Books I Read February 8th, 2026

Gonna bring it together this week. Gonna push.

The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier – A hack composer ensconced in bobo Manhattan is drawn to the fecund wilds of South America, journeying up-country into the dawn of man. It reminded me of Henderson the Rain King and of Saul Bellow generally, a masculine, verbose and conspicuously brilliant narrator grappling with sex and art and various other vital forces which compose human existence. Actually, Bellow is an interesting comparison to a lot of early Spanish American magical realism, with his sex obsessed protagonists undergoing hyper-real torments. I digress. I actually tend not to love books written in this style these days, but this was very strong. Carpentier was brilliant and his knowledge far-reaching and idiosyncratic, and this is excellent if a little racist.

Murambi: The Book of Bones by Boubacar Boris Diop – An exile returns to post-genocide Rwanda.

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo – A girl grows up in a slum in Zimbabwe, emigrates to America.

A Different Bed Every Time by Jac Jemc – Experimental short fiction.

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis – The last sentient robot watches the human species decay into solitude and idle pleasure, until an unlikely pair of rebels re-discover the written word. Walter Tevis is criminally underrated, and this is everything you could want in this form of science fiction satire—prescient, insightful, engaging. A more optimistic A Brave New World, in terms of content and quality.

Memory of Departure by Abdulrazak Gurnah – A young man surmounts the decrepitude, moral squalor, and constant pedophilia of pre and post-colonial Zanzibar. There is a lot of stuff in this book which is genuinely distasteful – I really cannot overstate the prevalence of homosexual child rape, which seems to have been a real feature of Gurnah's childhood – to the point where I was almost ready to wave it off midway through. But from this horror Gurnah manages to craft something meaningfully life-affirming, no small feat.