Satu Rämö, The Clues in the Fjord ** 1/2

If you gave an AI chatbot the prompt Write a crime thriller that takes place in Iceland, with characters who will recur in subsequent installments, you'd get something pretty close to The Clues in the Fjord. 

The prose is full of exposition that sounds like it comes from a travel guidebook ("The Westfjords made up a fifth of Iceland's land area, but less than 2 per cent of the population lived at the end of the narrow road"; "the maximum speed on Iceland's roads was ninety kilometres per hour"). The plot is designed to give opportunities to reference traditional foods and cultural touchstones. The main characters have colorful personal quirks—Hildur loves surfing, Jakob knits—and buried traumas to provide an ongoing background through the series of novels.

The (first) murder isn't discovered until page 110, one third of the way through. The police repeatedly pause their investigation to pursue personal agendas. The big break in the case comes from a random tip rather than from detective work. The title and tag line ("Death waits in the icy depths") are generic and have nothing to do with the story.

Overall, the book felt like a typical episode of CSI: Ísafjörður.

Randy Baker, Half Fast ****

Half Fast is an unusual cruising memoir in that it features comparatively few sailing adventures. The first chapters deal with onshore tribulations: riding out Hurricane Andrew anchored in the Bahamas, repairing the damage when their boat is blown ashore, tracking down outboard motor thieves in Honduras, working for a season in the Virgin Islands, refitting for more than a year in Trinidad. Even the on-water stories are harrowing: rescuing smugglers in Saint Vincent, dealing with an aggressive sea lion, nearly getting run down by a Chinese fishing vessel. The book ends with their boat nearly destroyed in a tsunami. Where's the poetry about the call of the sea and the freedom of the cruising lifestyle?

I would say the target audience for Half Fast is fellow sailors rather than people dreaming about sailing the world. Baker's stories are exactly the kind you would share with crew mates out on the water. 

In the final third of the book, Baker and his wife sail through the Panama Canal and cross to the South Pacific. This section features more typical content about life on board and the remote exotic places they visit.

The title, by the way, is a pun.

Andrew Miller, The Land in Winter *** 1/2

This novel features two couples living in the West Country of England in the winter of 1962/3. The Big Freeze forces them to confront their insecurities and dissatisfaction.

The writing style and subject matter make it read like a book written in the 1960s rather than a work of historical fiction published in 2024. It seems like a British variant of an Updike or Cheever novel, addressing the discontents of the suburban class.

Yoko Tawada, Exophony ***

The word exophony refers to the experience of "existing outside of one's mother tongue." Tawada is a Japanese writer who lives in Germany and writes many of her books in German. In this collection of essays, she celebrates exophony as a source of creative inspiration. Non-native speakers notice aspects of a language that native speakers are blind to.

My experience reading Tawada's non-fiction was similar to my experience reading her fiction. She offers interesting observations, but they don't add up to larger points. 

Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore ***

Wild Dark Shore has an awesome setting: a mostly abandoned research station on a tiny island between Australia and Antarctica. The only human inhabitants are a man and his three children, left behind as caretakers when the scientists left due to encroaching climate change. Until, that is, a mysterious woman washes ashore.

McConaghy offers fantastic descriptions of the island, its abundant wildlife, its challenging weather, and its isolation. The characters, though, are unbelievable. Every one of them acts strangely due to traumatic secrets that will be revealed in due course. McConaghy exacerbates the believability problem by having characters narrate chapters in the first person; it makes their withholding of secrets more clearly a pure plot device.

The plot gets increasingly melodramatic as all secrets are revealed. The incongruous appearance of a copy of Jane Eyre forecasts one of the twists.

Wild Dark Shore is a thriller dressed in the clothes of a literary novel. Character's personalities follow from the demands of the outlandish plot rather than driving the action. I give McConaghy credit for exploring various emotional responses to climate change, but I was never able to accept the characters as real people.

Henry Threadgill, Easily Slip Into Another World ***

This memoir from a well-respected creative musician and composer seemed like the perfect accompaniment to attending the Big Ears Festival (a "celebration of musical and artistic adventure and discovery"). And it was. It introduced ideas about creativity in music, life as a working musician, interactions between bandmates, composition versus improvisation, and live performance versus recordings—all subjects relevant to the shows we were seeing in Knoxville.

