Essays by Simon Stawski on the books he has just finished, with his reading data from ReadingRate and the Marginalia video for each one. Subscribe on Substack
Each essay is a star at its book: Hopscotch, The Magic Mountain, Flights, Solenoid, The Dispossessed, Lincoln in the Bardo, The Overstory, Humankind: A Hopeful History, Night Boat to Tangier, A Tale for the Time Being.
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being was Simon’s relief after four books in a row about bad men, and it left him empty: he mourns Nao, Jiko and Oliver, and asks why fiction hands wisdom only to the elders with one foot in the grave. The world is a lot kinder than our most famous words show us, and wisdom is something we can all train.
· 8 min read · on A Tale for the Time Being
Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier was Simon’s rebound after Ozeki: two thugs talking through the night at a ferry terminal, in prose too gorgeous for our own good. The metamodernism he went looking for turns up in the sound of it, an alarm clock that rattles the same from beginning to end, with music hidden in the noise.
· 6 min read · on Night Boat to Tangier
Rutger Bregman’s Humankind takes the Cynical Canon apart study by study: Golding’s island, the Stanford prison, Milgram’s shocks, the bystanders who never were. Simon reads it as the antidote to the Nocebo effect of the news, then puts a question to Bregman himself and answers it with the Shire.
· 11 min read · on Humankind: A Hopeful History
Richard Powers’ The Overstory won the Pulitzer for a novel about trees, and Simon finished its 600 pages feeling scolded. He names the mood the Misanthropocene, where environmental love turns into self-hatred, and argues for the opposite move: keep moving, keep building, and find a way off the planet.
· 14 min read · on The Overstory
George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is a ritual of unclenching. The ghosts at Oak Hill stay stuck because each keeps retelling his own story to nobody listening; the living get free the moment they set their story down and lift someone else’s load for a minute.
· 11 min read · on Lincoln in the Bardo
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed sends Shevek from an anarchist moon to a capitalist planet and finds a prison on each. Every ideal, from honor to justice, turns out to be a body saying yummy or yucky, and the garden still needs sweeping.
· 10 min read · on The Dispossessed
Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid is a diary that whispers stay here, dig deeper: a narrator who reads eight hours a day in bed, sleeps four, and offers self-torture as metaphysical inquiry. Simon read it during a week alone and felt the riptide of introspection pull at him too. The ends don’t justify the means, and there is no salvation to be found in exploring suffering.
· 8 min read · on Solenoid
Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights has no plot and does without one: it is a constellation of fragments, travellers and bodies in motion, and its one command is to keep moving. Whoever stops is pinned like an insect; the constellation matters more than the narrative arc.
· 7 min read · on Flights
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is a novel about a cure that never ends: Hans Castorp goes up for three weeks and stays seven years. Settembrini and Naphta argue without a winner, and the only move left is the descent, back down to the village, the bone broth and the book club.
· 10 min read · on The Magic Mountain
Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is a novel built like jazz, with two ways to read it and a structure ReadingRate scores 85 out of 100 for difficulty. Its tragedy is Horacio, who wants to live like a jazz player among people who won’t play along.
· 8 min read · on Hopscotch