Book report for June 2026

My oh my, wasn’t Dr Essai the busy little belletrist last month? He admits four of the six completed volumes did not consume a lot of time or cognitive bandwidth, though the doctor would not want that to diminish your admiration for his dedication to literary intake. One must always take into account the fragility of his ego.

Should you purchase a recommended book from Dr Essai’s Bibliothèque on Bookshop.org, a few quarters will be deposited in his account toward the future purchase of yet another codex. As always, thank you for reading. We book people are an ever-diminishing subculture — the cover of the new issue of The Atlantic declares “The Age of Reading is Over” — but stand firm against the forces of distraction! Read on, dear Jogglers, read on.

Completed

• The Night Manager, John Le Carré. A return to form for Le Carré after the disappointing Little Drummer Girl and The Secret Pilgrim. First-rate thriller about an unlikely agent who infiltrates an arms dealer’s operation.

• Abstract City, Christoph Nieman. The German designer (and frequent contributor of covers for The New Yorker) Nieman is one of the cleverest graphic artists I know. Each chapter is an illustrated account of some aspect of his life during the years he lived in New York City. He can do more with a handful of Legos than most of us could do with a complete paintbox.
• Platform Decay, Martha Wells. Volume 8 of Wells’s Murderbot Diaries series of tongue-in-cheek science fiction novels. Each one has zero nutritional value, but I’ve read them all because they’re too much fun. They are the basis of the Apple TV series starring Alexander Skarsgård as the sardonic robot who calls himself Murderbot.
• Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape, Cal Flyn. Flyn, a Scottish journalist with superb skill, visits places on the planet that have been abandoned, usually because they’ve been rendered unlivable — the area around Chernobyl, the Salton Sea, the Verdun battlefield — to witness how nature has rebounded and reclaimed the land. She sees hope in how Earth restores what humans have despoiled. (I wrote more about this book in a previous Joggle.)

• Analog Days, Damion Searles. Proof that being observant does not make you a novelist. An album of snapshots, many only a paragraph or two long, of the narrator’s life and the lives of his friends in 2016. Each one is acutely observed, but they don’t add up to anything.
• Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead, Robert Hunter. I am drawn to books about creative scenes. Patti Smith’s Just Kids, about New York’s East Village in the 1970s. Barney Hoskins’s Hotel California, covering Laurel Canyon in the ’60s. Prudence Peidder’s The Slip, about the painters who congregated in Lower Manhattan in the 1950s. Hunter’s book is misrepresented — it has nothing to do with the Dead or the Haight. It’s the boring journal of Hunter and the equally impoverished Jerry Garcia living aimlessly in 1961, long before the Summer of Love.

In progress

• These Truths, Jill Lepore.
• Poor Charlie’s Almanac, Charles T. Munger.
• The Land Breakers, John Ehle.

Purchased

• Poor Charlie’s Almanac, Charles T. Munger.
• Critical Thinking, Jonathan Haber.