Books I Read June 22nd, 2026

Right. It hasn't been a great few months for reading, I'm sorry to say. I did, however, make soap yesterday. Soap! Out of olive oil and lye! I'm really pretty pleased with that. Oh, I also have a book coming out next week – The Soft Touch if you're interested.

Riddley Walker by Russel Hoban – A Huck Finn analog journeys through a apocalyptic England, telling his story in a miraculous future cant. Reading it a second time I was struck once more by the genuinely unique language in which it's written. There's really nothing like it in any literature that I've experienced, a bizarre mash up of opaque metaphor and enough phonetic literalness to make Webster blush. But I was also struck by how odd it is conceptually. Although it presents itself initially as being a more or less straight genre novel told in a bizarre prose, it pretty quickly veers into the realm of allegory, a darkly beautiful discussion of humanity's inevitable instincts towards self-destruction, one in some small way mitigated by our heroism and kindness.

Second Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich – Reading it again I was struck by the sad parallels between the moral collapse of Alexivich's post-Soviet interview subjects and America's present. Though we haven't yet hit the economic nosedive which is sure to befall us in the probably not too distant future, and we'll never be capable of Russia's particular genius for alcoholism and dramatic passion, the collapse of moral confidence which has taken place in the West post-Trump and the increasing feeling that our society is nothing but an elaborate Ponzi-scheme reflect the same sense of anomie revealed in these pages. Anyway, still great.

Warlock by Oakey Hall – A fascinating meta-commentary on the Western as a genre and what it reveals about the American mindset and the savage contradictions within them which end in inevitable tragedy. Hall assembles a cast of Western archetypes drawn from across history and literature, then pits them against one another in cruel and violent affray which allows for no innocents (though a few monsters). There's quite a lot of speechifying, I will say, but this is a book which exists just to the side of reality, and the dialogue is both clever and effective. Yeah, I mean, great. If Lonesome Dove wasn't already the best western of all time, Oakey Hall might have claim to the title.