Orbital

Still reading books, bad at posting here!

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital won the 2024 Booker Prize, which was a significant factor in its selection for my monthly Swedish book club. There is a Swedish translation, but we all read it in English.

We all hated it, too! Gratifying!

Orbital gives us 24 hours in the life of astronauts on the International Space Station. Cool concept, but since Harvey spends most of the book describing Earth from space instead of really getting into anyone’s heads, or dissecting any relationships or examining any characters, it’s just pretty blah. It feels like reading an Instagram account: each chapter its own post, with a meticulously described view over the Earth and then an accompanying “caption” in the form of a crew member’s thoughts, always too short to plumb any depths.

The orbital perspective—the fact that we are constantly presented with the image of the Earth as a whole, as a single planet out in space—suggests profundity, but in the end goes no farther than suggestion. Nothing is asked of the reader. If you find the constant descriptions of Earth repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over them does nothing to diminish your experience of the book. If you instead find the internal narrations and thoughts of the astronauts repetitive and uninteresting, skimming over those parts likewise changes nothing. The super typhoon that the astronauts track throughout the book, whose damage Harvey occasionally zooms in to describe, doesn’t actually have personal repercussions for any of the characters since we never find out if loved ones lived or died. The omniscient narrator informs us of a crack in the hull, but nothing comes of it.

The judges have their reasons, I suppose, but I wonder if one of the most important reasons was their sheer exhaustion with the world. If I were still in academia I might be tempted at this point to write a monograph on the concept of the “burnout novel,” with a nod to my boy Byung-chul Han. That’s the new genre to which I’d say Orbital belongs: the burnout novel. Every day we are inundated with crises and catastrophes that demand our attention and our empathy, and maybe it turns out those are not boundless resources. Likewise it seems our ability and our means to renew those resources are becoming increasingly stunted. In that context, Orbital is a book that can gently wash over a passive reader with no effort whatsoever. There is no urgency, no message. How easy to read a book that makes no emotional demands. How relaxing.

How pointless.

Baby Driver

Finally, I’ve finished writing all my dorky little book reports for the books I read in 2025 and can move on to 2026! While this entry is backdated to January, I’m writing it in May. It’s just been that kind of year.

Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver came into my life by way of a massive tome of Beat literature, Beat Down to Your Soul, that I’d lugged around with me totemically since I bought it in college. I didn’t actually read it until 2020 and it was one of those books that spiraled out of control in terms of additions to my TBR, full of names and titles that I’d never heard of before but that also sounded fascinating. In particular, all of the women who had been part of the Beat movement but who have been sidelined and forgotten, if not by academics then certainly by popular culture. Kerouac and Ginsberg are household names; not so Diane di Prima.

My TBR at this point is several hundred books, most of which I’ve outsourced to the Storygraph app instead of remembering myself, but I always had Baby Driver ready at hand. It’s a catchy title and an amazing promise of a novel: Kerouac’s own daughter! One essay in the Beat Down to Your Soul collection, maybe by the compiler herself, also painted a striking picture for me of Jack Kerouac as an absentee father and the overall tragic arc of Jan’s life, which probably helped further fix it in my memory. Imagine my surprise when, on the tail end of my Christmas visit to my family, I stumbled on Baby Driver at the local bookstore! Perfect. I’d already picked up The Extinction of Irena Rey as a gift from my mom, but this one was it: Baby Driver was THE book of the trip.

I don’t have much time for Jack Kerouac, to be perfectly honest. I read On the Road on a Greyhound trip to Chicago in my early 20s (points for pretention, I suppose) and even then I couldn’t match the literary idolization of Jack Kerouac the person to the Sal Paradise of the novel. While there are moments of exquisite, ecstatic prose,  beautiful wordsmithing alone isn’t enough to fully paint over or transform an uninspiring truth. Here’s a guy just constantly mooching off his aunt (read as: mother), and that’s supposed to be heroic and admirable and even a bit manly? As the kids probably no longer say, the math ain’t mathin’.

