Book report for February/March 2025

Bless you, dear Jogglers, for your patience regarding the dearth of letters over the last few weeks. When I express frustration at my sporadic productivity, my wife often says, “Well, you’re not making Cinnabons.” This makes me feel better every time.

I have combined my usual monthly book report for the last two months, mostly because I did not read much in February. Life has been unsettled in the Dr Essai household, but the situation is returning to an equilibrium more conducive to the production of prose. And Cinnabons.

So, then:

Completed

• Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford. Spufford is a smart, clever craftsman of popular fiction with literary meat on its bones. This is a thriller set in a counterfactual 1930s America in which the indigenes have not been obliterated by smallpox, so that the ancient indigenous city of Cahokia still exists as the capital of the state of Cahokia. White, red, and black populations reside in a fragile social equilibrium that is threatened by a gruesome murder. Spufford misses a few notes, but the book is great fun.

• Thinking in Numbers, Daniel Tammet. Interesting set of essays by the neuro-unique author, who has written at length about how his autistic mind experiences the world. All the pieces in this collection were generated by his fascination with mathematics. Uneven but worthwhile.
• American War, Omar El Akkad. An excellent work of speculative history. The fictional context of El Akkad’s deftly written tragedy is a second American civil war 50 years in the future, after coastal metropolises have been inundated by rising seas.
• Orbital, Samantha Harvey. Had the Annie Dillard of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek spent a few months in orbit, something like this extraordinary book might have resulted. One long imaginary contemplation of a day on the International Space Station, which somehow has a subtle narrative drive. What some people can do with words dazzles me.

• A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary 1995, Brian Eno. Intermittently interesting diary from a busy year in Brian Eno’s life. Eno has an adroit mind, and it was fascinating for me to glimpse his creative working life, but there’s a reason most of us can’t sustain interest in even our own diaries. There were a few worthwhile essays appended to the diary (hence the title).
• The Fourth Island, Sarah Tolmie. Arresting short novel about strange events in the Aran Islands, including bodies washing ashore, a fourth island not on any charts, and mysterious reappearances by people lost. Sounds contrived, but it isn’t.

In progress

• On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle

Abandoned

• The Library of the Unwritten, A.J. Hackwith
• The White Lady, Jacqueline Winspear

Purchased

• In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes
• Outside, Barry Lopez
• The Slip: The New York City Street that Changed American Art Forever, Prudence Peiffer
• Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, Brian Klaas
• Bronshtein in the Bronx, Robert Littell
• Canoes, Maylis de Kerangal
• Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Malcolm Harris
• All the Horses of Iceland, Sarah Tolmie
• The Last Whaler, Cynthia Reeves

Bought rather a lot, didn’t I? This happens when I travel. Hoisting my carry-on bag into the overhead bin on return flights is always a strain.

If you choose to buy a book through the links to my Bookshop.org store, they drop a couple of doubloons into my account, which encourages me to buy more books that I have nowhere to shelve. Go on, be an enabler.

Coda

Kayoon Anderson’s full painting may be viewed, and purchased, here.