everything i read jan-mar '25

13 books and a plethora of footnotes

Well, friends, I have once again been reading. This is a lengthy newsletter, probably best to read on the app or desktop, but hopefully you can find a book to add to your list from it. Comments are open, so feel free to share your opinions of the books mentioned, even if they’re different from mine! :)

I don’t usually set out reading goals at the beginning of the year, but this time around I think I asked myself to rely a bit less on my usual suspects—the Irish, American, English, and, to a lesser degree, Russian authors.

So far, I would call my efforts moderately successful. Which isn’t nothing.

I’ve also been trying to read more slowly, and to re-read books I enjoyed and/or found complex enough to warrant a second, third, fourth look. It’s been a really rewarding process, if you’ll allow me one (1) bit of earnestness, because I’ve found myself becoming more intentional about the books I choose to read. (I also knew I’d be moving in April, which made the accumulation of too many books a logistical annoyance.)

If you’re curious, here’s my 2024 master list:

every book i read in 2024

I’ll list the January-March books in the order I read them. There are quite a few, so I’ll try to be concise with my little thoughts.

Before we get started, though: as I was drafting this newsletter, I came across a beautiful essay, “The Joy of Translating is Gone,” by Yukiko Duke. From 1991 until her mother’s death in 2024, Duke and her mother formed part of a Japanese-Swedish translating duo. I’ve always been fascinated by translators, especially those who work in tandem—unless they’re, I don’t know, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, their mark on a novel flies mostly under the radar. Anyway, you should read the essay (itself translated by Ian Giles). The end of it made me tear up in a coffee shop.

My Canva adventures continue.

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Água Viva by Clarice Lispector (Spanish trans. by Elena Losada) (1973)

One day soon I’ll be brave and read her in the original Portuguese, but I didn’t want to make the experience of my first Lispector harder for myself, so I chose the Spanish translation. Close enough for now. This was the perfect book to start the new year with—it felt a little like a rebirth. Prose, yes, but not particularly obedient to its rules; there is little plot, no clear character development, just the barest hint of a linear narrative. I sometimes find novels like this tedious—I’m partial to at least an intimation of structure—but I was dazzled by the entirety of Água Viva.

Tu sueño imperios han sido by Alvaro Enrigue (2022)

You might be more familiar with the English title, You Dreamed of Empires, which is less convoluted and passive than the original Spanish.¹

Critics loved this speculative novel about Hernán Cortés’s arrival to Aztec ruler Moctezuma’s court, and I really wanted to love it, too. And I did enjoy some parts (it was at times very funny: almost every passage about the Spanish men’s impressions—and occasional jealousy—of Aztec clothing, for instance). But on the whole, it pains me to say that I found it a bit wearisome; the kind of novel that, yes, is technically very good, but is almost too preoccupied by being Interesting to fully draw me in. I don’t love it when a novel preens, maybe. I don’t know. My dad read it after me and he liked it much better than I did, so maybe this is a generational issue! If you’ve read it, let me know what you thought.

Speedboat by Renata Adler (1976)

What always arrests me when I finally read these girlies—Didion, Babitz, now Adler, I guess—who I’ve been hearing about for years from the Lit Crowd is how casually racist they seemed to be. No one warns you that there’ll inevitably come a page when your eyebrows lift approximately halfway to your hairline and you’re like … oh? And because they wrote in this nonchalant, this-is-what-is-happening-to-me-is-it-not-interesting-well-if-you-don’t-think-so-I-don’t-really-care-anyway-that-is-how-nonchalant-I-am style, we’re supposed to move on, I guess? Or not take it at face value? Is that why it’s rarely mentioned in people’s rush to laud The Lit Girlies? It’s interesting!

I didn’t hate the book, and some of the observations about life as a woman in New York did make me chuckle, but man.²

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (English trans. by Ros Schwartz) (1995)

Another one people have been raving about. I bought it in London in November and the bookseller nodded approvingly when she rang me up, which is always a high I carry with me for at least a day.

This is one that, were we facing an adjective shortage, I’d describe as harrowing. I felt lonely reading it, which makes sense given the novel tells the story of a girl, part of a group of 39 other women who’ve been imprisoned in a bunker for years without knowing why and who one day are suddenly—again without knowing why—able to escape.

