Top reads: May 2026

Fiction

• A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (Krasznahorkai): Traditional, patient, peaceful work and artistry versus bursts of violence. It opens – without including a chapter I – on an unstable, almost violent image of a blade on which a train runs (instead of tracks).
  What even is reality here? The grandson doesn’t seem real – too old, for one – and his retinue is detached from his story. Only the empty monastery is real, and the history of the trees, rocks, and plants that live in it or are its building blocks. But even they’re not always there, and no humans intrude on the grandson’s reality.
  Not even life-long goals – of a very long life – need to be met. But how does reality change when you lose that chance? You walked past your goal, and now you can’t walk back to it.
• Made Things and Precious Little Things (Tchaikovsky): Novella and short story. Charming, but with a clear eye to power its abuses.
• Venomous Lumpsucker (Beauman): Extinction and capitalism – a bit of a reductio ad absurdum, in a fun way.
• Train Dreams (Johnson): Somehow fails to build a specific atmosphere. Maybe that’s the point: the story is told from a remote POV, looking at the events instead of feeling them.
• Our Little Cruelties (Nugent): The lesson here is obvious: little cruelties add up to a purely toxic relationship. But the details of these people and the justifications they come up with are really something else; I hope none of us has a family like this.
  These are unreliable narrators, of course. And it’s when an unreliable narrator makes himself look so bad while trying to look good that you know just what a horrible person he is.

Non-fiction:

• Exteriors (Ernaux): Snippets of life; a short-form journal of encounters with other people. Some of the moments are sweet, but most are uncomfortable.
• The Death of Expertise (Nichols): Why do people ignore experts? Worse, why do they get angry? This is an interesting book, but I think if you’ve been following the debunking space you might not learn much that’s new to you.
• The Importance of Being Interested (Ince): Ince has made a career out of being the audience surrogate when faced with very intelligent, very educated people: it’s his job to ask the basic questions, to demand explanations that make sense even if you can’t do the maths. This book is basically the written form of this job.