” After reading Beautyland, I sat there thinking about what else I wanted from it. And like Pharrell said to Maggie, I say this to Marie-Helene Bertino: “no notes.”
With movies, there's always something to nitpick, even if it's very minor. However, with less moving parts, sometimes a book can just be perfect. Agree or disagree with this theory?
Various people had recommended Beautyland to me but I finally picked it up—and knowing nothing about it—was absolutely stunned. It’s best you know nothing about it either, but let’s just say I’ll be recommending this book to everyone everywhere. The voice, the writing, the everything, Beautyland was perfection.
Note: In trying to think up perfect movies to work on my theory, AMR immediately suggested “Frozen,” and frankly, I do find it hard to disagree. Maybe Frozen is the one and only perfect movie made in existence. Bravo Elsa and Anna!
If not for Beautyland, I would be singing the praises of I Who Have Never Known Men instead. I’d been seeing this book featured prominently in every indie bookstore’s front section for months but never really looked at it. Finally I read an article about how this 1995 translated reprint took over TikTok, and then read Carmen Maria Machado’s New Yorker essay—now included in the book—and finally read the damn thing. Turns out, I had no idea it was a dystopian novel! I’m not sure what I thought it was about but it wasn’t that. IWHNKM is quite good and a gripping read, and it has a lot that stays with you, but in comparison to Beautyland—not that they need to be compared—it’s but a trifle. Still, great book!
- 18 Well-Read People on How They Find the Time for Books
- “I Who Have Never Known Men” is a Warning,” Carmen Maria Machado
- The Handmaid’s Tale for Gen Z How BookTok made a dystopian novel from the ’90s into an indie best seller.
Other than that, for one of our book clubs, we discussed Yellowface, which I had started on the plane ride to Asia last year, liked it, but never quite finished. This time around, I read the back half and then wrapped around to the front again. Coming off just reading Babel, it’s just even more impressive how R.F. Kuang can flip genres so well. The publishing insider parts of Yellowface were very fun for me, and of course, the overall idea of a white woman stealing her (dead) Asian friend’s novel is a great conceit and Kuang holds nothing back in excoriate and satirizing the whole thing. Recommend!
Oh wait, for that same book club, I read Piranesi, which was an absolute delight. It took awhile to get into the world and the writing, but the fantasy world of a magical house was fascinating and engrossing. It really made me want to read Susanna Clarke’s debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, even though I’ve heard that it’s entirely different. But yeah, high recommend on Piranesi too.
Overall, even if the volume is down, the quality of the most recent books I’ve read have been spectacular. Also, my friend Kristi Hong’s debut romance is out, The Teacher's Match, featuring a love story between two Taiwanese American teachers! Yay, friends!
And there’s not much to say about the quits except that Orbital had been on my list for so long and when I finally got around to it, I quit within thirty minutes. One of the Ringer folk, Sean maybe, loved it but I just had to abort, not for me! Same sort of feeling about The Shadow of the Wind, which is a 2001 book by the best-selling Spanish writer of all time, Carlos Ruiz Zafón. It was a book club selection and very meh, but the premise was sort of exciting, featuring a Cemetery of Forgotten Books that offered a lot of promise but was ultimately pretty bland and dull.