There are books that keep you in a state of tension from the first page to the last. This, for me, was one such book. I never really expected the main character’s situation to improve by orders of magnitude, but witnessing someone learn to become a lonely person without realizing that’s what she is was more haunting than I’d expected. Beautiful story, though.

(P.S. If you’re interested in reading this one, I believe it’s

shit you should care about

’s book club pick of the month for April. It would be a good novel to read with a group, I think.)

The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center (2024)

You understand why after I Who Have Never Known Men I may have needed the balm of a sweet romance, and in my experience Center always delivers on those. The story of a down-on-her-luck writer who teams up with a famous Hollywood screenwriter to develop a rom-com together? I started it at approximately 2am when I couldn’t sleep one night and by the time the sun was coming up, I was turning the last page. A cute time!

Foster by Claire Keegan (2010)

Can you believe it took me almost a month into the new year to read an Irish book? They do say growth is non-linear.

I read most of this 90-page novella at a cafe that caters to 80-year-olds and me (they have vegan croquetas), so as I was reading the story of a child being the object of love and care for the first time in her young life at her foster home, I was surrounded by the throaty nicotine voices of elderly women meeting for mid-morning coffee and pastries. This is, to be clear, the environment I would prefer to always read in.

Keegan writes moments perfectly—she’s an expert in showing us how people relate to each other; how their comfort levels ebb and flow. Take this line, for instance:

We come home and take soup, dipping our bread, breaking it, slurping a little, now that we know each other.

(!!!) You can see it, can’t you?

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (2000)

In an effort to become more deliberate about my writing (typing that made me want to slap myself), I’ve been (1) reading more slowly and (2) reading what writers have to say about the practice. I’ve never actually read a Stephen King novel (I’m not much for horror), but a few of my writer friends have read and recommended On Writing, so I thought why not, and wouldn’t you know it: it helped. Nothing that shifted my world or anything, but I find the best advice to be the things you’ve always suspected to be true, said authoritatively by someone you don’t know.

Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse (English transl. by Damion Searls) (2000)

This was a novella about someone’s first and last days on earth—so about life. Its bookends. I’d never read anything from Fosse before, but there it was on a shelf with all the other Fitzcarraldo Editions volumes, and there’s something so sleek about the blue, isn’t there?

Fosse does not apparently believe in ending sentences before they’ve had a chance to go as far as they need—want—to go, and normally that would annoy me, even though I myself am quite partial to the run-on in my own writing, but it worked. See:

…. and suddenly he feels calmer, yes, almost happy, that’s how he feels all of a sudden, yes you can change just like that, can’t you, hard to believe…

I read most of this one at a cafe, my table just behind an old man who had his newspaper splayed out in front of him, and it added to the experience. I felt very peaceful reading it.

Greek Lessons by Han Kang (English trans. by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won) (2011)

You know how sometimes you finish a book and you just know you’ll never really be done with it? Greek Lessons was very much that for me: by the time I reached the thirtieth page, which is when I read the line below, I knew it would become a reference point for me.

Sometimes I put the question to myself using the form of Greek logic you so detested. When we take as true the premise that if something is lost, something else is gained, given that I lost you, what have I gained?

This was such a special read for me. There are books that I keep on my nightstand for weeks after I’ve finished them, wanting to re-read certain passages, dialogue I’ve underlined that I want to mull over. Again, this was very much that kind of novel for me. On February 19, I wrote in my planner: “Greek Lessons is transcendent???” I think I was mad I hadn’t read anything by Kang before.

El acontecimiento by Annie Ernaux (Spanish trans. by Mercedes and Berta Corral) (2000)

I read this one³ for a book club; I’ll have more to say on this, but I found the group’s preoccupation with the reliability of an autofiction/memoir narrator fascinating, mostly because I usually … do not care about it. Like, if a memoirist wants to fib a little to make their story better, they’ll hear no objections from me.

Anyway, this, the recounting of the narrator’s search for an abortion in the 70s, was my third read from Ernaux (after A Woman’s Story and A Man’s Place) and found her writing, again, ensnaring. How prose can be simultaneously light and blunt is beyond me, but she seems to manage it every time.

Aprendiendo a vivir by Clarice Lispector (Spanish trans. by Elena Losada) (2004)

I wrote about this a little back in my San Sebastian travel diary. The book is a collection of selected chronicles from Lispector’s weekly column for Brazil’s Jornal do Brasil, on subjects ranging from religion, to the beach, to talking on the phone.

