Books I Read March 24th, 2026

I spent the weekend in the mountain and the desert, looking at bewildering species of plant growth and avoiding several basking snakes. I read relatively little.

Xala by Ousmane Sembene – A Senegalese plutocrat is cursed with impotence, finds his entire life collapsing in this satire of post-Colonial greed. I guess it was also a movie? It was effective, if maybe a little on the nose.

Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda – Short fiction.

Delicious Hunger by Hai Fan – Short stories by a guy who spent thirteen years fighting a Communist insurgency in the jungles of Malaysia. Which is obviously a fascinating premise, but I found these to be a little over optimistic, despite the subject matter, both in terms of there being a lot about losing limbs to land mines and also that the insurgency (as least as I can gather from the minimal role given to it in the West) fizzled out kind of pointlessly. Some lovely descriptions of the jungle, though, and fascinating insights into this peculiar lifestyle.

Self-Portrait in Green by Marie Ndiaye – An enigmatic narrator reflects on a live dotted by combative, intimate, re-ocurring relationships with a feminine archetype and her philandering, amoral father. Moody and dreamlike, an opaque narrative with subterranean rumblings of sex, women and hate. I liked it.