Book report for November 2025

The highlight of this month’s reading to oneself was Mary Oliver. I see her poetry derided on occasion, but never her essays, and with good reason. They are so good. The links take you to Dr Essai’s Bookshop.org page. Should you purchase a volume there, you will become part of an elaborate kickback scheme that so far has netted the doctor sums rumored to have reached the low two figures. He declines to comment at this time.

Completed

• Martian Time-Slip, Phillip K. Dick. For its first three-quarters, fun but clumsy pulp science fiction that feels as if written in haste (which many of Dick’s books were; he was chronically insolvent and often in need of quick cash). Then it veers into startling plot developments that embrace some of the author’s preoccupations: the elastic experience of time, the porous divide between sanity and something else, and how do we know any of this is real? It ends with surprising poignance.

• Upstream, Mary Oliver. Lovely essays about or inspired by nature. Oliver pens superb sentences and her voice…she’s a wittier version of Henry David Thoreau, and Annie Dillard without Dillard’s occasional hysteria (or rapture, depending on your tolerance for that sort of thing).

• The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr. The parts about neuroscience and hallucinated reality and the dodgy stories we tell ourselves about ourselves were more interesting to me than the writing advice. But those parts made the book worth reading.

In progress

• The Last Whaler, Cynthia Reeves
• Bread of Angels, Patti Smith

Purchased

• Best American Essays 2025, Jia Tolentino (ed.)
• Things That Disappear, Jenny Erpenbeck
• Bread of Angels, Patti Smith

As always, thank you, dear Jogglers, for reading.