I also feel a bit bad framing this review of Baby Driver within the context of Jack Kerouac, perpetuating as it does a tendency to situate women writers in relation to the famous men in their lives instead of presenting them on their own terms. See also: Save Me the Waltz. But whatever! It’s clear that J. Kerouac fille very much engaged with, and was inspired by, J. Kerouac père in the best possible way. Baby Driver has a similar picaresque structure and literary style, except with a better narrator.

“Better” is certainly a loaded word here. What makes Jan superior to Sal? I suppose it’s a matter of taste, at least partially, but the word that keeps coming up when I try to describe it is awareness. Jan Kerouac, the author, has a distance and an awareness about Jan Kerouac the character, the Jan of several years ago, that her father seems to lack about Sal Paradise (and by extension, himself?). Kerouac fille can see, with the advantage of hindsight, how destructive and tragic some of her choices are and the ways that her situation, interpersonal relationships, and status shaped and limited her. Kerouac père, on the other hand, mostly seems nostalgic. No reflection over what enabled or supported those adventures, just the mad rush of a good time.

To point to that in the text, Baby Driver ends with Jan reuniting and reconciling with her mother. They sit in the kitchen and talk about restoring some antique furniture her mom has in storage, as well as the possibility of reuniting their broken-up family. Jan has come full circle and has, at least temporarily, restored one of the primary relationships in her life and acknowledged its importance for her. In fact, she’s grown and matured enough now to offer support of her own. On the Road ends with Sal sitting alone, daydreaming about Dean and Dean’s father. Not even his own family, but someone else’s. The hero ever apart from the crowd, never acknowledging his own past.

More than all that, though, Baby Driver is just a good book. It’s a wild ride full of characters and adventures and beautiful language and it’s just good. I’m not sure how it managed to get lost down the memory hole, but it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.

Reading Goals for 2026

Still no great changes to my annual reading goals!

At least 48 books, of which:
at least 4 are in French, and
at least 25% are in Swedish
at least 12 are non-fiction
at least 10 have been in my library for over a year
at least 10 have come from my TBR (as of January 1, 2026)
at least half are by women or enby authors
at least 10% are by Black authors
at least 1 new-to-me country (as of January 1, 2026)

For my own reference, the last book I added to my TBR before January 1, 2026 was The Rise of the Military Welfare State.

My thinking behind these goals hasn’t really changed in the intervening years, so I’ll just link to the blog post instead of repeating myself.

Årsboken

I added Årsboken to my TBR after my book buddy neighbor mentioned that the author, Sven Olov Karlsson, is his next door neighbor. I then forgot about it for a couple years, but conveniently enough it was available from the Stockholm library as an ebook so I could read it at my leisure while I was visiting my family in the US to fill a couple of my self-imposed reading quotas.

Now, writing this months later, I can say that Årsboken was…fine. As a concept for a short story collection, I like it: twelve stories, one for every month, vaguely seasonal or thematic somehow. But even if they were fine, competently executed stories, I didn’t really enjoy any of them. As I texted book buddy after I finished:

Otherwise it was a little underwhelming. He writes like this. Fragments. Like a telegram. Or a beginner driving a stick shift. Stop and go.

Honestly, even that much I don’t remember now, looking back. I had to scroll up in the conversation to find that quote. I still vaguely remember a couple of the stories, others I’m not sure if I’m mixing them up or blending them together somehow. Part of this could also be a Me problem: I don’t especially care for short stories as a form, full stop. Any short story collection is going to start at a disadvantage with me.

I’m not mad that I read it, but I wouldn’t recommend it, either.

The Extinction of Irena Rey

Does it count as professional narcissism if I want to read a book because it’s about translators?

I first saw an ad for The Extinction of Irena Rey in LitHub, though another bookish friend later mentioned enjoying it. But the only thing that made me add it to my list was translators! mystery! The author, Jennifer Croft, is also a translator of renown (Olga Tokarczuk’s  Flights, among others) and that only made the prospect even more tempting.

