Book report for August 2025

This month brought the rare pleasure of reading a friend’s very good book. That’s something to savor.

Completed

• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald. I am ever more baffled by Fitzgerald’s status among The Well Read. His first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned, are awful. Gatsby is much better, of course, but his fascination with two-dimensional mediocre people persists—Daisy Buchanan is nearly vaporous—and he had the bad habit of ending scenes with the sort of overwrought summary sentences beloved by 19-year-old creative writing students.
• The Mountain is You, Brianna Wiest. This was pitched to me as striking wisdom about how to stop obstructing oneself, from a precocious young woman with a burgeoning reputation. It wasn’t. Earnest but vapid.
• The Paris Review, No. 218. I quit on every short story in the issue; they were uniformly mediocre. The redeeming piece was the interview about poetry with Ishmael Reed.

• Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson. Excellent biography of the pathbreaking American fashion designer. I don’t have much interest in fashion; I read the book because Elizabeth is a long-time friend and colleague. But I’d recommend it to anyone as a fascinating story of creativity and gumption that’s also an engaging narrative. Well-researched and well-crafted.
• The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman. I know of no better storyteller. Full stop. This one is Volume II of the trilogy His Dark Materials. Every page Pullman writes is a masterclass in narrative craft.

In progress

• The Western Wind, Samantha Harvey
• Fluke, Brian Klaas