bookmarks, januaryJANUARY 2026

For this year, I really want to keep myself accountable and consistent with reading, even as my life gets more hectic and busy. Thankfully, the beginning of 2026 has been a bit of a lull, and I got to finish a handful of fun (mainly shorter) novels to lead into the new year. I try my best to keep a critical eye out when reading in general, and starting writing these reviews as a practice to put my thoughts into a more coherent form. I don’t think any of these could be pushed into real essay- or feature-length, but sit comfortably as a collection of diary entries marking my January. My plan is to keep this going for this whole year, and putting these into the public holds me to it. Funnily enough, I’d say these six books have a mild theme: the internal monologues and rhythms of life (and some intellectuals).

Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff
Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff (not to be confused with Your Name Here, the new novel by Helen DeWitt; Lotteryland by the notorious misanthrope recluse Rachel Zozanian; or Hustlers by Kaplan Thornhill and the late Zozanian, all 3 also included in this book) is a behemoth of text, the true “unpublishable” nightmare beast novel that crumbles under its own weight and gives the rubble as The Point. And guess what, it works. In the layers upon layers, there are a myriad of vignettes about the world outside the book (paradoxically also inside it): thematics on war (post 9/11 world on terror, the current genocide in Gaza) and the unliveable state capitalism has forced us in (the musings on scholarships for an example). These all serve to underline the futility of the quest of Helen/Rachel and Ilya/Alyosha/Sasha/Dmitri/Misha/ Kaplan, the quest to create in a world where nothing matters unless it has a “story” attached to it.

There is a treasure trove of “stories” to be found in Your Name Here for sure, each coming in clear and distinct voices I eventually settled into once I got used to their rhythms. There’s the ensemble of second-person readers reading the brand new novel by Helen DeWitt, Your Name Here, full of Calvino and Kaufman references and self-aware regret of making them (I for one enjoyed those parts greatly). There’s excerpts from Zozanian’s Lotteryland, a fictional novel that is also a real novel DeWitt wrote but never published. There’s first/second/third person perspectives from Zozanian, her tabloidista friend and collaborator of many names, Jake Noszaly, the film director trying to adapt Lotteryland, and various other relevant characters. Central are the email correspondences of Rachel, as well DeWitt (fictional or real, it is made unclear) and Ilya Gridneff’s character, the aforementioned “journalist” whose name changes between various Russian aliases. There’s another novel, the aforementioned Hustlers, which most of Your Name Here covers the writing of (also the writing of Your Name Here, often the boundary between both is blurred), noted by the large headings with decimal marked chapter headings. Even the chapter headings gain a voice of their own past the halfway point, thick bolded brackets indicating another level of subconsciousness in the text.

The book ends with its own Adaptation McKee intervention: Zozanian’s suicide and (then named) Kaplan releasing the book as tabloid press eats up the controversy — something Gridneff suggests in an email 300 pages earlier. Multiple times, the words “the book is fucked” are printed. There is no clear path to unravelling the knotted mess of Your Name Here, no clue the distinctions between Rachel and Helen and Ilya and Alyosha and Sasha and Dmitri (even later emails in the book have “Kaplan” call himself Ilya or Gridneff). Clerical errors are intentional or not, who knows? It’s the perfect crime: a book that has to be thoroughly edited and pruned simply due to the sheer mass of well-tied connecting threads, that also feels like an egomaniacal first draft that could double as a writer’s last will and testament. I can’t tell if DeWitt has lost her mind or is smart enough to pull off this fucking 600 page joke on me. And that’s kind of incredible.

In all the pretentious slop (and self-aware recognition of pretentious slop; something required in a book that not only name-drops the aforementioned Calvino and Kaufman, my dears, but also multiple times references Fellini, Adorno, Kafka, etc) there is a real heart here. I adore the cast of characters: the unmitigated pseudo-autofictive Ilya (and aliases) and his (sometimes grating) email voice; I adore Rachel’s neurosis and pitiful writerly spirit; I adore everything about this book, even the parts that I hated. It’s perfect Your Name Here took 20 years to be published, it would’ve been too far ahead of its time. It’s required late 00s malaise works best with the two decades of hindsight, a terrifying reminder that things have definitely not gotten better, perhaps even worse. One of the true “good” developments I can confidently say has occurred between the real/fictional 2000s of Your Name Here and the present day, is that this book is now in the world for people to read and love and hate and find too many words to talk about. At the end of the day, that’s the true victory she needed all along.

The White Album by Joan Didion
Joan Didion’s “The White Album” is perhaps one of the most poignant and well crafted examinations of the cultural mess that was the American 1960s, a mosaic of violence and popular media blended together, a report from the scene of the crime. It’s impossible to downplay how well-crafted it is, truly one of the great American essays.

