Book report for January 2026

It was a cold month in the mid-Atlantic, so Dr Essai turned a lot of pages. Books purchased from Dr Essai’s Bibliothèque earn the doctor a bit of gin money through commissions, important during a cold winter and these trying times.

Completed

• There Is No Antimemetics Division, Qtnm (Sam Hughes). There is no way to write an adequate précis of this novel. The book first lived on a website, where its author wrote as “qntm,” before he rewrote it for print publication. It posits globally destructive entities loose in our world, entities that we are vulnerable to because when we encounter them, we forget them before they register in our consciousness. There’s more going on here, about the spread of toxic ideas enabled by our inability to remember how bad they are, all conveyed through a complicated but engrossing plot. I loved both versions.

• No Less Strange or Wonderful, A. Kendra Greene. Uneven collection of essays, many about paying attention to nature. A few pieces consist of only a few hundred words, and they are the best. The longer ones tend to end up running on empty.
• The Library of the Unwritten, A.J. Hackwith. The central conceit of this novel is that unwritten stories, either unfinished by authors living or dead, or existing for now only as characters in a writer’s mind, exist as actual volumes in the eponymous library, which happens to be housed in Hell. Why it’s in Hell is complicated, so never mind. Hackwith populates her tongue-in-cheek tale with a heroic librarian, an embodied muse, characters who have escaped their unfinished books and are wandering loose among the stacks, corporeal demons, a fallen angel, an archangel, and a gargoyle. I was entertained.

• The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life, John Daido Loori. Much profound thinking on the Zen approach to making art. Like any Buddhist or Taoist text, Loori’s book contains its share of inscrutable passages, but it’s a mind-expanding read, well written and illustrated.

In progress

• The Big Bang of Numbers, Manil Suri

Purchased

• Opera Wars, Caitlin Vincent
• An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, César Aira
• Ice, Anna Kavan
• A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver
• The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century, Alex Ross

As always, Dear Jogglers, thank you for reading. Blessed are the read.

Coda: There Is No Antimemetics Division prompted Joggle No. 131, “This Idea Will Self-Destruct in 30 Milliseconds; You Will Remember Nothing”

The good doctor has penned previous Joggles on creativity:

• “What Does Not Cometh from the Gods”
• “An Addendum toWhat the Gods Do Not Confer”
• “The Sound of One Hand Packing”