While Threadgill offers ideas about the development of his music, most of the book is a straightforward memoir about his life experiences, including an intense period serving in Vietnam during the war. He (along with his co-author Brent Hayes Edwards) manages to convey his personal character, in ways both intentional and not. He credits his two grandfathers with providing him an uncompromising sense of dignity and restless experimentation. At the same time, he repeatedly tells stories in which he apparently innocently gets into trouble: he gets sent into combat for creating an avant-garde arrangement of patriotic American songs; he is twice dragged against his will into visiting prostitutes; his evolving quest to capture new soundscapes requires him to abandon existing projects. He has a suspiciously passive role in his interactions (good and bad) with band mates and musical heroes like Duke Ellington. I suspect he is more prickly than he lets on, and I applaud the authors' ability to include that character shading.

Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection ****

Perfection is a short novel about Anna and Tom, a couple of "digital creatives" living and working in Berlin during the early 2000s. They alternate between feeling self-satisfied with their expatriate life and feeling anxious about the mismatch between that life and the version they curate on social media. 

It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony... while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet. the plants are watered as part of a daily routine that also includes yoga and a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds. ... And it is a happy life...for rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands...

Their social circle consists of young people just like them, meeting in clubs and galleries and speaking (non-native) English. They are in Berlin, but it could be any cosmopolitan city in the world. Anna and Tom eventually get bored and look for a way to recapture the excitement of their earlier adventure.

What was happening in the city—the replacement of its historical inhabitants with younger, wealthier newcomers, and the resulting price hikes and decline in diversity—was gentrification, a term used almost exclusively by the people who caused it.

The author has a delightfully droll way of describing modern life, where we gain aspirations from online sources and desire authentic experience as long as we also have a good WiFi signal. He captures the contradictory desires for unique lives and shared culture.

Anna and Tom stand in for an entire cohort of young online professionals: "an identical struggle for a different life motivated an entire sector of their generation... Mysteriously enough, they had discovered homemade fermentation kits, fire-roasted cauliflower, and umami at the same time..." Their symbolic nature means that they lack individuality as characters, much like Berlin is flattened into a generic global city.

The comparatively brief length and the lack of character development make Perfection feel more like a long short story.

George Santayana, The Essential Santayana ** 1/2

There's no way that truly essential Santayana should run to over 600 pages. The title suggests a judicious selection of important articles in which the philosopher George Santayana clearly and concisely explains his theories. The Essential Santayana, by contrast, includes whole chapters from his major books while strangely omitting entirely his first successful first book about aesthetics. For example, it includes thirteen chapters from Skepticism and Animal Faith when it could have relied on the paper "Some Meanings of the Word 'Is'," about which Santayana himself said "it contains my whole philosophy in a very clear and succinct form." 

The heart of Santayana's philosophy is the idea that a person's worldview or philosophical system is akin to a personal work of art: it's a product of productive imagination that provides "a distinct vision of the universe" built to help us understand and navigate our lives. It is not, and could not be, an accurate objective description of the world. Ideas are symbols representing the world, metaphors emphasizing qualities useful to human interest. Santayana also believed that art supports the aspirations of our highest selves, so it is no insult to call a philosophy a work of art.

I find this vision compelling as a framework, but the specifics of Santayana's philosophy feel to me derivative of other thinkers. I was also put off by his often dismissive tone toward other philosophers, especially those who attempt to construct universal systems such as Kant or Plato. His personality seems opposite from the open-minded curiosity of his former teacher and colleague William James. He reserves his admiration for Spinoza, Heraclitus, and Democritis.

Wolfgang Herrndorf, Sand ****

Sand is a "darkly sophisticated literary thriller" (according to its back-cover blurb), translated from the German. It was a bookseller's recommendation from the Napa Bookmine. In an unnamed North African country, an amnesiac finds himself hunted by intimidating thugs; who is he and what do his pursuers want?

Book One (the first 80 pages of 440) introduces the locale, the cast of characters, and a series of crimes: murders, stolen suitcases, an aborted espionage rendezvous, an escaped suspect. The descriptions are cinematic and the tone delightfully sardonic. 

Book Two narrows the point of view to that of our amnesiac hero. The action remains vivid and the mystery of his identity is compelling, but the author isn't able to maintain the satirical tone. Most of the characters and investigations from Book One recede into the background. From this point forward, Sand is a (very good but) more conventional thriller, with a few descents into surreal comedy.

Sand would make an excellent limited series. It has an exotic locale, absorbing mysteries, and colorful characters. Adapting it, I would attempt to retain the tone and wider perspective of Book One.

