The Spectator Bird, by Wallace Stegner

It was The Illogic of Kassel that led me to read The Spectator Bird, but not because it was actually referenced in that book. Toward the end of The Illogic of Kassel, Vila-Matas refers to a poem by Wallace Stevens, and that reference made me remember Wallace Stegner and think that I should read him again. I read Crossing to Safety several years back and loved it and around that time I picked up The Spectator Bird, and then I promptly forgot about it. My interest in Stegner may have been sidelined by my general lack of interest in reading American authors. And then there are just so many books to read. But when I saw the name Wallace Stevens and thought Wallace Stegner I remembered how much I enjoyed his language and his vivid descriptions and I decided this was what I would read next. 

I fell right into it; I read a quarter of the book on Monday and kept up that pace until I finished it this evening. The language was as good as I remembered, the descriptions as vivid. The book opens with an observation of the gusty weather and the dramatic sky and the lively birds on a February day in northern California and I thought, yes: this is what I remember. (I also thought how appropriate that I was reading this in the month during which it's set. I love it when that happens by chance – though it's only the present day of the book that's set in February.) The book jumps back and forth between a few days in February 1974 (or so) in California and a few months in the spring and summer of 1954 in Denmark. Stegner's narrator is the adult son of a Danish immigrant, nearing age 70 in the present day of the book. In the 1950s, he goes with his wife to Denmark to try and connect – more figuratively than actually – with his family history. 

I enjoyed reading this book quite a lot, particularly the elements I mentioned above, but there was one central plot point that turned up near the end that really made me bristle, almost to the point of ruining the book for me. I don't really feel like doing spoilers and focusing on this bit only, so I"ll just say that I'm left uncertain how I feel about the book.

The Illogic of Kassel, by Enrique Vila-Matas

I thought 2026 was off to a great start when I finished my first book of the year within the first 3 days. The Illogic of Kassel arrived at my home around day 3 of the year, courtesy of a New Directions subscription my father got me for Christmas. I thought to myself, I should read these books as they arrive, so I jumped right in. 

I was unfamiliar with Vila-Matas, and I find myself wondering if this book was the best place to start. The Illogic of Kassel is a work of autofiction – the writer was invited to participate in the Documenta art show in Kassel and this book records the experience and his impressions of the works in the show. The book is intensely intertextual – referencing not only the works of art but dozens of works of literature, and a few films to boot. Some of the references – art and literature – were works I was familiar with, but many were not. More than once I wondered to what extent one even can write about the experience of seeing (or interacting with) art, and contemporary art in particular. An observation I'll make about intertextuality is that it rewards the reader who is familiar with the referenced works; but if you as a reader are unfamiliar (and perhaps even if it's just overdone), it can be both opaque and obnoxious. I wouldn't go so far as to say this book was that, but it did remind me a little of a particular moment in my life in the early 2000s when I spent a lot of time with art school students with a proclivity for postmodern theory. 

But I don't want to give a wrong impression. This book felt also like a celebration of art – and of contemporary art, in particular, which I don't think gets much in the way of literary treatment. And to my point about the rewards of intertextuality, well: I certainly felt gratified by the inclusion of some of my personal favorite writers – Joseph Roth and W.G. Sebald figure among the referenced authors. (And William Kentridge and Sophie Calle among the artists.) Overall I enjoyed the book. The reason this felt, as I put it earlier, maybe not the best place to start with Vila-Matas, is that the very context of the book assumes that Vila-Matas is a known entity. There was a reason he was invited to participate in Documenta. For the unfamiliar reader, we must try to piece that together without knowing the work that led him there.

Archipelago, by Natalie Bakopoulos

I was a little bit at a loss when the new year rolled around and I had to decide what to read first. Las year, I finished the only remaining Javier Marías novel available in English that I had not yet read. I do have a handful of other books of his I could have read – two books of essays, one book of short stories, something he wrote about Venice, but I wanted something else. My first impulse was to go for something monumental, so on January 1 I started Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé, which I have been meaning to read for some time. About 50 pages in, I realized it was not what I wanted at the moment. Archipelago was sitting on a side table in my living room, where it had been since my dad brought it over a couple months ago. He probably found it at a thrift store and grabbed it because I'm planning a trip (my first) to Greece later this year. And so, without thinking much about it, I grabbed it and started reading it instead. 

