I am a huge fan of Ian McEwan, and have read most of his novels. While the quality is variable, it’s always high, and books like Atonement (a great movie as well), Amsterdam, and The Cement Garden are world class. I expect he’ll win the Nobel Prize for literature.
Now the NYT reviews McEwan’s latest book, What We Can Know (click on cover below to go to the Amazon page), with reviewer Dwight Garner calling it the “best book [McEwan] has written in ages.” The book comes out formally tomorrow, and here’s a bit of the review:
Ian McEwan’s new novel, “What We Can Know,” is brash and busy — it comes at you like a bowling ball headed for a twisting strike. It’s a piece of late-career showmanship (McEwan is 77) from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure I sometimes felt like laughing.
McEwan has put his thumb on the scale. This is melodramatic, storm-tossed stuff. There is murder, a near kidnapping, a child hideously dead of neglect, multiple revenge plots, buried treasure and literary arson. Writers treat other writers’ manuscripts and reputations the way Sherman treated Georgia. No one is a moral paragon.
Civilization as we know it ends. A pair of scholars in 2120, risking death from roving predatory gangs, travel across what’s left of England in search of a long-lost, epoch-making poem titled “A Corona for Vivien.” They are the last, it seems, historians alive.
This can sound like a bit much, and perhaps it is. But below and beyond these (mostly sly) surface machinations is a different sort of novel, a quite careful one. It’s about what biographers owe their subjects. It’s about the nature of history. It’s about letters, journals, emails and the other things we leave behind.
It’s about the talented wives of certain literary men and their bright resentments and wars against misfortune. It’s about affairs and empty wine bottles and quail with mushrooms and A.I. and animals and how the best poets read their work aloud. The small things scrape against the large. This other book is inky and thinky, as the poet Frederick Seidel said of the offices of Partisan Review.
Some aspects of “What We Can Know” will put readers in mind of McEwan’s early novels, which helped give him the nickname “Ian Macabre.” But the novel this most resembles, its historical sensibility, its metafictional touches and its jumping back and forth in time, is his stately 2001 classic, “Atonement.”
That’s good enough for me, and I’ve already ordered it from our library via interlibrary loan (I no longer buy books as my bookshelves are full to the extent that I must put new books horizontally atop the vertical ones).
I’m on a kick now reading Booker Prize winners, and in the last couple of weeks I’ve polished off two of them, both of which I recommend highly: Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (Booker winner in 1987), and Disgrace by John Coatzee (Booker winner in 1999). You won’t go wrong with either of these, though I suppose I’d give Lively’s book the edge.
When I run dry on novels to read, I go to lists of literary prizes, and I’ve found the Booker winners more reliable than Pulitzer fiction winners.
After these two, I have started a behemoth history book to read, one recommended by a friend: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by University of Chicago professor Ada Palmer. I’ve already read a wee bit, and believe me, I’ve never found a history book written in this style (informed but totally informal and lively, almost as if it were a text message). After a spate of novels, I decided I needed some nonfiction.
So that’s what I’ve read lately, and again I recommend the two novels I just finished.
Now it’s your turn. What have you read lately, and what can you recommend?
First? Weird.
The best book I’ve read recently is Andre Millard’s America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound (2005). Millard does an excellent job of tracing the development of recorded sound and, in particular, showing how the technical demands of music recording, movies, radio, and, eventually, television pushed developments that were leveraged by other media.
Another interesting one is David Monod’s Vaudeville and the Making of Modern Entertainment, 1890–1925 (2020). This is the first book I’ve read on vaudeville, so much of it was new to me. Monod seems to do a good job identifying what was new and innovative (yes, innovative) in vaudeville and in identifying “what killed vaudeville”.
I love Ian McEwan. “Enduring Love” is a favorite.
I’m currently rereading “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A Five-Hundred-Year History” by Kurt Andersen. Here’s a snippet from Amazon’s summary: “Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy ’60s, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our peculiar love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we’ve never fully acknowledged.”
As for fiction, I’m in the middle of “Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier. I bought the handsome Everyman’s Library hardcover edition. (I see “Best Novel of the Century” on the cover of one of the mass market editions. Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s really good—so far.)