Sophie Elmhurst, A Marriage at Sea ****

The central event in A Marriage at Sea is a shipwreck: Maurice and Maralyn Bailey were sailing toward the Galapagos when their 31-foot boat Auralyn was struck and sunk by an injured whale. They spent 118 days drifting across the Pacific in a life raft before a Korean fishing vessel spotted them.

The title is the first clue that the book is not fundamentally an adventure tale. Elmhurst describes the Baileys ' improvised survival and subsequent press tour with a journalist's attention to detail, but she is most interested in what their ordeal tells us about their relationship. Just as the undeterred Baileys are about to embark on a second ocean trip, Elmhurst spells out her metaphor explicitly: "For what else is a marriage, really, if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?"

The final section of the book jumps forward a few decades to show how their marriage worked under more normal circumstances. We see how Maralyn's relentlessly forward-looking spirit was critical to their survival both on the raft and off.

Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional ***

Stone Yard Devotional is the fictional story of a woman who retreats to a small nunnery in rural Australia. She is an atheist but feels the need to seclude herself from the challenges of her job as a wildlife conservationist. The book appeared on several "Best of 2025" lists and was a Booker Prize finalist. 

The writing was not as meditative or introspective as I expected and hoped. The narrator doesn't focus on day-to-day life in the community nor on her lack of/loss of faith, and says little about the pressures that led her here. Two themes stood out to me: whether retreat or engagement is the better approach to challenging problems (like climate change or injustice); and how to live with regrets when the possibility of forgiveness is gone.

Stone Yard Devotional has a quiet strength to it, but its wisdom applies to subjects that I am not currently struggling with.

Meghan O'Gieblyn, God Human Animal Machine ****

A collection of essays about the metaphors we use to understand our relationship to technology (specifically AI), and how they are largely the same metaphors we use to understand our relationships to God and to the "disenchanted" scientific world.

Many "new" ideas are merely attempts to answer questions that we have inherited from earlier periods of history, questions that have lost their specific context in medieval Christianity as they've made the leap from one century to the next, traveling from theology to philosophy to science and technology.

The unanswerable questions we keep returning to are about subjectivity and understanding. What is consciousness? What counts as an explanation for natural phenomena? 

Despite the technical subject matter, O'Gieblyn writes in the classic style of personal essays, including first-person stories about her own struggles with the issues. Her style makes the abstruse topics feel relevant, although I sometimes lost the thread of her argument.

She makes thought-provoking connections; for example, thinking of consciousness as software running on the hardware of the brain is a modern variant of the mind-body problem, which in turn is a recurrence of the religious idea of a soul. ("The metaphor has not solved our most pressing existential problems; it has merely transferred them to a new substrate.") I was particularly intrigued by the idea that science struggles to understand subjectivity because the enterprise was designed precisely to eliminate subjectivity from our understanding.

 

Daniyal Mueenuddin, This Is Where the Serpent Lives **** 1/2

This Is Where the Serpent Lives is ostensibly a novel by the author of the excellent story collection In Other Rooms. Other Wonders. Like the earlier book, it provides a convincing portrait of characters from various castes attempting to get ahead as the old feudal society of Pakistan gives way under modern and Western pressures. Every detail contributes to a realistic milieu, from the choice of which language to speak to whether you accept your host's offer to sit down.

The book seems like a Russian story that takes place in Pakistan. The subject matter is similar, peasants and landowners, social stagnation and transition, corrupt officials and disappointed dreamers, characters with multiple nicknames and forms of address. Mueenuddin's writing style is extremely Chekhovian. 

While it purports to be a novel, This Is Where the Serpent Lives is actually a collection of linked stories that includes the title novella. The four sections share characters, but they don't enrich each other as they would in a proper novel. For example, the main character in "The Golden Boy" is the orphan Bayazid who eventually becomes the driver for the Atar family. Yazid is also an important character in the title section, but none of his adventures from the first section affect his responses in the last.

Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood ** 1/2

This history of the Peasant's War in Germany (1524-26) is extremely well researched and provides an abundance of detail about the massive public uprising that occurred just as the Reformation was taking hold. I got a clear sense of the peasant's grievances, the complex interplay of authority among the lords and clergymen, the social forces that led to the rebellion, even the attire of the armies. It's an impressive feat of research given that the events happened 500 years ago and the participants were either illiterate or self-interested.

Unfortunately, though, Roper writes like a sociologist rather than a narrative historian. The book is organized into chronological sections for autumn 1524 through summer 1525, but the individual chapters explore the conflict thematically, exploring concepts like freedom, lordship, and brotherhood. 

