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Book Report for September 2025

Letter No. 124: Includes volumes set in 15th-century England and the here and now, plus a rare misstep from Lydia Davis and a bit of medical oversharing.
Book Report for September 2025

Dr Essai is relaxing after successful treatment for prostate cancer yesterday. One more distraction put down, we believe, for good. Meanwhile, some fine books this month. Should you be moved to purchase any title from my Bookshop.org store, the essayistic doctor gets a buck or two, and do you know what a latte costs these days? Not to mention a martini. Cheers. But enough about me...

Completed
  • Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, Brian Klaas. A social scientist disenchanted with social science writes a book that makes the case for our lives unspooling under the influence of randomness. History turns on fluke events, and though we feel small and insignificant, we each matter because what we do can have immense consequences that we are incapable of foreseeing. A bracing intellectual ride. I’ve subscribed to Klaas’s newsletter, The Garden of Forking Paths.
  • Into the Weeds, Lydia Davis. The last thing I expected from Lydia Davis was a dull book, but this is a long and lifeless essay about why she writes. A disappointment.
  • The Western Wind, Samantha Harvey. Her novel Orbital was genius. This work is lesser, but not by all that much. A mystery, of sorts, set in 15th-century England and centered on a good-hearted, rueful village priest confronted by the confounding death of the richest man in town. Told in reverse four-chapter chonology.
  • Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki. Brief talks by a man considered a founder of American Zen Buddhism. Paradoxical and inscrutable, of course—we’re talking Zen here. The first line is killer: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
In progress
  • The Best American Essays 2004, Louis Menand (ed.)
  • Fire, George R. Stewart
  • You Must Change Your Life, Rachel Corbett
Purchased
  • Bitches Brew, George Grella Jr.
  • Into the Weeds, Lydia Davis
  • Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, J.F. Martel
  • The Heart in Winter, Kevin Barry
  • North Sun, Ethan Rutherford
  • What Nails It, Greil Marcus

When you make a purchase from my online bookshop, I get a bit of a kickback. It’s all legal and aboveboard, honest. No, really... As always, thank you so much for reading.

Dr Essai's Bibliotheque