The two you’re reading both sound like good ones. I put them both on hold at our local library. Thanks! I love it when Jerry asks this question, I always find titles I wouldn’t otherwise know about.
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. It’s her version of David Copperfield and I couldn’t put it down.
I enjoyed it, but for me, it was only 4 out of 5 stars. Going back to Dickens, I really liked Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein, which isn’t really a re-telling of Oliver Twist, but uses the characters to tell a story about Fagin and the London he lived in (Oliver gets a brief and unflattering cameo).
As for recent re-told classics, I really enjoyed James by Percival Everett, which puts Jim, not Huck Finn, at the center of the story.
And while I’m at it, I’ll suggest The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem, historical fiction about the young slave who discovered how to artificially fertilize Vanilla orchids. Includes a healthy dose of botany and some history of Reunion Island, then a French colony.
I finished Demon Copperhead recently and thought it was a terrific book; better than Poisonwood Bible, which itself was very good. At least 4.5 out of 5 stars.
I loved the book I just finished called The Places in Between.
A journalist goes on a walk through Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban.
He describes the people he meets and their struggles. Is quite a walk through very tough conditions. He meets dangerous conditions and makes it through the walk across Afghanistan with guards he doesn’t want with him but assigned to him. He is a Scottish journalist.
I also recommend the book James and John. The history of 2 homosexuals in the 1830s and their death sentences after being caught having an affair.
Their lives in British prisons and the hideous conditions under which they live is truly tragic. It was one of the last death sentences for homosexuality in England.
I second The Places In Between by Rory Stewart (former MP and Secretary of State for International Development (UK)). It’s been a while since I read it; but I found it excellent and very engaging.
I’ve had his book, “How not to be a politician” on my “for later” list for some time now. I’ve always liked that guy.
I may have mentioned this before, but I’m sure you would love Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob.
You guys give me an inferiority complex. I haven’t read much worthy literature the last couple years. Besides math and science, my reading these days has mostly been mediocre sci fi and zombie apocalypse novels.
I am not a fiction reader, but I can recommend a great nonfiction book I just finished. Though being a scientist, I still don’t understand how AI works. Well, this book helped a bit. Tae Kim’s The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant.
I would recommend MY books, which are sci-fi, fantasy, and/or horror, but I feel that would be awkwardly self-serving, and I have too much self-contempt.
I haven’t read much fiction recently, but as far as nonfiction goes, I have recently started, “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, about the still unappreciated dangers of super-intelligent artificial general intelligence. Eliezer is always great, and his coauthor is also very sharp.
I’ve also been rereading Jordan Ellenberg’s “How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking” which is wonderful, as is his subsequent book, “Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else”
Adding this to my TBR pile. Thanks!
A very good, but unfortunately little-known science fiction novel on the same theme is Fools’ Experiments by Edward M. Lerner (himself a computer scientist).
Tough Crowd by Graham Linehan, an Irish writer famous for the sitcoms, Father Ted and The IT Crowd, who currently resides and works in the US but was recently arrestested at Heathrow Airport for a comedic tweet. The book is nonfiction, a history of his rise and then the attack on his character and livelihood for saying that people can’t change sex and women’s rights and children’s safety should be protected.
Just finished Stoner by John Williams. Published in 1965, it is a short novel about a man who became an English literature professor in the early 1900s, and it is great.
I loved Stoner so I recently finished Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams. A rare literary western. Maybe Moby Dick as a bison hunt?
I try to have two books going at the same time, fiction for when I am looking for relaxation and entertainment, nonfiction when I am hoping to better understand scientific and/or political matters I care about. Before saying what I am reading now, I will mention two books that I recently read which blur the line between categories. Both are by Benjamin Labatut. When We Cease to Understand the World and The MANIAC. Pretty tough sledding with these! Still trying to decide what I think about this style of writing.
Presently I am reading Clown Town, the latest entry in Mick Herron’s Slough House series. I am a huge fan. For nonfiction I am almost through Thomas Chatterton Williams’ Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse. The summer of 2020, of course, and Williams deftly skewers a number of folks on both extremes of our polarized political landscape. What actually happened in Kenosha? Williams spells it out, and neither the wokesters not the MAGA crowd will be happy.
I’ve mainly been reading the manual for my new car. It’s like directions for the space shuttle. I’ve never owned either an electric car or an automatic gear one before, so it’s quite a learning curve. I’m getting there though.
As an ex-hoarder I’m also reading “Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding And The Meaning of Things”. It’s probably not much interest to most people here, but if you have a friend or a family member who is struggling with hoarding I highly recommend it. It will help you understand their issues and how to help them. The condition used to be lumped in with OCD, but it is now a separate mental health category by itself.
I’m still checking regularly to see whether V S Ramachandran has a new book out. He’s a neuroscientist who explains the brain in a way that even I can understand, but it has been over a decade since his last book.
I’ve been so busy that I’m falling behind in reading Jasper Fforde’s books. If you like innovative wordplay and bizarre scenarios I recommend his books to make you smile.
+1 to Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series (7 books). The only other book of his that I’ve read, Early Riser, was not very good.
I liked his Nursery Crime stuff too. I liked Shades of Gray, but I got cross when I finished it and realised it was only the first in a series. It didn’t say that on the cover!! I’ve been too annoyed to read the second one, although maybe I should read it as the third in the series is supposed to be published in 2028.
A book that I really like was recently mentioned favourably in comments here:
The Sotweed Factor by John Barth. In a similar vein, Fanny by Erica Jong purports to be the true story of Fanny Hill, less explicit than the original but very funny.
As for non-fiction, I am re-reading for the umpteenth time Dreams of a Final Theory by Steven Weinberg, a series of essays about the future of theoretical science, not entirely confined to physics.
Finished the Wolf Hall trilogy. Superb!
Besides the usual pile of science fiction and fantasy, I’m also reading my way through the Penguin English Monarchs. Nice, short (100-120 pages) overviews (as opposed to the Yale English Monarchs, in which each volume is a major, lengthy, scholarly biography). I’m up to Edward I. In general, I’m spending more and more time on Western history and culture, an obvious reaction to its denigration by the wokerati, but it is my culture and heritage, and I’m proud of it.
Re-read John Keegan’s magisterial “Face of Battle” prior to a trip to the battlefield of Waterloo. Written 50 years ago some parts are optimistically dated but the core of the book, a study of three English/British battles, Agincourt, Waterloo and the First Day of the Somme, is probably the most influential military history book of the last 50 years. Keegan switched the emphasis from a top down (culture, society, generals, politics) view to a bottom up one. What motivated soldiers to stand in line at Agincourt, in square at Waterloo or to go over-the-top on the Somme? What was the mechanisms of victory and defeat both psychological and physically ( and to some extent mathematical – esp line vs column at Waterloo)? It is important to note that Keegan isn’t writing a history of those battles ( the French and Germans are incidental ) but rather using the experiences of British soldiers to demonstrate what it would have been like to be in the firing line ( an inappropriate expression for Agincourt when gunpowder weapons, although present, were very incidental ) where the primary weapons were edged and arrows (Agincourt), black powder (Waterloo) or industrial (Somme).
I highly recommend the book.
These book reviews/recommendations are my favorite dispatches from WEIT.
My apologies if I am mentioning previously discussed books. I have recently read and enjoyed Lincoln in the Bardo, The Lincoln Highway, All the Light We Cannot See, and Long Island by Colm Toibin. I read Barkskins, which I found to be a slog but informative as to the history of logging and settlement in Northeastern North America. I am currently reading The British are Coming by Rick Atkinson, and the Confessions of Nat Turner.
“The British are Coming by Rick Atkinson” is superb. It took advantage of the newly opened George III archives. He paints vivid detail pictures of the events.
“THE FATE OF THE DAY: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, by Rick Atkinson” is the latest published of the trilogy and I can’t wait to read this.
I recently finished both, consecutively, and they are simply excellent. His third in the trilogy is coming out next year in time for the 250th celebration of 1776. It may reflect presentism, as I read a lot of history books, but these are two of the best. It’s clear to me that George Washington was the essential man, and the only one who could have preservered through all the hardships of that war.
I’ll put in a word of agreement for All the Light We Cannot See. I still think it’s the best work of fiction I’ve read in the last ten years.
