Book report for July 2025

The July report arrives a bit late, due to Dr Essai’s time-consuming difficulty in finishing the previous communiqué. These things happen.

Completed

• The Secret Pilgrim, John le Carré. Written, according to the author, when “I determined to make a last farewell of the Cold War.” A novel made from a sequence of incidents recalled by a retired British agent. Well written, of course, but lacking the heft of the George Smiley masterpieces.
• Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland, Lavinia Greenlaw. As a poet, Greenlaw has excerpted the travel journal of Morris, another poet, that he kept on an 1871 trek about Iceland. The glimpses of life in the country at that time are fascinating, and Morris endears by his candor about his own bumbling nature. Greenlaw has added haiku-like verses composed of sentences and fragments culled from Morris’s journal. All-round fun.

• Canoes, Maylis de Kerangal. Collection of stories by the extraordinary French storyteller. I read her sentences slowly, word by word, to savor them, like sipping a gorgeous Pinot. Highly recommended.
• What Art Does, Brian Eno. Slight in every respect. A disappointment from what is ordinarily a penetrating mind.

In progress

• Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free, Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson
• The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Abandoned

• A People’s Future of the United States, Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams (eds.)
• The Quiet Americans, Scott Anderson

Purchased

• The Whispering Muse, Sjón
• New York Sketches, E.B. White
• Blind Corners: Essays on Photography, Michael Collins