Some books I read this summer

The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt

In graduate school a friend once asserted: “You have to understand: we deeply, deeply hate children.” I balked at the time, but The Last Samurai made me reconsider this too-easy dismissal of her thesis. Maybe we all sort of hate children in the sense that we wish they did not exist. Do we resent the burdens children impose? Do we lack the creativity and patience to join them in their own worlds? Do we hate even our own childhood, find it to be, more or less, an embarrassment? Are we unwilling to do what is necessary to properly educate children—our own, and those of others?

Sibylla—who shares the work of this peculiar book’s role of protagonist with her eleven-year-old son, Ludo—is surely nuts. Her insistence that people don’t understand “rational thought” intensifies the farther away her thought comes from reckoning with practical realities. Nevertheless, her plan for educating Ludo is perhaps nothing short of what is required to do the job correctly. I am a father of four and a professional educator, and so I could not but read this book as anything other than an indictment of my own lack of courage in not being a little bit crazier in my educational vocations. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, another crazy person who wrote one of the best-ever books about education, this book aims to make education seem difficult, but no more difficult than it actually is. What do we owe our children—all children, the next generation—besides everything we have?¹

Seduction Theory, Emily Adrian

I love campus novels. I love them because I have spent my entire adult life on campus, and because I love genre fiction. I would be an insomniac, I think, without genre fiction. Happily, however, it exists, and I can make my way through 1000-page fantasy novels, one drowsy paragraph per night, most of the time. This book was not, however, like that. I read it in two sittings, staying up far later than my bedtime to reach its conclusion.

I experienced significant second-hand guilt reading Ethan’s awkward seduction of his department’s secretary because it is exactly how I, who would never do it, would do it.

(As the novel observes, you’re not allowed to call secretaries that anymore. Why? Being a secretary is not a bad thing! Francis Bacon was Thomas Hobbes’ secretary! Peggy Olsen was Don Draper’s secretary! Just because one ought never to trust a Cecil, doesn’t mean we can’t call a secretary a secretary!)

Campus novels work, in part, because the structure of the academic year provides a temporal scaffold for plot. Dear Committee Members accelerates in urgency over the course of an academic year; Straight Man captures the gestalt character of the last month of term. Much of Seduction Theory takes place during the ambivalence of the long academic summer—a great time to train for a marathon, as the novel observes—an represents the feeling of that particular interregnum with tremendous fidelity.

The novel also does ingenious things with its own narrative conceit; and so I’m not the first to realize it’s got lots in common with Pnin.

Seduction Theory is also just reliably funny, which is a rarer quality in books than one might think. It also features a number of delightful Easter eggs—referencing the distinctive olfactory experience of Northfield, Minnesota, and having one of its principals investigate the complex domestic arrangement of Prof. Agnes Callard, whose new book, as it happens, I also (mostly) read this summer.

Open Socrates, Agnes Callard

I read most of Open Socrates with half a mind to write a review. With the other half of my mind, I’ll say this: “Open Socrates” should be understood in the imperative mood, like “Open Sesame!” The Socrates this book reveals is not Plato’s, and most certainly conceals nothing beautiful inside.²

Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay

This book is probably the best one by a Canadian fantasy writer. Since we are trying a little harder to be a proper nation these days, I have been doing things like not shopping at J. Crew and trying to care more about Canadian politics, and reading this book was, I guess, part of my attempt to be more patriotic. Tigana is about a small province wiped from memory by a vengeful sorcerer, and the attempts of a group of Tiganans errants who try to break the spell and restore their home. The Peninsula of the Palm—the continent where Tigana is one of nine provinces—is intensely regional, and this regionalism is what allowed it to be conquered by competing sorcerers in the first place. It is, in other words, like all books by Canadian authors³ a book rife with very Canadian anxieties about national identity, and the hilarious Canadian preoccupation with Federalism. The prose is florid, not to say overwritten. One compliment I can give it: published in 1990, it would certainly have been a trilogy if it were released in 2025.

The Navigator’s Children, Tad Williams

Speaking of which, here’s a somewhat rare thing in epic fantasy: a conclusion! Well, a second conclusion for the Osten Ard books. Williams’ first trilogy, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, ended back in the 90s, and there’s probably a long story to be told about the significant “inspiration” drawn by Robert Jordan and George Martin from those books. Williams is much deeper and more interesting—and a better writer—than many more famous fantasy writers, and before his second trilogy, I sort of admired his restraint.

The second Osten Ard trilogy focusses on this world’s elves—the Sithi and the Norns (of course these are the names humans call each group, not the ones they call themselves, but I want to keep this review accessible) —and are about a nihilistic tyrant’s refusal to imagine a world without her in it. Both sets of books, in fact, are about the injustices we do to younger generations. Williams’ immortals are characterized by sclerosis, by their unwillingness to let anything go, ever, at all, and how this warps their politics. It’s the best thing about politics I read this summer.

All of Sally Rooney’s Novels

Are these books people have opinions about? Ah, I’m kidding. It’s fun to kid—if you are not a character in a Sally Rooney novel, that is. What to say? The best one is Conversations with Friends, followed closely by Normal People. The worst one is certainly Intermezzo, which, unlike all of Rooney’s other novels, felt like a burden to finish.

I finished Conversations With Friends on the beach in Glyfada, and had a conversation about it with some Belgian students. I was embarrassed when they approached me because it is embarrassing to lay mostly naked on a beach and read a book with a lot of sex in it. I frequently had this experience as I read these books in front of, say, my family, in the evenings. "What’s your book about, Daddy?” “Oh, it’s about two people sending emails back and forth to each other.” “That sounds boring!” [lying]: “Yes.”

At the expense of revealing myself to be a man: I thought I understood something profound about women’s experience of desire in reading these books. But I then tested my understanding by reading my wife a few passages from Conversations with Friends, Normal People, and Intermezzo, whereupon she witheringly replied: “Perhaps you have learned something about how characters in these specific Sally Rooney novels experience desire.”

Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant

It was a business doing pleasure with you, Mr. Kant.⁴

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery

A novel with two very unlikable protagonists that nevertheless won me over and made me sob through its two final chapters.

I was not persuaded by one character’s flippant dismissal of phenomenology.

Spent, Alison Bechdel

Spent lacks the brilliant, labyrinthine quality of Fun Home and Are You My Mother? Bechdel evidently knows she needs to put down her phone, but this disappointing entry suggests the damage was already done. Bechdel gave birth to autofiction with Fun Home, so I guess it’s only fair that she finished it off with Spent.

Speaking of putting down your phone—

A Web of Our Own Making, Anton Barba-Kay

My friend Dan Schillinger—novelist Emily Adrian’s husband, to bring things full circle—told me this book is better than Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology. He’s right. It is a dense phenomenology of digital technology, and what it means for us and our world. I read a significant chunk of this book on an airplane, and the combination of my surprise at my own attention span in that situation, and the verve and accuracy of Barba-Kay’s descriptions of digital technology convinced me to abandon my smartphone. It felt like—a feeling that grows daily—the most agency I have experienced in years, and I would not have had the nerve to do it without this book. I probably wouldn’t have read so many other books this summer if I had not read this one first.

1. My friend Peter Blair also read this book this summer and wrote elegantly about it here.

2. Read my friend Mary Townsend’s very good review of this book for a more thorough pan.

3. Ok fine not all, but you know what I mean.

4. I stole this line from a mean review of Becca Rothfeld’s very good collection, All Things Are Too Small.