2026 #1 Intermezzo (Rooney)

 

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

3.75

I started this book in August and then I put it down. Peter and Ivan did not immediately catch my interest, so I moved on to other things. But I returned, and I'm glad I did. I don't love the "no dialogue-styled-as-dialogue" aspect, although I appreciated it more when I was invested in a moment that was more meaningful to me. I enjoyed the last quarter of the book the most, wherein the five main characters start to come together. We spend a lot of time in the heads of Peter and Ivan, and I started to grow tired of the both of them, but the cool move here is that Rooney shows us (eventually) how they start to grow tired of themselves. That's what made the book for me. I'm glad I read it.

Challenges on Storygraph (@rebcamuse):

2026 Reading Goals: 1/60

Tackle Your Physical TBR 1/18

#192030 Challenge: 2024

Litsy #WickedWords 2026 (January):

Pawn

Knight

Rook

2025 #52 The Book of George (Greathead)

 

The Book of George: A Novel by Kate Greathead
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Who is George? Well, while we are treated to almost four decades of his existence, I'm not sure I felt any more confident in answering that question at the end than I did at the beginning. George is, it seems, fairly unremarkable, and I think (THINK) that's the point? This does lead to some humor, and the frustrating inconsistency of George's attitudes is also a plus. I think we are supposed to see him as flawed -- and he is-- but who isn't? He's self-centered and winds up in precarious situations of his own making (I couldn't help but think of another George...Costanza!), yet also seems to be able to interact socially and land a spot in a Super Bowl commercial. So, he's complex, in that ordinary human kind of way. His on-and-off again relationship with Jenny, who is also flawed, provided the most interest, but there were several spots where this threatened to be a do-not-finish for me. I'm glad I persisted, however, because I actually liked the (non-)ending because it was perfect for the book (something I appreciate even when I don't love the book that much). Ultimately I think it probably did not resonate as much with my Gen-Xness as it might with younger folk.


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2025 #49 Headshot (Bullwinkel)

 

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3.75
Conceptually, this book is fantastic, and the fact that it highlights young women boxers is exceptional. I bear some responsibility for my somewhat "meh" reaction to the book as I have very little interest in boxing, and I'm sure that sullied my reaction a bit. That said, the book does not go into detail in terms of actual boxing maneuvers, etc, so don't let a dislike to boxing deter you from reading it. I'm just calling out perhaps an implicit bias of my own.

The writing style is appealing, as we are granted access to the headspace of the different competitors. In the end, however, I think I found it too many characters to hold on to, although Bullwinkle admirably fills out a dossier for each with moving and thoughtful details. I think those who made it to the final rounds stayed with me a bit more, but it also took me quite a while to finish the book, so I didn't retain it the way I might have otherwise. I appreciated the glimpses into the future of each of the characters as well, which was a great reminder that we are all our own pasts, presents, and futures. I found Izzy and Iggy the most interesting, perhaps because of their familial connection, which added a whole other dimension to the story.

I wished, perhaps, for more backstory at the outset, so that I could invest in the characters more as the narrative progressed.

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2025 #45 Beautyland (Bertino)

 

Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title felt a bit gratuitous to me, but then I thought, what would I title this novel? I have no idea. There are moments that read like a charming coming-of-age tale, others that twist your heart as our human-ness is witnessed and performed by Adina, and still others that serve up whimsical nostalgia from the late 70s, spanning from a famous moment on The Price is Right to Voyager's gold-plated time capsule phonograph record. It turns out the whimsy is deeper, after all, especially as Adina struggles with homesickness and trying to belong, and then experiences the deep grief of loss. Similar to Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, Bertino's novel made me care about Adina more than her origin story, and I often forgot that there was an element of fantasy/sci-fi here. Part of this is due to the dry, but not unfeeling, delivery of the protagonist. Adina has an element of an "Everyman" (and yes, I'll use the male dominant term to connect specifically to its 15th-century reference) to her--we are Adina, if we choose to step back and look. What a gift to be able to see ourselves through her eyes, to laugh at our silliness, to cry at our cruelty, to empathize with our pain.

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2025 #43 Martyr! (Akbar)

 

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This remarkable debut novel lives up to the hype. Fans of Akbar's poetry won't be disappointed, as he weaves in poems into the manuscript authored by the protagonist, Cyrus, an Iranian-American poet, writer, and recovering alcoholic. I did not know what to expect, having read little about the book as I'm simply trying to read all the 2025 Tournament of Books selections, and I think I'm better for not knowing what I was getting into. It is hard to describe the ride that is this book -- it is beautiful, tragic, funny, historical fiction, and one of those books where you feel you can connect with almost every character. There's even a plot twist -- handled deftly by Akbar, without resorting to clichéd sentimentality. Akbar lays bare themes of addiction, abandonment, artistic impulse, religiosity, media filters, racism, sexuality, and yes-- martyrdom--all in a way that seems like one of those rare honest conversations one might have with a close friend (often while inebriated, for some). The only drawback (if I can call it that) for me was the final scene between Cyrus and Zee. While I understand the reason for the lack of earthiness, it jolted me out of what I loved so much about the book -- the "here-and-nowness" of it--the starkness and the reality. I would have enjoyed a more subtle experience. But that doesn't keep me from saying that Martyr! is definitely in my top five books that I've read this year.

