What I Read October 2025

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I spent much of October being ill in the manner of a faintly tragic Victorian governess. Nothing grave, just an assortment of mortal inconveniences that showed my body is not so much a temple as it is a structurally unsound system of tubes and liquids, gross and fallible.

It should be noted that there is no angle from which this type of Camille-on-the-chaise illness is alluring. You cannot smoulder while blowing your nose.

By end of month, I expected some turn-of-the-century doctor with a pince-nez to prescribe a restorative stay by the sea. I would have gone. Gladly. I’d have even covered my pasty ankles for decency’s sake.

Still, between the tissues and the intermittent Byronic languor, I managed to read four books by people who are very good at doing the writing thing. (Also, SPOILER: Between illnesses, I GOT TO SEE COLSON WHITEHEAD LIVE! I’ll save that for another post when I have regained the ability to write about it in complete sentences that are more than “!!!!!!!!!!!”)

I haven’t written the individual reviews; those will eventually arrive (crosses fingers, appeals to the mercy of time gods). So for now, some thoughts on the books as a group. This is, by the way, not me asking the books to do group work. Group work is a scourge. I’m noticing what they did when they sat in the same room in my brain.

The books:

• The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
• A Stroke of the Pen by Terry Pratchett
• Missing a Beat by Seymour Krim

Wildly different in form and structure, but all perform the same literary judo: they force a reader to look at history, absurdity, brutality, and ego-masquerading-as-culture. Three of them probe indelicately at the grand American myth that everything is fine and glorious, which is to say, the bootstrapped bald eagle stories America tells about itself in order to sleep.

By far the most…important, I think I want to say…of these books (and the best, I definitely want to say) was The Underground Railroad. Whitehead refuses to euphemize our history and natures. Vonnegut satirizes. Pratchett pokes at our soft spots, and Krim interrogates his disappointments in some sort of New Journalism version of an Individual and Society 101 course.

All four share an obsession with the ideas of story-as-power and language never being neutral. Who gets to define things? Whose suffering counts? Who gets to say what happened? Whose foolishness becomes legend? Whose story gets believed?

Moreover, what do we gain and lose by accepting these myths?

Pratchett regards myth as something humans compulsively produce to keep us comforted in our belief that we’re terribly wise or terribly tragic or, at the very least, the Main Character. A sort of psychological bubble wrap. The other three books, though, scrutinize the rather large and rickety myth called America, one shaped by power, violence, and selective memory. Race is a central pressure point in those three books, and the authors address it with varying degrees of authority, clarity, and moral handholds.

Whitehead writes starkly about the historical and ongoing realities of systemic racism, refusing euphemism or safe distance. His work is both expansive and claustrophobic. Violence often arrives without warning, as it does in life. It is brutal and brilliant and essential reading.

Vonnegut has characters use racial slurs to expose and criticize racist American thinking, and it lands sharply. It was unpleasant. Intentionally so. Yet that intention does not make the experience easy. Also intentional. There is a lot to unwrap in this book about racism, free will, and people-as-machines.

In several essays in this collection, Krim writes about Black culture from the outside, with a mix of admiration, projection, and longing that reveal (and sometimes perhaps widen) the gaps in his understanding and the limits of his perspective.

So, yeah, if I’m slow on getting the reviews out, it’s because I don’t want to just toss off some half-baked take while my skull is hosting a demolition derby. These books deserve deep analysis. I want to show up for that like a person who still has a functioning cortex.

Both my health and this blog are back on track. *Looks at calendar, sees what’s advancing over the horizon at an impolite jog* Well. Right. Onward, then. Let’s just agree to continue to do our best with as much dignity as we can reasonably fake.