Sandwich Joe

The Lathe of Heaven is a quiet, devastating masterpiece. Ursula K. Le Guin explores the ethics of power, the dangers of utopian thinking, and the unbearable weight of unintended consequences, and all through the eyes of a protagonist who doesn't fight back so much as endure.

George Orr is a man whose dreams change reality, and he's as terrified of this power as others are eager to exploit it. What unfolds is a surreal, shifting meditation on agency, control, and the false promise of fixing a broken world through singular will. The novel asks hard questions about utilitarianism: who gets to decide what's “better,” and at what cost?

Le Guin's restraint is what makes this so powerful. There's no flashy rebellion; it's just a slow, eerie slide through alternate realities. And yet, the novel's final act offers something quietly radical: the idea that humility, endurance, and simply choosing not to control might be the most human response of them all.

Repetition is a novel that trusts its reader completely, and that trust is the whole mechanism. Hjorth’s prose is cool, controlled, and almost affectless… and yet the emotional weight is immense, because she has engineered it to live nowhere except in you. The reader supplies it. The reader completes the text. By the end, you realize you’ve been doing the same interpretive work as the narrator herself, assembling meaning from fragments and silences, never quite arriving at the thing itself.

The dual temporality (a woman in her sixties reconstructing her sixteenth year) gives you two unreliable narrators stacked on top of each other. The girl who couldn’t see what was happening. The woman who may not want to. Hjorth never resolves the distance between them, and that irresolution is precisely the point.

I’m so uncomfortable.

It took me a few days to figure out what to say about this book. For good or ill, it did make an impression.

I’m not sure what I can add to the discourse that hasn’t been said already. Like many other readers, I feel that Yesteryear suffers from a lack of good editing. The premise is solid and intriguing, but the execution of the idea falls flat. For example, I’m disappointed at the lack of Burke’s deep research into Christianity, or Natalie’s underdeveloped character.

That said, I did fly through the book, and, despite its faults, I can see why it might be the book of the summer.

Ultramarine is a novella that I initially approached with the wrong expectations, and I think that’s worth naming upfront because it shaped my early reading experience. The premise sounds like the engine of a thriller or slow-burn horror. It isn’t. Once I stopped waiting for that shift, I found something quieter and more rewarding underneath.

Navarro comes from theatre and poetry, and it shows in the best possible way. This is a book of atmosphere and interiority rather than plot. The sailors function almost as a collective entity (similar to the girls in Brutes by Dizz Tate), a force rather than individuals. The Captain, unnamed and deliberately opaque, is less a character to know than a position to inhabit, a woman who built her authority entirely on control and protocol, and suddenly confronted with something she cannot name.

The water is doing heavy Jungian lifting throughout. The ocean here is the unconscious, and the 21st man reads as shadow material that surfaces whether invited or not. Crucially, the Captain never enters the water to swim herself. She facilitates everyone else’s descent and stays dry on the deck. And then the unconscious comes to her anyway.

Eve Hill-Agnus’s translation deserves particular mention. The prose has a rhythmic quality that mimics the rocking of a ship, and for a book this dependent on that effect, a translator who couldn’t feel and carry that musicality would have ruined the tone of the novella.

My one genuine complaint is that I wanted more of it. When the writing is this good, brevity feels like deprivation.