I was drawn into it right away. Bakopoulos' writing is clear and contemplative. The book's narrator is a writer and translator. As a person who reads a large volume of literature in translation, her musings on translation were really interesting to me. At one point, another character in the book who is a writer describes the experience of being translated as a kind of violence. Over the course of the book, the narrator is translating another work – from modern Greek into English – and contrary to her usual practice, she begins the translation without reading the book in full first, so she is discovering and creating the story at the same time. It left me thinking a lot about my own experience as a reader, occasionally a reader of works in languages other than my own native tongue. I am not fluent enough in any language to avoid translating as I go, but reading in another language forces you to think very hard about the sense of each word – to notice where translation fails. I think it leaves a deeper impression of the work because you've had to really contemplate it. Whereas when you read in your native language, it's easy to glide right through. 

A dark mood hangs over the whole book, which left me feeling always on the precipice – reading with a sense of dread, but wanting to go on. If I have one complaint about this book, it's that it didn't quite deliver on the mood. There is a constant foreboding in the book, an implication of terrible events to come, which make the actual events of the narrative a bit anticlimactic. And yet, I was also relieved by this. I didn't want whatever terrible violence might lay in wait to happen, and then ... it just didn't. I could see some readers finding this unsatisfactory, but overall I really enjoyed the book. 

2025 in Books

Last year was my worst reading year since 2012. I finished 19 books in 2025, the first of which was a holdover that I started at the end of 2024. This delayed my usual starting the first of the year with a Javier Marías book, but 2025 was also the year I became a Marías completist – well, of his novels available in English at least. 

Last year I finished:

• The World of Yesterday, by Stefan Zweig
• Voyage Along the Horizon, by Jaiver Marías
• Moving Parts, by Magdalena Tulli
• The Night Guest, by Hildur Knútsdóttir
• Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain
• By the Ionian Sea, by George Gissing
• Amulet, by Roberto Bolaño
• Dance with Snakes, by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Apocalypse, by Lizzie Wade
• A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles
• Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq
• Transit, by Anna Seghers 
• Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson
• March Violets, by Philip Kerr
• Identitti, by Mithu Sanyal
• Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie 
• On the Calculation of Volume I, II, and III, by Solvej Balle

So, for the usual stats: A majority of the books I read this year were by women: 12 out of the 19. That's a big improvement over last year – and unusual for me. Five of these were for my Women in Translation book club, which I have to thank for keeping me reading at least at a slow pace through the year. Also 12 of the books I read this year were books in translation. Apart from Americans, I read authors from Austria, Chile, Denmark, El Salvador, Germany, Iceland, India, Poland, Spain, and the U.K. Iceland and Poland were firsts for me. 

Two of the books I read last year were rereads – the Gissing and the Leckie. Four were works of nonfiction, three of those memoirs. I was really drawn to memoirs at the beginning of last year – continuing a trend from the year before, as I noted in last year's round-up. 

I'm going to allow myself a lot of favorites this year, even though I'm working from a smaller than usual list of books. Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday and Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth were both incredible memoirs covering overlapping periods of time, the early 20th century, World War I and its aftermath, though with very different perspectives. I wanted to stay in that pre-war(s) world for a long time, which is what led me back to my beloved Gissing (but rereads can't count toward favorites – I said so last year). I thought I would go from Gissing to a reread of Dostoyevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, but somehow I ended up on a different track.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles did bring me back to that world, in the form of fiction, and I really loved it. And Transit brought me through to the other side; to the place (figuratively, though almost literally) where the Zweig book ended up: the exodus from Europe during WWII. I started Anna Seghers' Transit ahead of a trip to Provence in July because of its setting in Marseille. I was loving it, but reading very slowly, so that I only finished it not long before I visited Berlin in September. I was feeling such an affection for Anna Seghers just then, so I was most gratified to be able to visit her grave in Berlin. I ended the year with a consecutive reading of the three books from Solvej Balle's On the Calculation of Volume series that are currently available in English. I enjoyed them all, but the first one especially was profoundly moving for me. 

