Dispatch from the Trail: Five Books Since May

The finished pile.

Coming back to this. Three months away is too long. Deepest apologies to all seven subscribers to this blog—and it is a blog. Can’t be fussing over it like it’s the Paris Review.

It’s been a productive time, despite the fact that I had to hit pause on Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.*¹ Just yesterday I turned the last page on the latest book-club pick, Kathleen Alcott’s America Was Hard to Find, which I went back and forth on. And before that I finished the previous book-club pick, Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (I’d give it a golf clap—the junketeers made me laugh), blazed through Hernan Diaz’s Trust (strong start, frustrating finish) on the train, wrapped up Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping (not really for me, ultimately) in just two days while my wife was out of town, and took a week with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (left me cold, and not because of its icy setting). I wrapped John Henry Days on June 13 and TLHoD on July 12, so four books logged in one month—a pace I don’t think I’d matched since my smartphone-less college days and their hours-long stretches of sublimely untouched free time. It’s amazing what the brain can do when it turns away from the algorithms.

So yeah, I’m looking at my palm-sized screen less, I’m touching grass, and I’m making progress in this project, but you can also maybe see the problem in the above paragraph. Not a one of the books did much to light me up inside. I’m still waiting for the next one that’s gonna grab me by the lapels and shake me from the stupor of the moment. I’m not sure any have since Emma Cline’s The Guest and Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, read in 2024 and 2025 respectively. Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow has probably come closest this year so far.

I worry about this becoming more commonplace as I get older. In the latest season of Tina Fey’s The Four Seasons, her Netflix show about aging coupledom, one character asks, “You know how when you hit your fifties, you just sort of never feel joy again?” And another responds, “Yeah, I’m holding steady at a five at all times.” Is a certain amount of emotional flattening inevitable as new experiences thin out and days spent commuting to and from work bulldoze the mind? Or am I simply reading (and more generally pursuing) the wrong things?

Maybe all you can do is hope that the flattening (whether real or merely perceived) makes the highs that do still come all the sweeter, but I continue to wonder what the next high will be, at least book-wise. For now, I’ve resigned myself to simply enjoying the passages that work for me in whatever I pick up. Some days, that’s all you get.

The ongoing pile.

To that end, I’ve turned to a collection of short stories I’d read in part in college and that I’ve always meant to finish, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. Trying to do a story or so a day, usually before bed—a quick morality tale from a skewed reality with a sci-fi bent, like a Twilight Zone episode. And I’m also down to the last few hundred pages of theMystery.doc. And I’m thinking the next novel I pull down from the shelf will be Ed Park’s Personal Days.

A little workplace lit, as I continue to adjust to my RTO life.