At its most basic, The Extinction of Irena Rey is about the search for missing Polish author Irena Rey. She’s always been very idiosyncratic about how her translators work, we learn, so this time is no different: she invites them to her house for a summit (as she calls it) and everyone works together to translate her latest work into their respective languages. They can’t talk about the weather, they can’t use their names, they can’t translate any other Polish author. There’s certainly a cult-like element to everything. This time around, however, the cult leader has mysteriously vanished. What to do?

This straightforward series of events is wrapped in multiple levels of metatext. The novel you as a person in the real world are reading is in English, of course, but within the world of the novel this is a translation into English from Polish that was (again, in the world of the novel) originally written by an Argentinian woman. Who just so happens to absolutely despise the translator. Oh, and the imaginary Polish original text is supposedly a fictionalized account of actual events!

This is where I have to regret that I fell so behind with my dorky little book reports here because I know there are a lot of things about the book that I’ve forgotten, in addition to the little scraps I remember but can’t find a place to shoehorn in here. It’s been several months now since I finished it. But I remember that I enjoyed every minute of it: it was weird and unhinged and just incredibly smart.

Gabi: A Girl in Pieces

The third and final part of my Fat Triptych was Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero.

This one didn’t make the rounds quite as much; I think I only saw it on one blog, but that one review was enough to get me intrigued. And then my US library had an ebook copy!

Gabi, a Girl in Pieces focuses on Gabi Hernandez’ senior year of high school, told in the form of her diary. On the one hand, I could summarize it as high school drama, and that would be way more glib than the book deserves. On the other hand, I could summarize it as an Issues Novel tackling things like racism, addiction, body image, teen pregnancy, sexual assault, and family trauma, and that would be far more of a downer than the book actually is. Really, in the end, the story is about a year in the life of a very particular human who is going through very particular things, and that’s what keeps Gabi from becoming an overwrought or anvilicious After School Special. I’m pretty sure that high school me would have respected Gabi and related to her; grown up me wanted to protect and encourage her.

No surprise then when I say that Gabi was a welcome palate cleanser after Dietland. Where Plum was an absolute blank void who only served as an excuse for Walker to lecture her readers, Gabi is an actual character. She has a personality, she has strengths and weaknesses, she has opinions, she has interests. Gabi isn’t a manifesto, and Quintero doesn’t have an axe to grind. She just has a character—people—that she cares about.

It’s also refreshing to read a YA novel that isn’t a stealth attempt to sell books to fully adult readers looking for a bit of lazy, easy escapism. Gabi is actually for young people, and I mean that as a compliment and in the best way possible. It’s not up to me to say that Quintero understands the readers she’s targeting, but it’s clear that she respects them.

Dietland

The second part of my Fat Triptych from Christmas 2025 (yes I’m writing this in May 2026) was the splashy and much-lauded Dietland by Sarai Walker.

I had been so excited to read this one back when it was first announced. All of the book blogs I was following at the time loved it and kept comparing it favorably to Fight Club and it just seemed like it would be a really fun and life-affirming read!

It was not.

I wonder if I would have liked it better if I’d read it on first release—when I was a different person, when the world and The Discourse was different as well—or if that wouldn’t have made any difference at all. It left such a disappointing taste in my mouth that I had to immediately schedule a meeting with the other member of the Bad Reads Club to give vent to my spleen.

Dietland just comes across like Walker’s own personal airing of the grievances: with Weight Watchers, with Victoria’s Secret, with unattainable beauty standards, with anti-depressants, with advertising, possibly with a few blind dates that went spectacularly poorly. That’s not the same thing as social commentary, even if her grievances touch on social or cultural phenomena.