I'll add one honorable mention that I didn't include in my list because I didn't read the full book. I also read – and was really struck by – Anthony Doerr's story (almost a novella really) Memory Wall.

On the Calculation of Volume II & III, by Solvej Balle

After reading On the Calculation of Volume I for my book club, I immediately went out and got II and III so I could jump right back in. Book one had a real arc and I was wondering where Balle would go with book two. I found it hard to imagine. But sure enough, books two and three go to quite different places (literally) from book one. 

 

Spoilers for both books follow.

 

Craving the expected passage of time through the change of seasons, Tara, the narrator seeks to create them for herself by traveling to various locations in Europe in a sequence that approximates the seasons she thinks should be happening at the time had time continued to progress normally. While I don't think I, personally, would have sought out winter (the first season Tara chases), this book captures much more what I imagined myself doing if I found myself in the circumstances when I read the first book. I thought, I would just go someplace. Start moving. Travel. I travel alone frequently and and I love meeting people on the way and making friendships that only last a day or a week. One thing I kept wondering as I read the first book was if I could do that forever – if that would be enough to stave off loneliness. (Another thing I thought, which has not been addressed in any of the first 3 books and seems unlikely to come up now, was that I would get a pet. You'd have to find one with the right temperament – i.e., a cat like my Little Hans, who loves everyone immediately – but I think that could go a long way when it comes to keeping company.) Anyway, travel seemed like the natural thing to do, and that is what Tara does for much of book two. But eventually she tires of traveling and attempting to recreate the seasons, and she settles down in Dusseldorf, where she begins to study – developing a somewhat bizarre obsession with the Romans and their contemporaries. 

Book 2 ends on a sort of cliffhanger, which becomes the arc of book 3: Tara (and we the readers) discover that she is not the only one stuck in this time loop. Oddly, I found parts of book 3 a bit of a slog. I say oddly, because the introduction of another character seems like it should make things more interesting. On some level it does, but a lot of exposition was required at the beginning, with Tara recording how her new companion spent his stuck time. This changed the quality of the narrative quite a bit compared to the earlier books. The "chapters" (days recorded by Tara) are much longer while we learn about how they met and catch up on the years' worth of days. But then book 3 took a few more twists and recaptured my interest. Now I'm stuck waiting until April when I can read book 4. 

Catching up on Fall Reading

Though it's true that I haven't been reading much these past several months, I have read some books. I'm neglecting this site more than I'm neglecting to read. So, to catch everyone up:

In October, I read Identitti by Mithu Sanyal for my Women in Translation book club. Truly, I have this book club to thank for keeping me reading at least a few books a year. I'm not quite sure what to say about Identitti, which is maybe why I never posted here after reading it. I found it jarring to read at first. It's hard to even explain what I mean by this, but I found the narrator to be somehow loud. The book is also full of social media posts, which I find unpleasant to encounter in book form. But the book ended up being more complex and nuanced than it seemed at first. 

Before I started Identitti, I had been reading (and really enjoying) All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski but somehow I never built up the necessary momentum on that (perhaps I will go back over the holiday break). Later I also started Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson after I found a copy on the sidewalk. I set them both aside to read Identitti, for which I had a deadline. Then one Saturday in November, I was out for a walk and I found a copy of Ancillary Justice in a little free library and I thought it might be fun to reread that, so I grabbed it and over the following 3 days I did read it again. And I loved it again. It's very refreshing to me these days to read something I know I will just tear through. 

After Ancillary Justice I didn't even attempt to read anything else. I was leaving a few days later for a weekend upstate with family and then a few days after that for a trip to Italy. I brought a copy of The Periodic Table (which I read more than 25 years ago and keep meaning to reread) with me to Italy but I never even opened it. 

Just before I left for Italy, I picked up the next book for my Women in Translation book club: On the Calculation of Volume I, by Solvej Balle. The day after I got back from my trip, I started it and I got about halfway through. I picked it up for a second time yesterday evening and finished it. I absolutely loved this book. The premise will be familiar to anyone who knows the movie Groundhog Day, but (no disrespect to the movie) this is no Groundhog Day. Stuck in a never-ending series of November 18ths, the narrator changes her approach to the day gradually in the book. She answers (though she cannot explain or account for) the troubling questions of reliving the same day, such as do the things you consume return to the world or disappear? 

The language in this book is so clear and precise and beautiful, the treatment of the situation so thought out and real. I kept thinking: this is not how I would behave in the circumstance, only to later conclude that, no, the narrator was right to behave this way and what I imagined myself doing would be a mistake. 

The "I" in the title of this book is there because there are, at present, 5 more volumes in the series (with another planned). I'm anxious to read the continuation. 

March Violets, by Philip Kerr

I was on some kind of a kick when I picked up Berlin Noir, though I don't remember now what it was. Had I decided I wanted to read more detective stories? Or was it connected to my interest in interwar Europe? The latter sounds more convincing to me, though for that I tend to go for primary source material, so maybe it was the former. In any case, at some point a few years ago I got this copy of Berlin Noir -- a collection of the first three Bernhard Gunther novels -- and then I shelved it and forgot about it. I remembered it because I am heading to Berlin for the first time at the end of this week. I could have read any number of books in my possession ahead of my trip (more Jenny Erpenbeck, for instance; Nabokov's writing about Berlin; or Joseph Roth's Hotel Years would be a good option), but I decided on this. I figured I could at least get through the first novel before I left, which I did. Having done so, I don't think I'm likely to read the others. It's not that March Violets was bad; it's just not really my thing. 

Bernhard Gunther, the narrator of March Voilets is so much the stereotype hard-boiled private detective that it comes up even in the book when he's brought in by a Gestapo agent who's a fan of American detective fiction. Gunther's tastes - cigarettes, alcohol, curvy women - are exactly what you expect if you've watched any film noir from the postwar era. At times it felt like parody to the point where it was almost distracting. With the central character (and frankly, many of the surrounding characters as well) so much a type, what becomes the distinguishing feature of March Violets is the setting. It essentially plays out the idea, what if you take a classic American noir detective story and drop it in 1936 Berlin. Add in the warring government forces to the usual list of suspects and this is where you end up. Of course the denouement of the story takes place in Dachau. 

I don't read detective stories often, but I do usually enjoy them when I do. And I did enjoy March Violets to a point. It was a bit too violent for my tastes (and not because of the Nazis surprisingly enough). I also found it ultimately unsatisfying, because of a major storyline that was left unresolved. I did wonder if I needed to read the subsequent book(s) to get the resolution I wanted, but I'm not sure it's worth my time.

Death at the Sign of the Rook, by Kate Atkinson

I didn't know Kate Atkinson had a new Jackson Brodie book out until I came across this copy at Housing Works. I bought it on the spot, of course. I wanted to start it right away, but I made myself finish Heart Lamp and Transit before diving in. 

Part of the reason I was so eager to read a new Kate Atkinson Jackson Brodie book was I (correctly) assumed it was the kind of book that would break through the reading slump I've been in for the last few years. I find Kate Atkinson is always reliable for an engaging read, and the Jackson Brodie novels offer the fun predictability I enjoy in mysteries (though I primarily consume them on TV). I've read all the previous Jackson Brodie books in order, but it's been over a span of years and I find my memory of them hazy. I barely remember a thing about the most recent one, Big Sky, but I see looking back now at my post about it that I had a similar challenge reading it, in that the recurring characters (apart from Jackson Brodie himself) were more faint memories. The main thing I remember about Big Sky is that it was grittier than what I had come to expect from the series (there are definitely some darker moments in the books, as I recall, but the overall mood of Big Sky, as I remember it, was unusually dark.) Death at the Sign of the Rook is not that. It is decidedly cozy, and full of call-outs to other cozy mysteries from a fictional peer of Agatha Christie to Grantchester and Midsomer Murders. It even opens at a murder mystery theme weekend at a country house, though (thankfully) it doesn't deliver the predicable outcome of that trope.

