So Much to Read
"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."—Samuel Johnson
Reviews Limericks Six Words Buy Nothing

17 February 2026
The Ten-Year Affair
Erin Somers
Cora and Sam each escaped from Brooklyn to a town in the Hudson Valley with their respective spouses and small children. They meet in a baby group (I think that's what it is? I'm not up on the terms) and begin—not an affair, not a friendship, more of an orbit around each other. The novel is third-person from Cora's viewpoint, and the affair is mostly conducted inside her head, running on an alternate track to their real lives. In those real lives, they collide and acknowledge their mutual attraction. They attempt to befriend each other's spouses. They go on an ill-advised joint family vacation. Sam is revealed to be hapless but charming. That is, if you think being able to flip a toothpick in one's mouth lengthwise, only gagging a little, is charming (I don't). Cora is bored with her husband, who has a serious pot addiction but is otherwise pretty terrific. It's hard to tell how realistic it's supposed to be, as the real world often seems as fanctiful as Cora's imaginary one. Their spouses are weirdly oblivious, or are they conspiring themselves? There's lots of ribbing of millennial upstate New York culture (if you liked Portlandia, you'll like this). I loved it.


I also read most of The Rest of Our Lives, by Ben Markovits, but ran out of steam. Kind of like his sentences, which often trail off into ellipses…for this he was shorlisted for the Booker Prize? It's about a guy whose gotten weary of his "C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life." So after he drops his daughter off at college he keeps driving, starting an impromptu tour of visits to his brother and a series of old friends from college, each of which I found more interesting than him.




22 January 2026
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
Adelle Waldman
I know I tried this in 2014 when it first came out, and that it didn't take, and I have no idea why, as it's so far up my alley it's climbing up my fire escape. Probing the psyche of a thirty something man who makes miserable the women he dates in his New York literary circle? Sign me up. Of course I have no idea if it's an accurate representation of a man's inner life, though I don't necessarily think the author's being a woman matters. A man doesn't autoamatically understand all other men; none of us can truly get inside another person's head, much as we should try. The basic thesis is that Nate says he wants a smart woman who is a peer and who he can connect with, but when he seems to find that he gets irriated with her and discovers he's much happier with a small boned, smart but not well-read, emotionally unstable woman with perfect breasts. Seems to check out! Sure, the misogyny he's tarred with is coming from a female mind, and it's easy to believe she's projecting this as a bit of revenge for mistreatment, but it's art. It doesn't have to be a mission statement.


I still read the Best American Short Stories every year, despite feeling inspired to finish only a couple in each edition. This year I especially liked Jessica Treadway's contribution, and was motivated to read a collection of hers from 2010, Please Come Back To Me. There I found "Oregon," which is a story with the same soul of the one in the 2025 BASS, but in a longer and better incarnation.




←2025 reviews

"There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breathgiving air...I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all."—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby