Books I Read June 22nd, 2025

Ashamed to be an American. Not that proud to be a Jew. I also didn't read as much as I might have. Alas, alack.

A New Name: Septology VI-VII by Jon Fosse – I don't have the energy for the joke where I write this in Fosse's single sentence style, which is maybe not that funny anymore anyway. The final volume of Fosse's epic depiction of an aging artist's final days in a small house on the Norwegian coast is, like the first two, ruminative and luminous. The prose replicates the intangible bleed of observation and memory which make up human thought, while the repetition and simple language turns the act of reading into a meditative, even prayerlike act. The best advertisement for Christianity since Marilynne Robinson, if I were Catholic I'd be ready to add it to the canon.

Seasons of Migrations to the North by Tayeb Salih – This remains a profound and beautiful novel, managing in less than two hundred pages to touch intimately on colonialism, tradition, lust and death. Line to line the language is beautiful, and the structure is complex and distinct but also captivating as a story. Reading it again after ten years I found myself coming to the end and still half-remembering it's final passages...

I choose life. I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the longest possible time, and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. I I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget.