Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2026
A whole society narrated by the dead, sparing only the grandmother; better read slowly than straight through.
My friend Craig’s weekly advice never instructs: each piece tells the story that shows why.
A beautifully made book that left a sharper eye: good typography is invisible yet shapes everything.
Beauty lives in the gaps, exactly my taste; less a book to read than one to think with.
A perennialism that is not relativism; it found the part of me already drawn to Sufism.
Less SF than a treatise on alterity: the truly Other cannot be reached; no contact.
Clarke, Susanna. Piranesi. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
A humane, layered picture of a self that protects what it cannot bear to remember.
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2004.
A quiet masterclass in epistemological humility; to write like this would be to count a life a success.
Kingfisher, T. What Moves the Dead. Sworn Soldier, 1. New York: Nightfire, 2022.
Poe’s Usher as fungal possession, with detail so exact it makes the impossible feel alive.
Less a map than validation against my own year-and-a-half winter: someone else went through this.
Dawson, J. R. The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World. New York: Tor Books, 2025.
Eerie in Fisher’s sense; its teaching is to treasure the ephemeral, not fear death.
Knowing a person resists optimization; asking my father about guitar taught me more than years.