Joan Didion’s The White Album, while also a mosaic of Americana’s spiral in the 60s and the decade after, is far from the marvelous feat the title essay accomplishes. It is no question that Didion maintains here absolute mastery of the English language across the book, something that is on display in each essay, so effortlessly perfect prose. The failure is what she uses that skill for. Didion commits the cardinal sin of essay writing: being boring. In her attempts to feel the culture’s pulse and repeat its rhythms to the reader, she becomes effectively useless in her observations. A passive eye, tacitly critical but rarely saying anything beyond “I don’t know, I’m just saying how it is” (a near verbatim quote from the second to last essay). Although not an inherently flawed perspective to write from, over the course of 220 pages my engagement with the text dwindled.

Beyond the first title essay, there are hits and misses in the other 180+ pages. “California Republic” has the excellent pieces “Bureaucrats,” “James Pike, American”, “Many Mansions”, and “The Getty” — all which work much stronger due to their throughline and lasting half-life from the revelation that is “The White Album”. Section 3, “Women”, is perhaps the weakest, with a ridiculous critique in “The Women’s Movement,” a forgettable essay on British novelist Doris Lessing, and the only redeemable content, a succinct but excellently crafted feature on Georgia O’Keeffe. “Sojourns” and “On the Morning After the Sixties” become looser and looser thematically, Didion’s own autobiographical experiences being the remaining throughline (although “In Bogotá” and “In Bed” are particularly excellent). As the book unravels its themes, so does my patience.

Didion’s ultimate failure is, in her languid gestures towards the incomprehension of the 60s, the erosion of “everything she thought she knew” — she omits deconstructing what that previous past even was. Her main interaction with this kind of dialectical framework of history, through the Women’s Movement of the 70s, produces an essay that can only be written by someone too stubborn to look back at the past with anything besides “objectivity”. Didion provides scenes of the first instances of Americana’s decay, the decay of the America she grew up in. Yet in that action, she is unable to produce a concise answer, not due to the scope of the question, instead due to an unwillingness to interrogate all of the past.

Água Viva by Clarice Lispector
Breathless, truly a book that lives beyond its pages. Every paragraph grips you like it’s the most important thing in the world, and as your eyes pass over to the next, what was just read disappears into the ether. This is the experience of reading Água Viva. It’s astounding that this was even written, a text that feels as if it’s lasted as long as consciousness has. As the final words echo, it will live on: these 88 pages are just a snapshot into the mind, into Lispector’s mind — it is nothing more or less.

Every once in a while, a passage was so incredible it forced me to take a pause and sit with each word chosen. I think, depending on my mood, that could be any passage in this book. Timeless, even in the moment one reads it in the present. Even though the fleeting nature naturally makes the reading experience one that leaves little impression in the present, that is perhaps the point. Lispector’s attempts to conjure the immediate moment are executed perfectly, to the degree the moment itself is the only one where this book truly breathes free.

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
It's far from original to remark on the absolute mastery on display in Borges' Ficciones: mastery over language, over narrative, over the mysteries of the world and literature itself. It's always funny to read a true classic, something whose tendrils have infiltrated the minds of the author I love so much already, whose text is the bedrock to so much of what I love in literature writ large.

The fictions in Ficciones exist on various levels, far beyond the fictional matter the stories are constructed. "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," "An Examination of Herbert Quain," even and "The Secret Miracle" are concerned with fictional fictions; "The Circular Ruins," "The Babylon Lottery," and "The Library of Babel" are pure mythos, reality itself as fiction; "The Form of the Sword" is of a false story (a fiction) retold to the narrator; "Theme of Traitor and Hero" is about a fictitious history revealed; "Death and the Compass" is a detective story whose central crime is a fiction too. The word labyrinth appears a myriad of times, and labyrinthine is the best word I'd use to describe Borges work. Tangled in their own depth, I found the stories in the first part ("The Garden of Forking Paths") intimidating to unpack due to their density. Return readings, although cursory, began unlocking more and more in each page. That being said, I think I am far from connecting all the dots, each inked so close together they make a blob black as night.

Out of these fragmentary moments, I found myself most moved by "Funes, the Memorious," perhaps due to its straightforward autobiographical recounting. I'd argue it's the most human out of all the fictions here, perhaps next to "The Secret Miracle," another favorite of mine. That's not to say that I was not affected by most of these, quite the contrary. I think I'll be taking the parables, myths, legends, and everything in between in this book for decades to come.

It's funny to see, looking backwards, where authors I adore like Bolaño, Cortázar, even my dear Calvino, were influenced by Borges. Ficciones occupies a unique space in history: so clearly of its time, yet timeless too - a book not defined by its legacy, but strengthened by it. I wish, in an experiment similar to Pierre Menard, to read Borges in the original 1940s context, to understand the genius and innovation on display, to truly appreciate the effortlessly rich language in each story. Until then, simply reading the fictions of Ficciones is enough.