I highly recommend the work of James Wade, a Texan author who writes in a fairly similar style to Cormac McCarthy: bleak and poetic, great characters. Currently reading his latest, Narrow The Road.
This was nice to come across.
Thank you for reading (and for the overly generous McCarthy comparison).
JW
Oh, and I’m currently reading The Seeds, a poetry collection from Cecily Parks. It’s delightful.
I’m currently bouncing between several books right now: “Essays After Eighty” by poet Donald Hall (now over 90), along with his “Selected Poems.” Plus “With Every Great Breath: New and Selected Essays” by nature and fiction writer Rick Bass. And “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life” by Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein. Aaand “Last Night’s Fun: In and Out of Time with Irish Music” by Ciaran Carson.” I currently have mixed opinions on the combined research/editorializing by Heying/Weinstein — I admit I’m only about 50% through — but highly recommend the rest if you’re into rough-and-tumble non-fiction.
I have a copy of Hall’s “Their Ancient Glittering Eyes” sitting on a shelf at the tip of my toes as I type. My wife and I are both fond of this type of literary reminiscence. Well, gossip! I have recently discovered William Stafford’s selected poems in “The Way It Is,” and I am not sure how it is that I never met him before.
I am also about a hundred pages into Christopher Lasch’s “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics” and am amazed at how contemporary it feels after 35 years. His opening follows: “The Current Mood. The premise underlying this investigation—that old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity either to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action—needs an introductory word of explanation.” Perhaps exhaustion is our fate.
And I am trying, really trying, to appreciate the early works of Dickens. It is a work of determination and sheer willpower. Love ain’t got nothing to do with it. The first four down and still slogging through Barnaby Rudge. I asked Grok when I can expect relief; it told me that “Martin Chuzzlewit” would grind me down further, but that the burden would then start to lift.
Hmm, I’ve read Dickens up to and including Bleak House, and found them all wonderful.
Recently enjoyed Mythos by Steven Fry.
Saturday by Ian McEwan I liked also.
Nonfiction: I recently finished Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults, about Israel and Hamas. It’s grim reading; he writes at length about what happened on October 7th.
Now I’m FINALLY reading Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, by the philosopher Kathleen Stock. I’ve only just finished the first chapter, “A Brief History of Gender Identity,” in which, with admirable objectivity and concision, she lays out the various definitions of the word “gender” and explains the history of the development of what she calls “gender identity theory.” Looking forward to her second chapter: “What is Sex?”
I’m also rereading Lionel Shriver’s Mania, a satire about Wokeism, set in an alternate recent past. In the book, something called the Mental Parity Movement catches on, which argues that it’s wrong to in any way discriminate based on intelligence. The idea is taken to its logical conclusions, legally and socially, with dire results.
You should try Shriver’s “We were the Mandibles” as well. It is a ‘better’ book than Mania even if Mania is so very relevant,
I love these kinds of discussions, thanks for this Jerry! (As I tell my wife: I get most of my book and movie recommendations from you and your readers.)
My recent reading:
Richard Evans’ history trilogy: The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. Superb, monumental. As I’ve said of it before, in his zeal for completeness, he occasionally strays into “Too many notes, Mozart” territory. But the books are wonderfully readable. If he can keep me interested in German politics from 1865 through 1918, over several hundred pages, he’s a good writer.
Mailman by Stephen Starring Grant. Charming and very interesting; highly recommended.
A Fast Bike to Byzantium: A Motorcycle Travel Adventure by Andy C Wareing. It’s OK, not that special. Not of the standard of Jupiter’s Travels or One-man Caravan which both get my highest recommendation.
I’d Know That Voice Anywhere: My Favorite NPR Commentaries by Frank Deford. I always enjoyed Deford’s sports commentary on NPR. Did not translate from radio to the printed page for me. Only got through about 5% of it.
The Ride of Her Life: The True Story of a Woman, Her Horse, and Their Last-Chance Journey Across America by Elizabeth Letts. Lived up to the hype pretty much. I enjoyed it.
Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe by Carl Zimmer. Hard for me to believe I’d feel this way about a Carl Zimmer book; but I found it kind of boring and only read about 40%.