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2025 #41 The Wedding People (Espach)

 

The Wedding People by Alison Espach
My rating: 4.5 stars

4.5 stars. I enjoyed this way more than I thought I would, but I also seem to have bias against certain types of cover art? Anyway, Phoebe is an amazing protagonist, and the book is full of characters who are hiding behind façades, and Espach lets us see that so that they don't become caricatures. The initial premise doesn't seem like it would be very funny--and it isn't--but the story is so very human and redemptive in that the characters get to be real people, making real choices. A delightful read. As it is part of my Tournament of Books 2025 list read, I'll say I enjoyed it more than Margo's Got Money Troubles, which is a good comparative in terms of style/genre.

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2025 #37 Margo's Got Money Troubles (Thorpe)

 

Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lots of folks misuse the word "ambivalent" but I think that's the right word to describe how I feel about this book. Think more 3.75 stars. There were parts of this book I LOVED and parts I really did not love.

Suzie? I kept forgetting she existed and then she'd pop up like a game of whack-a-mole. The mushroom "scene" was off the rails, although I suppose that was the point. But these types of things made the plot feel like a manipulation, as if Thorpe was just interested in having the reader be a yo-yo she could play with. I least enjoyed the descriptions of the OnlyFans content - not that I'm prudish, but if I'm not a consumer of that content, I don't really relish reading about it either, even in a pragmatic, funny way. I did find, however, Margo's "writeups" very amusing. The more surreal content? Not my thing.

Jinx was a GREAT character and his relationship with Margo is largely what pushes this toward 4 stars for me. I also loved the mix of first and third person narration. And for as little as he's actually described, I felt I had a strong picture of Bodhi in my mind.

So, I had to sit with this for a day before writing a review because I did like it and it did make me laugh (and also cry). I think it felt a bit too improvisatory for me in terms of storyline, but some of the characters were gold.


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2025 #36 James (Everett)

 

James by Percival Everett
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a book that needed to be written and needs to be read. There's no better way to reconcile some of the problems with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn than with satire. But while satire comes into play, this is also a truly beautiful novel. And it isn't just simply "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told by Jim", although it has been so many years since I read Twain's book I can't claim knowledge of a side-by-side comparison. The messages aren't subtle, but it is an invitation to think about an old character (or actually old characters--Huck, too), in a new way. There are parts that drag a bit, but overall the novel illuminates the privilege of "adventures" and how characters can reclaim and change the archetypes to which they've been relegated.

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2025 #34: Liars (Manguso)

 

Liars by Sarah Manguso
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I think this book is going to land differently depending on the personal experiences of readers. While that's true of any book, I had a really hard time relating to the relentless onslaught of the narrative. I felt like I was a therapist, and I was simply reading a transcript of sessions of a woman in an unhappy marriage. That said, I did appreciate that the post-divorce narrative didn't go the way of the cliché, I suppose. As a child of divorced parents, it did make me think a bit, but mostly the book just tired me out. I needed more shape and direction.

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2025 #31 Colored Television (Senna)

 

Colored Television by Danzy Senna
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, Colored Television digs into the trials and tribulations of the writing life, especially those compounded by racism. Unlike the former book, however, it doesn't quite go to the same extremes, and the protagonist here, Jane Gibson, is generally more likeable than June in Yellowface.

The book gets off to a slow start, where we are treated to the inner workings of Jane's mind before we care too much about her. She's living in someone else's house with her husband Lenny and their two children, Ruby and Finn. Her marriage is slightly less than functional, its success measured by frequency and quality of sex, and Lenny has his own ambitions as an artist that don't always complement Jane's sabbatical wherein she is trying to finish her second book in order to get tenure. Senna does excellent work layering the texture with tension. First and foremost, there is Jane's own mixed-race identity and how it does/doesn't interact with both her personal and professional life. She has dreams of luxury, and she has everything riding on this second novel, Nusu Nusu, to make her financial dreams come true. While we don't have deep dives into the novel, we understand enough to know that it is an intergenerational narrative about mulatto [term as used in the book] people.

 
In some sense, Jane's wishful thinking is enabled by her friend Brett, in whose house they are staying (and whose wine collection they are drinking). While Jane does find success in completing the novel, things go downhill very quickly, when Jane is confronted with the commoditization of identity in the publishing industry.