As mentioned back in February, I bought this accidentally and I don’t really recommend reading it before reading more of Lispector’s works, but it did make me think a lot about the value of keeping a regular non-fiction practice outside of one’s fiction work (it is by the latter, after all, that Lispector is best known). More than that, it made me consider the value of regularly exposing your work to an audience without the safety of a fiction label. Which is essentially what we do here with our newsletter, no? More to come on this, I think. I’ve been turning it over for weeks.

Deep End by Ali Hazelwood (2025)

Listen, if there’s a new Hazelwood novel out, chances are I’ll be buying it sooner than you can say STEM Romance. Now, long-time readers will know that I was only a science girlie for two years in high school, when a combination of Grey’s Anatomy-induced psychosis and a truly batshit Chemistry teacher briefly made me believe I’d make a good doctor. (It should be noted, however, that I have never since replicated the power I felt operating a bunsen burner in second period … mixing my little substances … doing my little calculations … points were made!)

However, my abrupt departure from the sciences notwithstanding: I love a Hazelwood heroine. Are they all eerily similar, what with their smol, brainy, beautiful, but-how-could-male-love-interest-love-me, selves? Sure! Do I care? No! Deep End was on the smuttier side of things, and I, personally??? Had no complaints.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce⁴ (1916)

Only my second Irish read of the year, so I perhaps might let myself believe that my goals are slightly more than moderately successful.

This was technically a re-read because I read it for the first time as a college sophomore, but since, you know, who-was-she, I’m comfortable cataloguing this as a brand new-to-me novel. And I mean, the truth is, even if this weren’t a Joyce novel, naming one’s narrator Stephen Dedalus and having him wrestle with questions of faith, family, and art was pretty much always going to end up on a list of Clara’s Favorite Things. Add Walking Around™ to the agenda? While talking and squabbling with friends and frenemies alike? Well! Say no more! I’ll be there for as long as you’ll have me!

It is clear, based on the sheer amount of underlining I took upon myself, that I will continue to read A Portrait. Its treatment of sin alone—the knowledge that to sin is human and as such inevitable, and so it is our reactions to that inevitable sin that determine not only our lives but, more importantly, our willingness to live.⁵

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And that’s all! I am currently re-reading Macbeth which, lol. I ended up excluding a novel that I really didn’t enjoy from the above because I, quite frankly, felt mean, and as it’s a new novel from an author new to fiction and my issues were stylistic more than anything (re multivocal narratives—more often than not, I find them gimmicky) … I figured I’d leave it out, thus making me feel both silly and magnanimous.

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1. Someone on Instagram messaged me about the title’s translation back in January and I lost the message before I had a chance to respond. In case that person reads the newsletter: If the English title had followed the same structure, the translation would’ve been something like “Your dream has been empires” – the English translation took “dream” as a verb instead of a noun, which is the way it is used in the Spanish title. It doesn’t really matter, I guess, except that the original title makes it sound like “empires have been your dream” (if we play with the syntax) and there is something important about the unspoken definite article that is missing from the translation. The English title is fuzzier, less violent, almost. Anyway: The Spanish title comes from a line in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 1635 play La vida es sueño.

2. I have a confession to make and it is that I read this in large part because of last year’s LARB review of Honor Levy’s My First Book, in which Conor Truax wrote: “It could be said, then, that unlike those notoriously maligned for their failed efforts, Levy is something of a Renata Adler of looking at your phone a lot, or perhaps of doing ketamine off of it, an activity frequented by characters throughout the book.” I laughed with the rest of them at this line while having only the vaguest idea of what he may have meant by it. Happy to report that now that I’ve read Adler, I don’t understand it much better. Still a great line.

3. The Happening in English … I personally would’ve translated it as “Event” instead of “Happening” but that’s me! I am available for translation consults!

4. From Hazelwood to Joyce—containing multitudes is so important to me.

5. When, in chapter 4, the priest absolves Stephen and the latter feels, for the first time in months, the lightness of divine forgiveness:

So entire and unquestionable was this sense of the divine meaning in all nature granted to his soul that he could scarcely understand why it was in any way necessary that he should continue to live.

In other words: why risk a longer life if further sin is certain to come and wreak havoc upon the self? Why not die now that I am finally—and temporarily—free of the guilt of having misbehaved? Anyway. I’ll keep reading.