Obviously a book that includes a radical feminist underground that carries out vigilante justice on behalf of sexual assault victims and kidnaps British media moguls as a response to Page 5 Girls is not realistic in any sense, much as nothing about Fight Club is realistic in any sense. But there is a lack of emotional? psychological? realism in the small moments that made it impossible for me to connect the book to real life in any sense. People are absolutely cruel, but in Dietland everyone’s top priority seems to be going out of their way to make fat women (namely Plum) suffer. And I do mean everyone. Plum herself is also nearly completely without self-insight or reflection, and this obviously has to be by design because the book isn’t about Plum, and it was never about Plum: it’s Walker’s manifesto. Plum has to constantly be lectured and explained to so that Walker can have a soapbox. On occasions when Plum turns it around and has an epiphany of her own, they’re full of secondhand embarrassment because they’re just so…shallow.

One that stuck with me and I think sums up the entire mood of the book: at some point near the end of, or perhaps right after, her anti-makeover (or “makeover,” complete with scare quotes, if you prefer) Plum is sitting on the subway and contemplating a fellow passenger. A man. And she thinks to herself that being fat has given her the superpower of seeing people’s true selves—selves that they would never reveal to thin, beautiful women. (By “people” here, she really seems to mean men in particular.)

My reading of the text is that Walker means this “I’m 14 and this is deep” kind of insight completely unironically and straight-faced. Plum doesn’t really evolve beyond that point or come to a more nuanced understanding. Walker doesn’t really criticize it or show Plum to be wrong in any way; none of the soapbox lecturer characters talk to Plum about this claim. If anything, it’s the enlightenment they were pushing her towards for the entire book.

It’s been ten years since Dietland. I hope Walker’s feeling better.

2025 Reading Goals Review

At least 48 books:
I made to 51 thanks to a long-haul flight and two weeks of Christmas vacation. Success!

At least 4 are in French:
Trois femmes puissantes
En attendant la montée des eaux
Terre des hommes
Rien ou poser sa tete

Made it!

At least 25% are in Swedish:
By the skin of my teeth, due to a glut of English books over the holidays. Though, my total foreign language books (as in, Swedish and French combined) is close to 40%.

At least 12 are non-fiction:
Sister Outsider
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
The Lies That Bind
Hemlös—med egna ord
How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century
Wind, Sand and Stars
The House of the Dead
Letters to a Young Poet
Conflict is Not Abuse
Journey to Russia
Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style
Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
Rien ou poser sa tete
Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune
Filosofins tröst 
Fat Talk Nation: The Human Costs of America’s War on Fat

With Burnout, I hit my non-fiction goal by September. Hooray!

At least 10 have been in my library for over a year:*
Wind, Sand and Stars
The House of the Dead
Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune
Tordyveln flyger i skymningen

Even moving the goal posts back to 10 books, I failed this one by every possible measure. It was inevitable; I made such substantial progress on this in the last few years that I began to run out of books that I hadn’t already read but that still looked interesting. Even if I count ebooks, that only gets to five. We’ll see what 2026 brings.

At least 10 have come from my TBR (as of January 1, 2025):
The Idiot
An Unnecessary Woman
En attendant la montée des eaux**
Om det regnar i Ahvaz
Conflict is not Abuse***
Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style
Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat
Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune
Tordyveln flyger i skymningen
Three Apples Fell From the Sky
Filosofins tröst
Fat Talk Nation
Dietland
Gabi, a Girl in Pieces
Årsboken

Success! Surpassed even an ambitious book-a-month goal of 12! But let’s not reflect on how many books I added to my TBR…

 

At least half are by women or enby authors:
Excluding anthologies with mixed genders, 22 books were by women and 20 were by men. On target.

At least 10% are by Black authors:
Trois femmes puissantes
Sister Outsider
En attendant la montée des eaux
The Lies That Bind

I never found a fifth book. Hopefully the coming issues of Karavan will have some good recommendations for me there.

