Books Read: January of 2026

Pretty self-explanatory concept. I list the books I've read for this month and what I thought of them. Obviously there are spoilers, as I have read the novels and such I will also have thoughts about the ending as well as the beginning and the middle.

Flesh (2025): David Szalay

A fascinating concept for a book. A character study of a grey void, a complete lack of character who interacts with the world almost exclusively monosyllabically and who rises and falls through no real initiative of his own. Every moment of real pathos, excitement or thrust in his life from his spell in a youth detention centre or watching his friend die in Iraq to getting married or having his first child happens away from the narrative, recounted to you by the least interested protagonist in literary history. His response to learning of his son's death and his wife's mortal injuries in a horrifying car accident is to sit down. Istvan is a man who fights, works, fucks, feels and exercises because he has learnt through osmosis that these are normal things for men to do. An incredible feat on Szalay's part to write a novel about a total formless mass of a person, from whom no light can enter or escape, with a plot still gripping and moving, written in a seemingly bloodless style that takes time to really work properly but the further you read, the more you realise how perfectly the (lack of any discernible) style fits the novel. He goes from a flat on an estate in Hungary to driving a bentley to meetings with the foreign secretary and investors in his property developments to back in the same room in the same flat in the same estate in Hungary and he describes having an emotion maybe two times in the entire book. An incredible study of someone so tightly wound he refuses to acknowledge even to himself a feeling he may have had. His feelings are never described, only justified post-hoc with an 'I guess I felt like' when he talks about his motivations for his actions.

 

Wolf in White Van (2014): John Darnielle

This is a novel that is about whether it is worth it to make choices. In a more specific sense, it is a novel about making the choice to put a hunting rifle under your chin and blow your own face off, but in a broader sense it is about whether the fact that any of us could do that whenever we felt like it. Not whether doing so is good or bad, right or wrong, desirable or good for us in any sense. Not if free will exists, but the simple fact that it does. Sean makes a living pretending he is engaging in others' choices. Sending him their choices consumes many of their lives. Two of them die because the choices take up too much of their brains. Another has to quit because he wakes up involuntarily in the middle of the night thinking about making more choices. Free will is uncontroversial. We have the free will to sit on the floor of our bedroom, place the barrel of a hunting rifle under our neck, and blow our own face off. Through the next year of reconstructive surgeries, physical and speech therapies, and painkilling sedatives many people will ask you why you did it. None of them however will dispute the fact that you could do it. Wolf in White Van is, in a way, one of the most thorough and total affirmations of universal humanity you can find in literature. The human experience is the fact that tonight, each one of us could place the barrel of a hunting rifle under our neck, and blow our own face off. That possibility, and all other possibilities, sprawl out in front of us like the floor of a slaughterhouse.

 

The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007): Michael Chabon

The Yiddish Policeman's Union exists in a rareified air, with Disco Elysium and Starship Troopers as one of a select few novels to inhabit a world so effectively that it exists as a work of art that the alternate reality it portrays would have produced it as a work of art. Chabon doesn't feel the need to hold your hand through every aspect of 'world building' as if you were a child. The novel is a meditation on the fact that the Tsadik haDor of each generation has not seen right to be revealed. Our one was a heroin addict, shot in the head in a flophouse, his unerrant blessings and generosity ending in a cheap hotel, strung out on heroin with a pillow on the back of his head as a makeshift silencer. The book's reality coincides with ours in one main place; like the Tsadik haDor of each previous generation, ours has not relieved our sins. We live in a world marked by misery, by violence, by addiction, by pain, by murder, by exploitation, by oppression. If the messiah has free us from sin, then clearly old habits die hard. The world is a harsh, miserable place. The Tsadkim are ill-suited for it, they are as ill-suited for the real world as they are for the world of Sitka, Ukraine, New York City, Poland, Jerusalem, Boca Raton, Melbourne, Saskatoon, Buenos Aires in the novel. It would take blind Freddy to miss the comparisons between the Sitka Jews, having to rely on post-hoc justification identity papers from a government that hates them, kicked out of the homes they've inhabited their entire lives despite a political identification with them from more powerful outsider groups of the same ethnic backgrounds who view them as at best an annoying irrelevancy, and the Palestinian people in our world. Like Palestine, the Sitka District Jews have a number of hardworking, world-weary, secular heroes fighting for their national status, religion put to one side. They fail, of course. All of the Tsadkim fail. Landsman tells an FBI agent trying trying to convince him of the plot on Jerusalem: 'I don't care about red heifers and and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat.' Amen detective.

 

Orbital (2023): Samantha Harvey 

In my quest to read more serious literature this year I was reticent to do back-to-back genre fiction, but I have reassured myself that both are barely even so. I am at the point in my life where I'm really not interested in reading science fiction novels. Orbital is, despite what most reviews may say, not really sci-fi, despite the fact its set in space. Orbital is a very, very, very, very, very, very, very beautiful novel. I chose it as its 'only' 130 pages. Reading this book, however, took me longer than anything else on the list. Primarily because, the writing feels so dense you expect it to mean more than it does. Orbital appears to have basically nothing novel to say about the world. Borders don't matter much when you can't see them drawn. People live on earth. Ironically, the novel is about understanding something deeper about earth the further you get from it, but the further I get from Orbital, the less I understand about the book. Maybe this shows I am not smart enough to understand the book I read. The book is luscious, incredibly technically proficient, and Samantha Harvey is clearly one of the best writers alive today. I want to clarify this by saying that I don't feel the novel needs to be a thrill a minute bunker-buster to be enjoyable. Flesh was bloodless and dispassionate and I enjoyed it massively. The difference was that Harvey seemed to have very little to say and seemed uninterested in saying it when she did. I don't feel a novel has to be a fleshed out character study to be compelling, as I enjoyed the Yiddish Policeman's Union immensely even though I felt the characters were shallow stereotypes of detective fiction characters. I see what she was trying to do but I don't think there was enough meat on the bone here, as hard as she worked for it.