One cause for this collapse of authority was the empire's confusing patchwork of different rights and claims. What prevailed was not what we today understand by 'rule.' Rather, it was a kind of negotiated governing that depended on cooperation and, ultimately, comparative strength. Rights and jurisdictions could be bought and sold or even swapped. The buyer of a castle might gain judicial rights associated with it; the tithe of a village could be bought as an investment. ... Because sovereignty was frequently fragmented and not unitary, subjects could sometimes pick their fights and play one authority against another.

The result feels curiously static for a bloody and tragic war story, a description of the "rich detail of [the peasants'] daily lives" not a chronicle of battles. I would be hard pressed to describe the chronology of the conflict or its flashpoints.

The last 10 pages reveal the reason for this academic approach: "Some of the most profound political debates in historical writing of the last two hundred years, and especially over Marxism and its legacies, were fought out on the terrain of the German Peasants' War." Marx and Engels both wrote about it, East and West Germany highlighted different aspects of it, and historians of the Reformation blame it on one or another of the major religious figures. Roper is engaging with the meaning of the conflict more than the tale.

Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection ***

Rejection is a collection of linked stories in which characters fail to understand why their attempts to connect with others lead instead to rejection. For example, the first (and best) story "The Feminist" features a young man who has internalized the tenets of modern feminism but discovers that his less enlightened peers are the ones getting laid.

Tulathimutte describes his characters' thinking in ways both subtle and darkly hilarious, especially in the first couple of stories. He's got the style of online conversations down cold. Unfortunately, though, he doesn't provide any actual story in the sense of narrative or character development. The later stories ramp up the level of postmodernist reflexivity to no great effect.

Rejection reminded me of David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Both books feature unpleasant people tying themselves into rhetorical knots; they both experiment with writing styles; and they both concern themselves with the failure of self-conscious pluralism to improve our connections with other people. The story "Ahegao" builds to an elaborate, explicit, over-the-top sexual fantasy that wouldn't be out of place in a mid-career Chuck Palahniuk book.

Agnes Callard, Open Socrates ****

Socrates is more renowned for his method than for the content of his philosophy. The Socratic method involves questioning the premises underlying commonly held beliefs in the form of an inquisitive dialogue. Callard argues that the method is the philosophy: Socrates believed that we rarely achieve true knowledge, and that the key to a good life is continuous conversation moving us ever closer to truth.

Open Socrates is an oddly structured book. Collard wants to produce what she calls "an inquisitive text" that simulates Socratic inquiry, which is a difficult, if not impossible, task because Socratic inquiry requires two cooperative interlocutors, one seeking the truth and the other looking to avoid error.

I feel as if I got the flavor of the Socratic dialogues and clarification on common misunderstandings about them. Collard shows how to apply Socrates' techniques to contemporary questions. She successfully creates an inquisitive text if we take that to mean a work that invites the reader into a conversation. I feel like she is on the right track with many of her ideas, but I would need to talk with her to clarify the conclusions she draws from the ideas. For example, the chapter about equality is very insightful about conversational status-seeking but I remain unconvinced about how these insights relate to equality.

The book's subtitle is "The Case for a Philosophical Life," but Collard neglects to argue that a life lived philosophically is better than an incurious one.

Francis Spufford, Cahokia Jazz ***

Like Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Cahokia Jazz is a murder mystery that takes place in an alternative version of the United States. Cahokia was a real-life Native American city, located across the river from present-day St Louis. In the story, Native Americans were not decimated by smallpox and retain power in Cahokia in 1922.

The book starts strong with an atmospheric crime scene and all the noir elements in place: night, fog, a violent murder, detectives in fedoras, untrustworthy witnesses, hints of powerful subterranean social forces at work. It's not long before the murder becomes secondary to the public reaction and inflamed racial tensions. Which is fine, except that the portrait of city politics is rather too superficial. For example, overt conflict breaks out between the Klan and the native population, with the city's third ethnic group receiving barely a mention. I also felt that the characters were underdeveloped. 

The murder plot was fine. But I didn't get a sense of Cahokia as a living, breathing city, nor an idea of how the United States would be different if we had a substantial native population during westward expansion.

Ruth Garrett Millikan, Varieties of Meaning ** 1/2

Varieties of Meaning is a work of academic philosophy. The title and the back-cover abstract led me to believe it would explore the common thread that connects all the different things we say have meaning: "people mean to do various things, tools and other artifacts are meant for various things; people mean various things by using words and sentences; natural signs mean things ... What does meaning in the sense of purpose have to do with meaning in the sense of representing or signifying?" I've been pondering the meaning of "meaning" since my undergraduate days, and hoped for new insights.

