Book report for April 2025

Finally, an explanation for why I have not written much lately—all this reading. I need one of those witless grownups from my childhood to stand over me and say, “For heaven’s sake, get your nose out of that book!”

This was a good month for great prose. A note for new Jogglers: Whenever you follow a link and buy a book from my shop, Bookshop.org contributes to independent booksellers and kicks a few nickels back to me.

Completed

• On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle. A deserving finalist for the Booker International Prize 2025. The first volume of a heptology, it is the extraordinary story of a woman stuck in a single day for a year. Making that work for 160 pages is a magic act, but Balle pulls it off with quiet verve, if there is such a thing. I have not read another book like it, but I plan to—On the Calculation of Volume II.

• Art Can Help, Robert Adams. Superb brief essays on photographs that have captivated Adams, himself a photographer of note. The best of them embody both brevity and depth, and damn, is that hard to do.
• While We’ve Still Got Feet, David Budbill. Book of poetry inspired by Han Shan, a 9th-century Chinese Buddhist poet. Written with skill and wit and candor. Budbill’s exemplar would have approved.
• Big Sur, Jack Kerouac. Of the five Kerouac novels I’ve read, this is among the least heralded but, to me, the best. Based on a disastrous 1960 sojourn by the author in a California cabin, the book bravely faces the wreckage of its author’s life. Here, finally, a Kerouac book in which drunks are not beat angelsaints composing cool bop prosody. They are just drunks—sick in the morning, useless in the afternoon, frustrated and self-loathing and despairing. Some of it’s hard to read, some of it suffers from Kerouac’s signature self-indulgence, but it’s bracing in its truth.
• In a Lonely Place, Dorothy B. Hughes. Clever, engrossing noir novel written in the late 1940s. Hughes slyly turns genre tropes back on themselves in a portrait of a serial killer, and rarely steps wrong.

In progress

• Who I Am, Pete Townsend
• The Great American Essays 2003, Anne Fadiman (ed.)
• Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, John Crowley

Purchased

• The Blind Giant, Nick Harkaway
• Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams
• Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki
• Dust and Light, Andrea Barrett
• The Expert of Subtle Revisions, Kirsten Menger-Anderson
• The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr
• The Western Wind, Samantha Harvey
• Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life, Zena Hitz
• The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life, John Daido Loori