Book report for December 2025

Dr Essai wrapped up 2025 with two novels, a memoir, and a slender set of reflections on why one writes. For the doctor, the question of why he writes always has been easily answered: for the money and the women and the glamour. Goes without saying, yeah?

Select titles link to Dr Essai’s Bibliothéque on Bookshop.org. Any purchased volume earns him a slim commission, and earns the buyer karma points for resisting the Amazon hegemon.

Completed

• The Last Whaler, Cynthia Reeves. Inconsistent fictional narrative of a Norwegian couple stranded at a whaling camp in Svalbard in the late 1930s. I read it because its setting is one of the wildest places I have ever visited. When Reeves is on her game, the book can be very good. But for some reason she is prone to pages of amateurish writing, especially when establishing historical context. I mostly enjoyed the book, but one read will suffice.

• Bread of Angels, Patti Smith. A letdown compared to her excellent Just Kids. With Angels, I had no sense of the story she felt compelled to tell, and when she loses direction she overwrites. This is the least of her books, I think.
• What Nails It, Greil Marcus. Part of Yale University Press’s “Why I Write” series. A Marcus sentence can be work to parse, but also can be worth it depending on his subject. This volume is a brief on what lights him up about writing criticism. Worth the hour or two it takes to read if you’re interested in that sort of thing. I had no regrets.
• On the Calculation of Volume II, Solvej Balle. After the extraordinary Volume I (Balle projects seven books in the series), I was curious to see how much more the author could mine from her premise of a rare book dealer inexplicably unable to move on from November 18. The answer was a lot more, with a delicious twist on the last sentence. You may catch notes of Italo Calvino as you read. Volume III, already on my shelves, has crooked its finger at me, and I won’t be long in responding.

In progress

• The Library of the Unwritten, A.J. Hackwith
• No Less Strange or Wonderful, A. Kendra Greene