It occurs to me that maybe a way out of my reading slump would be to read more books like this, and this morning I found myself considering why I don't. My answer to this is not totally thought out, but I have the beginnings of one. I've been a lifelong devotee of fiction -- for most of my adult life I've read fiction almost exclusively. But over the past several years, I've found myself more and more drawn to nonfiction. Primarily to memoir, though I've read some more straightforward nonfiction as well. Even as I read fiction, I find myself looking for books that provide me with a deeper understanding of a place or a time. If I think about the best books I've read over the years, the ones that come to mind are books like Death and the Dervish, which introduced me to a history and culture of which I was only faintly aware. After reading Death and the Dervish as well as Bosnian Chronicle, I got copies of Misha Glenny's history of the Balkans and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, because I wanted to know everything about the region and its history. I haven't gotten around to either yet, but what I realize is that the books that I love are the books that make me want to know more. And sometimes they take me forever to read (I believe Death and the Dervish took two months and Bosnian Chronicle was a slog I recall), but they stay with me. When I am in a slump (which I have been since the middle of 2022 by my own assessment), I can read fast and fun books just as well as I did before, but they don't give me the drive make connections, learn more, and immerse myself -- in short, what I love about books.

Transit, by Anna Seghers

As I mentioned in my last post, I picked up Transit to read ahead of a trip I made to Provence in July. I spent a good while scanning my bookshelves for anything I might own that was about Provence. I didn't really know anything about Transit – I found my copy on the sidewalk in Brooklyn a few years ago and pretty much just grabbed it because of my general trust for NYRB classics. I'm not even sure what prompted me to pull it out in my search for a book about Provence, but when I saw it was set in WWII-era Marseille, I figured that was good enough. When I went on to read Anna Seghers' brief bio inside and saw that she left Marseille in 1940 on the same ship as Victor Serge, among others, I knew I had found the right book.

Transit is about the transient life in Marseille in the winter of 1940. As the only port in France still under the flag of France, Marseille was the stopping point for countless refugees from all over Europe looking for a passage out – to anywhere. The book's narrator has escaped a concentration camp and traveled through France mostly on foot as far as Marseille. There, he joins the throngs of people looking to leave, though he himself isn't certain of what he wants to do. Through a series of events, he is mistaken in Marseille for a respected German Jewish writer and he ends up falling in with the writer's wife, who is looking for her husband while also trying to flee. Transit is full of visits to packed bureaucratic offices and appointments with heartless officials who have the power (or are helpless) to determine your fate. the refugees help each other when they are in trouble or resent each other when they have fortune. The narrator runs into the same sad cases over and over in office after office and cafe after cafe. You get lost in the futility of it all.

I read some 60 pages the day I started Transit. It pulled me in immediately and I thought I might finish it before I left for France 5 days later. I got about halfway through before I left and while I did carry it with me to Paris and onward to Avignon, the Luberon region, and even a day trip to Marseille, I didn't get back to reading it until nearly a month after I got back home. When I lose momentum, it can be hard to get it back, but I did immediately take to Transit again when I went back to it. The fact that the bulk of the book could be described as repetitive made it easier to return. It almost didn't matter where I left off; the cycle of events in Transit could have continued on endlessly in my absence until I dropped in on them again. And yet, I really loved this book.

Heart Lamp, by Banu Mushtaq

After finishing A Gentleman in Moscow – ages ago now, it seems – I searched my bookshelves for something to read that might put me in the mindset for my then upcoming trip to Provence. I landed on Anna Seghers' Transit which I tore through at first, but then I lost all momentum when I actually left for my trip. I finally got back to it a couple weeks ago, but I wasn't able to finish it before I needed to start the next book for my Women in Translation book club. So last Friday, after I got the notification that my order of Heart Lamp had arrived at Greenlight Books (just in time – I was starting to get nervous), I went to pick it up and started it on the bus home. 

It had been a long time since I read a book of short stories, and I think it was a nice format for my current style of reading (i.e., barely reading at all). For the most part, I read each story in a single sitting, so there was nothing I had to remember or keep track of. 

While the stories in Heart Lamp are not interconnected in any formal way, they do all inhabit the same world. The stories feature well off families and poor, happy and unhappy, young and old. There is a lot of heartbreak in these stories, but some very funny parts too. Reading the stories as a whole they are greater than the sum of the parts. All together, they give you a colorful, beautiful, detailed picture of Muslim village life in the south of India.