Book report for June 2025

Completed

• Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, John Crowley. No one else writes like John Crowley, with his imaginative scope, his craftsmanship, and his ability to write stories that make the mythic as concrete as the ground beneath your feet. This is such a good novel. And the central figure is an immortal crow.

• Dust and Light: On the Art of Fact in Fiction, Andrea Barrett. Probably of interest mostly to writers, especially writers who admire Barrett’s work, as I do. Essays on building fiction from historical figures. Smart and rich in ideas.
• 84K, Claire North. Clever dystopian novel set in an England that has privatized most everything to an entity known only as The Company. That may sound hokey, but in North’s hands the premise is all too credible—and menacing. North deploys her own grammar and syntax rules to convey the disjointed nature of thought and uncomfortable conversations in a way I’ve never seen before, and unlike most experiments of this sort, it works.
• All the Horses of Iceland, Sarah Tolmie. Tolmie writes new mythologies from places like the Aran Islands and Iceland. This one is condensed, brisk, resonant of Old Norse stories, and engaging. The tale is of Eyvind, a 9th-century Icelandic wanderer who ventures to near Mongolia and brings back the mystical horses of Iceland.

• The Book, Keith Houston. A popular history of the book that starts with clay tablets and papyrus. By the end, I didn’t have the curiosity to make it through the final chapter on book binding, but Houston writes well, and this volume is beautifully designed.
• Ghostways: Two Journeys in Unquiet Places, Robert Macfarlane. Paired essays about ancient English walkways that feel haunted by walkers of the past. The first, which comprises most of the book, is verse, more or less, that I found mostly baffling. The second was comprehensible and fascinating. Macfarlane is always interesting, if now and then opaque in ways I find offputting.
• The Great American Essays 2003, Anne Fadiman (ed.). One of the better volumes in the long-running annual collection of essays. Standouts include work by Brian Doyle, Adam Gopnik (his charming exploration of his daughter’s imaginary friend, Mr. Ravioli), Edward Hoagland, Michael Pollan, Susan Sontag, and John Edgar Wideman.

In progress

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

Purchased

• What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, Brian Eno
• Held, Anne Michaels
• The House of Being, Natasha Trethewey
• On the Calculation of Volume II, Solveg Balle