Books I Read November 16th, 2025

I made bagels for the first time since I left the bakery…

And with those bagels, I made a monster BEC.

Also, read the following.

There are Doors by Gene Wolfe – A lovestruck everyman is pulled into a foreign dimension—sort of like if IQ84 didn't suck. This doesn't reach the heights of his sublime Peace but it's more coherent and human than most of his later works, while still being full of his usual odd asides and seemingly irrelevant details. Good or bad, no one wrote like Gene Wolfe—he was a genre unto himself.

Existential Psychotherapy by Irving Yalom – An (the?) attempt to utilize existential psychoanalysis as a practical guide towards therapy. Yalom is of the first generation of psychotherapists who didn't imagine they were creating a new religion of which they were the foremost prophet, and while this is more philosophical than, say, Martin Beck's book on depression some weeks back, it does a much better job of focusing on the practical application of existential ideals to human behavior. This is to say that there are tables and references to scientific studies and whatnot. I enjoyed it, as I have this entire foray into existential thought. Constant focus on my own lack of specialness and the inevitability of my demise has been very therapeutic. Still not really sure how it relates to say, schizophrenia, though.

The Skin Chairs by Barbara Comyns – An upper class family reduction to genteel poverty as observed by a precocious young girl. There's nothing in this story of arrogant relatives and unlikely characters that you won't have seen before, but it's nevertheless effective. I found myself emotionally engaged and Comyns is a subtle and excellent writer.

Autocorrect: Stories by Etgar Keret – More of Keret's uncanny humanistic shorts. These are more the dreams of a middle aged man than the quasi-erotic misadventures which characterize his earlier work, but they remain bright and funny and sad. I've said this before but I really always enjoy Keret, his style doesn't grow old to me and his hit rate is really impressive. Doesn't hurt that each story is such a light ask.

Of Dreams and Assasins by Malika Mokeddem – A motherless girl survives a youth in the choking patriarchy of post-colonial Algeria. Strange to think that the the defining post-imperial leftist revolt ended up in oppressive Islamofascism (do we still use that term, or did it go out with the Neo-cons? Remember when Neo-Cons were all we had to worry about?). This is sharp and sad and anger inducing.

The Amputated Memory by Werewere Liking – A girl survives a youth in the surreal patriarchy of pre-Colonial animist Cameroon. After last week's book I was expecting something a bit more conceptually complex, but what I got is a semi-autobiographical account of the author's (mostly horrifying) misadventures (Liking was married at 12 and pregnant at 13, but spent much of her later youth as a cabaret act) re-conceptualized as a feminist epic celebrating the lives of her beloved ancestors.

Blood Feast: The Complete Short Stories of Malika Moustadraf by Malika Moustadraf – Various parties attempt to survive the brutal patriarchy of urban Morocco. I swear this was not a deliberate theme on my part. Moustadraf was a rocket in Moroccan letters, writing a small handful of sharp, vulgar stories about outcast homosexuals and maltreated women before dying of kidney failure at 40. Disturbing and effective, it's a shame there aren't more of these.

The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue by John Allembah Azumah – Can I stop for a moment to give a shout-out to the Los Angeles public library system, without which I'd be an illiterate barbarian? I asked them to buy this book like nine months ago and then they went out and did it, which is pretty awesome. What a fabulous institution. Anyway, this is a brisk overview of the impact of Islam on sub-Saharan Africa, well-documented and humanistic.

The Madman and the Medusae by Tchicaya U-Tam'Si – The death of two men in wartime Congo as told in a polyphony of local voices. Expressionistic and odd, but I pretty much dug it.