At least 1 new-to-me country (as of January 1, 2025):
Lebanon (An Unnecessary Woman)
Iran  (Den blinda ugglan)
Guadeloupe (En attendant la montée des eaux)***
Croatia (Journey to Russia)
Serbia (Encyclopedia of the Dead)
Ukraine (Döden och pingvinen)
Armenia (Three Apples Fell From the Sky)
Taiwan (Notes of a Crocodile)

Blew this one out of the water. Maybe it was too easy? It certainly helps to have an international WhatsApp book club.

 

*I revised this one after I didn’t quite meet it last year. Is it shifting goalposts or is it adjusting targets to better correspond to reality? You decide!

**Technically I had added another Condé novel to my TBR instead of this one. Since I mostly just picked it at random to act as a Condé placeholder, I’m counting En attendant… as part of this goal fulfillment.

***As with Condé, I had another Sarah Schulman book on my TBR (Gentrification of the Mind). But Conflict is not Abuse left such a weird taste in my mouth that I feel confident taking Gentrification off the TBR. It also seems like Conflict rehashes, at least in passing, the main points she made in Gentrification.

****Guadeloupe is an overseas department and region of France, but it feels like it should count.

The Phantom Tollbooth

Every year around Christmas I habitually re-read a beloved childhood classic that survived my move across the Atlantic. While my reasons for this are tactical and pragmatic—these are very easy reads to squeeze in at the end of the year if I’m behind on my book count goals—it’s also a nice bit of cozy comfort reading that’s appropriate for the season.

This year it was The Phantom Tollbooth, which I read in ebook form on my flight to the US. There is something about ebooks that ruins the magic of these kinds of books, I have to say. It’s harder to appreciate Jules Feiffer’s charming illustrations when you’re staring at them on a tiny smartphone screen, never mind the tactile loss of the feeling of the edges of the pages against your fingers as you turn them.

Which reminds me of a point Maryanne Wolf made in either Reader, Come Home or Proust and the Squid: everyone of a certain age right now, or at any given moment in time, had access to similar levels of technology. Everyone my age, definitely everyone older and certainly some of the ones who are younger, learned to read from books because there were no tablets or smartphones or ereaders. That’s the experience built into our learning brain. Maybe generations who grow up learning to read on those devices will have the same emotional association with reading on them that we have with reading books? So much depends on what the young, growing brain is exposed to, after all.

That’s a post for another day, though!

Otherwise everything else was just as magical since the last time I read it. The Phantom Tollbooth was one of the few books I would actually bother to reread, I enjoyed it so much. But even so it had been several years, making this my first reread as an adult. Exactly the kind of comfort food you need in these deeply and unpleasantly weird times.

Njals Saga

This was a recommendation from my The Heart is a Lonely Hunter book friend.

“It’s fantastic. Reading it now and it’s all about lobbying and politics and getting as many people on your side as possible. You realize that nothing ever changes. You can see so much of modern Sweden in there, too. You read this and you’ll understand us Nordic people better than we understand ourselves.”

Maybe I do now, and maybe I don’t. For being something like seven hundred years old, plenty of things still seem modern. The lobbying and politicking, sure, but also the dialogue (at least, as translated into Swedish from Icelandic by Lars Lönnroth). Reading Njals Saga is a completely different beast from reading The Iliad or The Odyssey. People in Njals Saga are just constantly roasting each other with devastating one-liners, starting as early as Hrutr’s comment about his niece Hallgerd to her boasting father: “I do not know how thieves’ eyes came into the family.”

More personally for me and my flavor of bad brain, the structure of Njals saga also makes it an easier read than other classics. The Swedish translation is prose, not poetry, and divided into relatively short episodes—I assume this reflects the original. Yes, it also happens to be 500 pages long, but it’s not a difficult 500 pages. Other epics of this style are usually poetry and usually translated as such, and somehow that’s enough to make my eyes glaze over. Even though I’m otherwise a huge mythology nerd! Impossible to explain. A public domain English translation is available at the Icelandic Saga Database, so you can browse yourself and see what you think.