In not quite a twist--but perhaps a questionable choice--rather than address that core issue, Jane decides to come at it from a different angle, again centering her ideas of "success" rather than her ideologies. She manipulates and deceives, but in rather earthy ways, rather than hyperbolic hysteria. The deceit does drag on a bit too long, but the plot mobility increases so that we aren't drowned in an investigation into inner psyches, and Jane's naivete softens her character a bit. The book is more a tragicomedy than anything else, and the humor is sardonic. There's survival here, and that's an important element of the book. Jane's will to keep going, setting her lack of scruples aside, is a striving to which most readers can relate at some level.




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2025 #28 The Book Censor's Library (Al-Essa)

 

The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While not totally subtle in its satire, Al-Essa's novel succeeds with a dark whimsy befitting Alice and Wonderland, which serves as larger reference for the story in more ways than one. But Al-Essa's looking glass is perhaps more than it seems, and we are easily manipulated into caring for characters even though they bear titles, like stock figures, rather than names. The "Everyman" approach keeps a strange distance, until we come to understand the power of our own imaginations with an ending that has been described as a "narrative rupture" or a "twist worthy of Kafka." The ending made me a bit cranky, initially, but the more I thought about it, it seemed perfect to serve Al-Essa's true narrative, with its hanging threads and all.

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2025 #25 The Extinction of Irena Rey (Croft)

 

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The premise--a translation of a story about translators and translation authored by a translator--is clever, yes. What I didn't expect was the humor that springs up like an unexpected mushroom in a field of moss. That gives it a 3. 75 for me.
There are moments of meta-translation like:
"Her face was the white of a freshly laundered sheet that someone other than me had laundered. (My laundry always turns out beige or gray.)" In this humble offering from Emi, we see how imagery in translation always connects to experience in one way or the other (remembering that the text we are reading was in fact written in Spanish, and we are reading it translated into English). Croft skillfully uses the slightly askew simile to call out some of the challenges of translation. But this is all operating on a deeper level, and occasionally detracts from surface-level enjoyment of the book.

The book is complex, sometimes overly so, and the narrator becomes increasingly unlikeable in her high-school level emotional intelligence (this is, however, somewhat soothed by the occasional footquips (as opposed to footnotes) from the translator (Alexis), who is somewhat of an arch-nemesis figure for the author (Emi) throughout most of the book (although the reason why is never totally clear, save for Emi's need to assign blame somewhere)). Apologies for the excessive parentheses in the previous sentence. The descriptions of nature and fungi are beautiful, but we are quickly yanked out of any idyll of the primeval Polish forest toward a speculative fiction that resembles Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. There's a lot of ideological whiplash and flights of fancy that did not enrich my experience of the book, clever thought it is. There's a mystery too -- the titular Irena Rey goes missing-- but I stopped caring too soon in the book.

I am glad I read it, and there were definitely parts of the book I thought were glorious in prose and imagination. But at the end I felt I had finished putting together a piece of furniture, and found myself looking at several screws and bolt or two that were "left over."

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2025 #20: Great Expectations (Cunningham)

 

Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Really more 3.5 stars.

Having decided to try to read all the 2025 Tournament of Books shortlist, I started with Great Expectations and I'll resist troping the title in this review.

A debut novel by New Yorker theater critic Vinson Cunningham, it traces the rather passive existence of David Hammond, a twenty-something Black man who almost unwittingly winds up as a staffer on Obama's 2008 presidential campaign (although in the book, the former president is never identified by name). Cunningham was actually a staffer, so one wonders how much of this "novel" might actually be memoir, and that actually becomes important as the "plot" isn't really much of a draw. It isn't about the campaign, to be sure, but we are treated to some smarmier moments of life on the campaign trail, but interspersed with David's musings on his past: his time in the Pentecostal church as a child, his rather incidental fatherhood, his hookups, his childhood in Chicago... It is difficult to get a foothold in the narrative sometimes. There are sentences that sing (and there's a good deal of sonic and musical emphasis in the novel), but then there are more stream-of-consciousness babblings that seem to be aspirational Saramago.

I had a tough time sustaining my attention (two renewals on Libby!), but the last quarter of the book finally seemed to pick up a bit, although I'm hard-pressed to tell you why. There is a little bit of intrigue and controversy that hits the campaign, but David also seems to take that in as a passive observer. It is hard to call him a protagonist as he doesn't seem to be actively or emotionally invested in his own life or observations. They are just there.

It is a good book--and with some of the detritus cleared and perhaps a bit more interest in the trajectory of narrative, it could have been great. Certainly it was enough that I'll be curious to read what comes next from Cunningham, and I hope there is a "next"!


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