"A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good."—Samuel Johnson
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In the Year 2025
I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia
Su Meck with Daniel de Visé
This is one of the most remarkable stories I've ever read. When Meck is a young mother a ceiling fan falls on her head and wipes out not just her memory but basically her entire brain. She has to learn everything about the world from scratch, with no idea who she or anyone around her is. Incredibly, when this happens in the late 1980s, once she's stabilized she is sent home with no follow-up care whatsoever. More incredibly, her husband goes off to work and leaves her to care for their two sons, when she has no idea how to even feed herself and also no short-term memory so basically the toddlers are entirely on their own. Still more incredibly, her husband violently rapes her every night. And most incredibly of all, after her mind slowly returns and heals enough for her to understand herself and her life, she stays married to him and publishes this book detailing all that he did. Oh, and while she's still in a dark fog and not really sure what's going on day to day, the whole family moves to Egypt. Truly jaw-dropping throughout, and also fascinating in what it illuminates about how the human mind works.
Sociopath: A Memoir
Patric Gagne
Here's another memoir by a woman whose brain doesn't work like everyone else's. Gagne has never had a conscience, so, like Meck, she has to learn how to behave and fit into society by watching and mimicking other people. It's a rare insight into a mental disorder that is not uncommon yet also almost never admitted to. But is a sociopath capable of being a reliable narrator?
Some Bright Nowhere
Ann Packer
The cover is stunning, but the novel felt slight. I happened to have reread The Dive From Clausen's Pier in the last year and been impressed with its heft. It's a classic novel in that it follows the characters as they and their situation develops, carefully observing their world. This new book was certainly shorter, and though the subject matter was also heavy (and again about being trapped in a predicament beyond one's control, with a partner in a serious health crisis, compelled to figure out how to handle it morally) it felt sketched. Is it that novels, like TV shows, are now written for a distracted audience, so they don't take the time to grow? Or is it that writers, like all of us, are thinking and writing (and, of course, reading) with frazzled minds?
All the Way to the River: Love, Loss and Liberation
Elizabeth Gilbert
Here's another book about ministering to a dying partner and trying to honor what she wants while still having needs of one's own. Gilbert is as compulsively readable as ever and I devoured this in a couple days. Does it take a bonkers tale about florid mental meltdowns, sexual mayhem and enough drugs to destroy a small country to get me to concentrate these days? Apparently so.
Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays
Meghan Daum
Adichie's novel is in distinctly different sections, and I only read thoroughly the one that interested me and that I quite enjoyed (see attention span issues, above), which is about a contemporary Nigerian woman's dating life.
As for Daum's latest, I read every word, and not just because it is short. She writes about her parents, who she thinks should never have had children, and romantic roads not taken. As always, she's honest but not too personal, confident and secure in her mind while clear-eyed and critical about her sometimes tenuous place in a changing world.
Crush
Ada Calhoun
A novel that reads like a memoir, and is in fact about an unnamed woman leaving a marriage that seems very much like the one the author just left. In the novel, the main character takes up with a basically perfect and fascinating man who parachutes into her life from her past, fully available, right when she needs him to. So it reads like a fantasy, but hopefully the author was as fortunate! It's certainly entertaining.
Three Days in June
Anne Tyler
Grace & Henry's Holiday Movie Marathon
Matthew Norman
Two Baltimore-set pleasure reads, for two different seasons. Tyler's latest is about a woman preparing for her daughter's wedding, their relationship, her ex-husband, and a work crisis.
Norman's novel is about finding romance again after being widowed. He's in fine form here. So what if the alternating narrative voices were hard to tell apart? It's cute and funny and a little sad and a little more complicated than it appears at first. Several cuts above the Hallmark Christmas Channel, but just as cozy.
Don't Stop: Why We (Still) Love Fleetwood Mac's Rumours
Alan Light
I don't understand why people think AI wriitng is so easy to spot. People have been writing in this slightly manic, sycophantic, bet-you-didn't-know-this tone since forever, and books about pop culture are exactly where you often find it. This song-by-song discussion of one of the all-time great albums is a good example of it, and I suppose it could have been written entirely by AI but I doubt it. Sure, the discussion of the band's dynamics is interesting, if not exactly fresh. But it's also stuffed with quotes from random 24-year-olds about how much they like certain Fleetwood Mac songs, and I have no idea who wants to read that. It's too bad it's not worth wading through because there are some tasty tidbits, like that Dreams was heavily influenced by the Spinners' I'll Be Around (you can't unhear it).
Show Don't Tell: Stories
Curtis Sittenfeld
Spent: A Comic Novel
Alison Bechdel
I'm relieved to report that Sittenfeld seems to have recovered from her woke-brain fever that ruined Romantic Comedy, or at least is keeping it in check. This collection delivers her usual sharp observations of awkward situations, and includes a delightful revisiting of a passing moment in Prep, from the perspective of some 30 years on.
Bechdel, on the other hand, is disappointingly captured by gender ideology. She's always been in a panic about The Enemy that the left likes to blame for everything (a mishmash of Republican politicians, churches, nuclear families and chain bookstores), but for decades I've also counted on her to poke affectionate fun at progressive pieties. However, like so many lefties, she's either blind or bullied on the gender issue. Aside from that, this book-length comic about lightly fictionalized versions of her and her real-life partner, Holly, living among the characters from Dykes to Watch Out For, is a pleasure, and her art (baby goats!) is better than ever.
"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
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Copyright © 1996–2026 So Much to Read
Contact: books at so much to read dot com