Sandwich Joe
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.
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.
Contains spoilers
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.
Authority is a deliberately disorienting follow-up to Annihilation, and whether that’s a feature or a bug depends entirely on what kind of reader you are. Where Annihilation dropped you into Area X’s visceral, ecological dread, Authority keeps you at arm’s length, trapped inside a dysfunctional government agency with a protagonist whose job is to make sense of things that refuse to be made sense of.
It’s a slower, more bureaucratic kind of horror, and it’s genuinely effective, but the book can be disjointed in ways that occasionally tip from “productively disorienting” into just plain hard to track. Characters and plot points slip in and out of focus in ways that feel partly intentional and partly like casualties of VanderMeer’s commitment to atmosphere over clarity.
I’m usually fine with confusion and a book that doesn’t solve everything (or anything); however, in this case, I would have loved to have known more about the world of The Factory. It wouldn’t have to be about what the factory does — I’m fine with that being ambiguous. Instead, I want fleshed-out characters or a more intricate plot or a detailed setting or anything that makes this short novel memorable.
Marzi by Marzena Sowa (with art by Sylvain Savoia) is a powerful, coming-of-age memoir told in vignettes. Set in the ‘80s, the graphic novel offers an illuminating look at the life of a young girl in communist Poland. Through her eyes, the reader sees both the ordinary struggles of childhood and the “grown up” realities of authoritarianism and scarcity. Marzi and her parents and neighbors regularly wait in line for days, hoping for necessities like meat or gas, finding it ordinary that these staples may not even arrive. This element in particular makes me thankful (and somewhat guilty) for the abundance, selection, and convenience of products where I live.
That said, I don’t feel like the graphic format was fully utilized. The story itself is strong, but it might have been even more effective as a traditional prose memoir rather than a graphic novel. However, I do think there’s something to be said for using illustrations in a memoir about childhood.
Overall, Marzi is definitely worth reading for its perspective and insight, even if the format doesn’t quite reach its full potential.
Murakami’s Norwegian Wood is unlike the surreal, dreamlike novels I’ve read of his before—it’s grounded, melancholic, and intensely personal. Told through the retrospective lens of Toru Watanabe (a semi-autobiographical narrator), it’s a story of grief, love, and the difficult passage into adulthood in 1960s Tokyo.
What stayed with me most is the novel’s exploration of how death shapes life. The many suicides in Toru’s life leave him torn between memory and possibility, and force him to face how “death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”
The novel isn’t always comfortable. The pacing is slow, the atmosphere heavy, and the characters are not designed to be easily likable. But by the end, it’s devastating and strangely beautiful, like the Beatles song it takes its name from: bittersweet, nostalgic, and impossible to shake.
Jay Rubin’s English translation of Norwegian Wood from the Japanese is absolutely beautiful. I highly recommend it.
Master Class has a great premise, but the execution never lives up to it. The world building stays strangely narrow, focusing entirely on schooling instead of exploring even a few other broader consequences of such a system. The protagonist is hard to root for; her choices often feel illogical or convenient rather than character-driven. And the book’s themes aren’t subtext so much as text shouted through a megaphone, with Nazi parallels so obvious they lose their impact.
A quick, mildly interesting read, but ultimately shallow and frustratingly underdeveloped.
The three books in this series (baby, toddler, and child) explore way to raise children in the Montessori way outside of school.
I’ve read the series, and I found this one to be the weakest of the three. While it was informative, I believe the others (especially the toddler one) were more novel and interesting.
That said, it’s a helpful book for guardians and caregivers to read, and I’ll be able to use these strategies in caring for my niece.
Solaris is one of the most quietly devastating sci-fi novels I’ve ever read. What begins as a puzzle about an alien ocean becomes a deeply human story about memory, guilt, and the limits of scientific understanding.
The atmosphere (figurative and literal) is uncanny and dream-like from the beginning. Kelvin and the other scientists each try to “logic” their way through the experience, clinging to rationality even as the situation becomes too intimate and emotional for science to explain. Their coping mechanisms are tragic rather than heroic; they’re brilliant men completely unequipped for an environment that turns their own minds into the experiment.
The uncanny gradually gives way to something sadder and more relatable. Kelvin’s descent from detached rationalism into raw, vulnerable attachment was heartbreaking to watch, and the book’s refusal to offer clear answers makes the ending linger in the best possible way.
A haunting, philosophical masterpiece about what happens when human experience exceeds the tools we use to understand it.
Perfume by Patrick Süskind is one of those books that’s impossible to “enjoy,” but equally impossible to look away from. It’s grotesque, hypnotic, and written with such precision that even the filthiest moments feel strangely beautiful. Süskind builds an entire metaphysics out of scent, turning smell into a stand-in for identity, soul, and power.
It’s weird. It’s uncomfortable. It’s brilliant. And the language is gorgeous throughout.
It would be difficult to overstate my longtime love of the His Dark Materials series. I stumbled upon the books when I was around age 10, and they were such a large part of my childhood. It feels surreal that the series has finally come to a close.
I know The Rose Field disappointed many HDM fans, but I thought it was an enjoyable read. The key is to treat the novel as yet another part of the whole rather than a culmination of the entire series.
🎧 I both read the ebook and listened to the audiobook, and I think I actually preferred the audiobook. Michael Sheen did an excellent job as narrator.
Saga, Vol. 1 by Brain K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples is wildly imaginative, deeply emotional, and completely unashamed of its weirdness. The story begins as a space-opera Romeo and Juliet, but quickly becomes its own strange, vibrant beast. The narration from their child gives it a haunting, storybook quality, even as the world around her bursts with violence, sex, and absurd humor.
Staples's art is stunning (lush, expressive, and cinematic) while Vaughan's dialogue makes even the most bizarre creatures feel human (well, human-ish). Beneath all the chaos, it's about family, empathy, and surviving in a universe that doesn't want you to.
As a longtime comics/graphic novel reader, I can say that Saga remains one of the best: strange, emotional, and endlessly creative.
Here is one of the most unique graphic novels I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of them. The concept is deceptively simple: every panel shows the same corner of a room, but across thousands of years. The setting itself becomes the main character, quietly observing as people, furniture, and even species come and go.
McGuire structures time like a shuffled deck of cards, showing how people don’t really change, even as everything else does. It’s both cosmic and intimate, a reminder that all things are impermanent, yet somehow continuous. The effect is mesmerizing: a story that feels like watching time breathe.
In The Secret Commonwealth, Pullman trades the intimacy of Oxford and the frozen wonder of the North for a sprawling, politically charged journey across Europe, the Near East, and Central Asia… and it works. This installment feels like a mature evolution of His Dark Materials: a world still threaded with Dust and dæmons, but one wrestling with modern realities and the pain of getting older.
Lyra, now grown and disenchanted, experiences a second fall, one not from innocence, but from belief. The sense of loss is profound, but so is the beauty of her search to recover faith in the unseen.
Others have noted some of the rougher aspects of the novel, so I won’t go into those. I’ll just say that this is a rich, mature, and deeply philosophical entry in the series: less adventure, more pilgrimage. Even in its darkness, it never loses the wonder that makes Lyra’s world so unforgettable. I can’t wait for the final chapter later this week.
Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives is terrifying not because of monsters, but because of how ordinary its horror feels. Levin exposes the quiet violence of conformity—how easily a woman’s sanity can be dismissed as “hysteria,” how quickly independence becomes a threat.
What’s most chilling is the gaslighting: Joanna’s every fear is turned against her until she starts to doubt her own mind. The evil here isn’t supernatural; it’s polite, domestic, and smiling. Even worse, some of the women in Stepford enforce the same ideals that imprison them, a dynamic that still echoes in modern “tradwife” culture.
It’s a story about losing a shared reality, about realizing that everyone else has agreed on something you know is wrong. Levin’s horror doesn’t scream; it reassures you that everything’s fine, and that’s what makes it unforgettable.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw is both a love letter to and an autopsy of the slasher genre. Stephen Graham Jones takes every trope (the Final Girl, the caretaker, the small-town curse, etc.) and makes them feel alive, uncomfortable, and personal.
Jade, the narrator, is one of the most compelling voices I’ve read in horror. She’s unreliable, but not because she’s dishonest. Her world is filtered through slasher logic because it’s the only framework that makes sense to her.
Jones pulls off something remarkable: horror that’s both “elevated” and defiantly not ashamed of its roots. The violence and pulp are still there, but so is heart, empathy, and social commentary. Jade’s awkwardness, her low self-worth, her obsession—all of it makes her painful to watch and impossible not to root for.
At its core, My Heart Is a Chainsaw isn’t just a slasher story; it’s about what it means to love a genre that doesn’t love you back, and to find a sense of self in its rules anyway.
One of my most anticipated books this year was Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. I read Babel last December and loved it, so I was anxious to see where her latest journey would take me. And, while the novel isn’t perfect, it didn’t disappoint. Katabasis, which tells the story of a student’s literal descent into Hell, blends Dante, Greek myth, and Buddhist afterlife courts into a wild dark academia fever dream.
There’s a lot to enjoy about the novel and Kuang’s writing. I love the biting humor, the way paradoxes like the Möbius strip or the Lethe become worldbuilding. It’s funny, bleak, and oddly moving.