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
A post-apocalyptic tale whose primary "event" is intentionally absent through its narrative, Jacqueline Harpman's I Who Have Never Known Men is one of the most beautiful presentations of a thought experiment I've ever read. The prose is tight and devoid of style, a style in itself, which makes sense in the logic of the book. In the brief 175 pages, the numbness in the voice becomes an intoxicating force; the spare Proust mention in the very beginning a signal beyond the idle life of the 39 escaped women, yet the tone withholds any change in emotion as the story progresses.

In spite of, or because of this (I can't decide), the experience of reading I Who Have Never Known Men is deliciously easy - the directness, the quick pace and brevity all allow this barren world to sink into the reader's mind. A word I've seen floated around incessantly regarding this book is "thought-provoking" - without any elaboration, a descriptor utterly devoid of meaning. I will say, though, that this book is one where that hollow provocation of "thought" (something really any book should elicit) deserves the ungrounded nature of the term.

I Who Have Never Known Men's biggest weakness and strength is the complete opacity of the situation. An allegory for the unknowns of the world, the rebirth of society is one that is unable to reckon with the past, primarily because the destruction of said past has seemingly no meaning at all. In the modern world, reckoning with the horrors born in the 20th century, still alive today - I Who Have Never Known Men follows the path of Theodore Adorno and Maurice Blanchot. Harpman shows a world where truly there is no "art after Auschwitz." There is no writing on the disaster, because as Blanchot himself writes, "the disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact." I Who Have Never Known Men is that "everything," the unobtainable grief for a concrete understanding of history. It is inherently unsatisfying, as life often, especially as we exist today, after the disaster.

By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño
Upon reaching the final pages of By Night in Chile, I have no doubt in my mind that Father Urrutia is one of my favorites of Bolaño’s creations. A flawed man worthy enough to earn a book-length exploration into his psyche, Urratia is expertly conjured in the often page-long sentences and the sprawling single paragraph the bulk of the novella sits in. It’s a testament to Bolaño’s talent for emulating the textures and rhythms of the human voice, perhaps honed in the making of The Savage Detectives’ myriad personal histories. While that novel is centered around the ways life and the artistic pursuit splinter off (among many, many other things), By Night in Chile explores the failures of hiding within the world of literature. Urratia is constantly hiding: from his religious duties, he retreats into the literary world he desires; from his artistic duties, he falls back into personal doctrine and the power of critique; from the latter, he hides in the doomed dynasty of Pinochet; from himself, he hides until his final breath.

A sibling novella to Distant Star (a text a bit more towards my general tastes), Bolaño unravels the way the bohemian literary lifestyle is both unable to stop fascism, but often welcomes it. Urratia hides from history in his historical texts, Maria Canales hides from the reality of her husband’s work with her soirées, Farewell hides from Chile in his estate. In the end though, Urratia cannot hide any longer from the wizened youth he scorns from the very first page. He has betrayed himself, he has betrayed Chile, he has betrayed literature itself, too. Like a falcon, Bolaño snatches his prey out of the air, left bloodied for the public eye to see, the body soon to be swept away by night in Chile.

Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates
It’s hard for me to look at Expensive People past its pseudo-legacy: a novel ahead of its time in terms of recognizing the threads between suburban decay & violence in America, but lacking relevance beyond that. This reads so easily as a proto-Bret Easton Ellis novel, a cross-bred between Less Than Zero and American Psycho, far less angry than either.

Yes, I understand the banality conjuring of the cursed Richard Everett’s daily life is required to make this text work, but Expensive People is indeed still quite boring. Always unfortunate to find such a well-written book a slog, because Oates’ prose is truly remarkable throughout. Elegantly crafted sentences and smart observations abound in this novel; in the afterword Oates even admits the ease in which Richard’s voice came to her in writing. I think the missing piece for me here can be traced back to exactly that: Richard is barely a character, whose motivations are at the same time obvious and obscured. The tongue-in-cheek “reviews” halfway through muddy any idea of Richard as innocuous, unaware of his circumstances. A funny touch, but they end up detracted from a stronger formation of character.

In the end, Richard has his own Patrick Bateman confession-not-taken-seriously moment, throwing into question the violence of the story entirely. Is this book a fantasy or delusions of a child whose mother was murdered? Is this written by Nada herself, a guilt-fueled exploration of her son’s relationship to her? Is the culprit even the suburban nightmare of Fernwood and Cedar Hills, or the bohemian escape of the city? In asking these questions, no answer feels satisfying because the answer isn’t the goal here. The idea that American society has reached this place of falsities and “expensive people” to the degree this could have happened is the point. The cost of the comforts of modern life is life itself, and in the case of Expensive People, the cost is being an interesting novel as well.

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