I very recently re-read a good part of Sebastian Junger’s oeuvre: The Perfect Storm, Tribe, Freedom, and, probably my favorite of all his books: In My Time of Dying. All are excellent.
We had planned to take a driving trip back east right about now; but my knee injury stopped that. In preparation, I read The Lewis and Clark Journals (Abridged Edition): An American Epic of Discovery edited by Gary E. Moulton. This was excellent.
On the recommendation of a friend: Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs. Meh, just meh.
Source Code: My Beginnings by Bill Gates. I found this excellent and engaging.
Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island by Ben Aitken. Good idea, terrible book. (I’m a big Bill Bryson fan.)
Nice long list–thanks!
I’ve recently finished The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, a well deserved winner of the Booker Prize. A wonderful insight into the impact of the Sri Lankan conflict on the people. 5 out of 5. I read The Bone People many years ago as my 90 grandmother, a relative of the author, managed to get through it and found it a bit of a chore. Obviously too metaphorical for Grandma, she missed the references to child abuse. Maybe time for me to reread it and see if my views have changed.
I have also read nearly all of McEwan’s books – “The Innocent” is my favorite. The best book by far I have read in the last few years is the tetralogy “The Raj Quartet” by Paul Scott. It is a masterpiece, better than “War and Peace”.
Well, although I won’t make comparisons to “War and Peace”, I think The Raj Quartet (don’t forget the fifth book, “Staying On,” which won a Booker) is a masterpiece of our time. Fantastic, and wonderful plot and luscious prose. I’ve recommended it many times, but people are loath to take on five books. It is their loss.
Paul Theroux’ Burma Sahib, a fictionalized account of George Orwell’s early life in Burma, was very interesting. Not as caustic as Theroux’s usual novels perhaps, but thoroughly enjoyable.
I’m also a McEwan fan, and excited about his new book, which will be waiting for me when I come home from work tomorrow.
I’m making my way through The Iliad, Robert Fagles translation, to be followed by his translations of The Odyssey and The Aeneid. I’m reading another translated work, Alice nel Paese delle Meraviglie, in my self-guided Italian course.
Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey is a tour de force.
Defying Hitler, by Sebastian Haffner. Diary entries by an ‘Aryan’ youth living in Nazi Germany who somehow managed to resist the genocidal insanity.
Cassandra at the Wedding is a wonderful short novel written back in the 60s.
There’s one Pulitzer Prize winner that I can’t recommend highly enough: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
I also really enjoyed Middlesex and recommended it to all my friends who are “readers”. I’m beginning to wonder if I can still call myself a reader as I’ve had a hell of a time getting through books, lately. I’m considering taking a complete break from the internet to see if that is what’s impacted my ability to concentrate. I’m quite frustrated with myself about this.
Middlesex is fantastic, isn’t it! I read all of Eugenides books – they are all worth reading.
I have the same problem getting through books these days, it takes something truly fantastic. I started setting rules for myself, at 8 or 9 every evening no more internet and it’s book time. It works if the books are captivating enough. I believe it is partly due to the Internet partly due to there being so many books available and it is easy to get stuck with the ‘mehs’ and difficult to find the gems.
Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive
By Philipp Dettmer
is a cartoon overview of the immune system that makes a difficult subject accessable.
For Future: CRICK: A MIND IN MOTION by Cobb, Matthew
releases here 11/11/2025
Romancing Opiates by Theodore Dalrymple, tough love for addicts, recommended by Kevin D. Williamson at The Dispatch.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee! I loved it! and stayed up all night reading which very few books can make me do any longer. It is an epic saga about a Koren family in Japan. I learned so much and I cried so much. This book got my 15 year old son reading again! He couldn’t stop talking about it.
Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Fantastic, imaginative, sad.
Middlemarch – I never read it so I supposed I should. It is very long, beautifully written, clever. A less romantic, more serious and political Austen.
I too am a big fan of Ian McEwan’s. I pre-order any new McEwan book, and I’ve read just about all of his novels. His previous work, “Lessons”, did not grab me, and I was unable to finish it, but that experience did not deter me from ordering his latest, whose first pages are engrossing.
Richard Powers is another author who is very high on my list. Powers is scientifically literate, and his plots are often ingenious.