Book report for March 2026

A bit of a lightweight month this time, with books short on the profound and a little short on quality. Nothing so bad as to be abandoned, though I did come close to ditching the Vonnegut. Anything ordered through Dr Essai’s Bibliothèque garners a commission for the doctor and denies the Bezos satrapy a few bucks. As always, dear Jogglers, thank you for reading.

Completed

• Fairyland, Paul McAuley. McAuley is a biologist who writes science fiction novels that seem to win a lot of awards. This one is batshit crazy, impossible to summarize, and more fun than a barrel of gin. The speculative biology can be dense, but the book begs to be Apple TV’s next science fiction series.

• Some Trick, Helen DeWitt. With DeWitt, I often suspect that she prefers textual puzzles and shows of verbal dexterity to storytelling. That’s true for many of the stories in this collection. Never dull, but in the end a thin collection of literary card tricks. If you want to see what she can really do, read The Last Samurai.
• Feynman’s Rainbow, Leonard Mlodinow. It’s fun, if you’re a physics nerd, to read an account of Caltech when it boasted Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman on its physics faculty at the same time. Too bad Mlodinow is such a pedestrian writer. Short on insight, which seems odd for such a smart man reflecting on such brilliant contemporaries.
• Slapstick, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Baffling. Vonnegut seems intent on parodying himself, for some reason. If that’s what he had in mind, he turned out to be not very good at it. Fortunately, the novel is brief.
• The Best American Essays 2005, Susan Orlean (ed.). I own every edition of this anthology going back to 1986. I am working my way through them year by year. This was a good year. Standout pieces include Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras” (which I have written about here), Danielle Ofri’s “Living Will,” Cathleen Schine’s “Dog Trouble,” Robert Stone’s “The Prince of Possibility” (about his time with writer and Sixties prankster Ken Kesey), and David Foster Wallace’s terrific “Consider the Lobster” (extra points for any Joggler who gets the title’s reference).

In progress

• These Truths, Jill Lepore.
• Ex Libris, Michiko Kakitani

Purchased

• Feynman’s Rainbow, Leonard Mlodinow.