But Millikan's topic is different. She uses evolutionary psychology to explore the nature of our internal representations (aka concepts), how they differ from those of non-human animals, and how we might have developed them. She concludes that concepts are more directly goal-oriented than is generally assumed, and that they are not constructed from intermediate sense impressions.

This topic is interesting even if it's not what I was looking for. However, Millikan falls into the common academic trap of focusing too much on esoteric terminological disputes at the expense of clear exposition, not to mention the evolutionary psychology vice of "just so stories."

There were a few asides that intrigued me. One was a (probably false) anecdote about how venomous snakes hunt and eat mice without the benefit of a concept of "mouse":

The story is that certain venomous snakes perceive mice for purposes of striking by sight, trace the path of the dying mouse by small, and find its head so as to swallow that part first by feel, and that none of those jobs can be accomplished using any other sensory modality. A snake that was wired up this way would merely perceive first a "strike me," then a "chase me," and finally a "swallow me," having no grasp at all that what it struck, followed, and swallowed was the same thing.

Another was the distinction, attributed to Gilbert Ryle, between "task verbs" that describe an attempt to do something (hunt, look, listen) and "achievement verbs" that indicate success (find, see, hear).

Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Third Realm ***

The Third Realm is the third book in Knausgaard's The Morning Star series. It is quite similar to the first book, with multiple narrators recounting events just before and after the emergence of the new star. Several sections retell incidents from the first book from a different point of view; for example, we hear from Tove and Gaute who are married to Arne and Kathrine from The Morning Star.

The hallmark of Knausgaard's style is the slow emergence of themes from a wealth of mundane detail. The prominent themes that arise in The Third Realm are questions about the source of evil and the differences between external appearance and internal truth.

Like The Morning Star, The Third Realm ends with a cliffhanger. The star disappears, and the surviving member of the murdered black metal band tells Tove that her task will be revealed to her. I am far enough into the series to know not to expect a resolution any time soon.

The fourth book, The School of Night, recently became available in English. Early reviews tell me it has a single narrator, a peripheral character from the first three books, and is a modern version of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. At the moment, I plan to skip it and possibly the rest of the series. I'm starting to suspect that Knausgaard doesn't have a vision for how it all fits together.

Michael Wejchert, Hidden Mountains ** 1/2

Hidden Mountains is the true story of two couples who attempt an unnamed and unclimbed peak in the titular mountain range in Alaska. The couples were serious climbers of the weekend warrior variety; an Alaskan expedition was perhaps beyond their skill level, due to logistics rather than the technical climbing difficulty. One of the men ends up critically injured in a fall, requiring rescue by an elite mountain rescue unit.

The book has all the elements necessary for an exciting and compelling mountaineering tale, but from the start something annoyed me.  Was it the sketchiness of the mountaineering history that the author provides? No. Was it the judgmental tone that crept in when he discussed sport climbing? No. The portrait of legendary climber David Roberts that contradicted everything I knew about him from his books? Well, yes, that did irritate me and make me question the author's credibility.

Eventually I realized that the issue was a lack of relevance and perspective. The idea that sport climbing and improved communication technologies have led to riskier ventures is interesting, but what does it have to do with the story at hand? And should we lament the change or celebrate it?

The book also has organizational issues. As a professional writer myself, I know that you need to keep the reader focused on the task at hand. If you've got interesting background details or tangents, they need to come before or after the main story. For example, the full resume of the helicopter pilot should not intrude on the drama of Emmett's rescue. 

The chapter about the helicopter pickup becomes positively Inception-like in its nested stories: the pilot performed a similar rescue many years before; the climbers in that earlier rescue had completed many important ascents and recently contracted Guillain-Barre syndrome; those climbers left their satellite phone at base camp and eventually called a district ranger at Denali National Park; that ranger was a Vietnam vet who was a "legend in Alaska rescue circles"; he flew a Pave Hawk helicopter whose rotors move at a constant speed of 258 RPM.  Every story here is dramatic and informative, but they interfere with each other, and the reader has to exert a lot of mental energy keeping them straight.

The book's subtitle is "Survival and Reckoning After a Climb Gone Wrong," and indeed its most emotional chapter is about the impact on the fallen climber and his fiancée. The most memorable parts, however, are about the modern systems of mountain rescue. There is one brief scene in which the author himself completes a tricky pitch on an Alaskan peak and receives a text from his girlfriend asking where to find the toner cartridges for their printer.