November 2025 Reading

I was going to write that I read shorter books after making my way through a couple of long ones, but then I realized that I finished DeWitt and Gridneff's Your Name Here this month. That book was both long and strange, and I liked it. It has thinly veiled alter egos for the authors, a novel within a novel, Arabic lessons, and a lot of images of Marcello Mastroianni. All of these are pluses for me. I have saved, but have not yet read, a profile/interview situation that DeWitt did with the New York Times in October, but then I saw a couple of weeks ago that she left a comment on the NYT website (!) expressing her disappointment with the piece and the fact that they didn't include Gridneff, her coauthor.

While I was reading that, I borrowed books from the library, which always gives me a sense of urgency to finish. My county's library is fine-free now, but I still feel a moral imperative to return my books on time.

I was regularly amazed by Tochi Onyebuchi's book of essays on his life as a lawyer, an internet night watchman of sorts, and a writer. I don't often love books of essays, since they quickly become formulaic, especially in a collection by one author. You start to see their habits and tricks, and I usually give up before I get to the last essay. Not with Onyebuchi. If anything, his trick in Racebook is to be both wildly intelligent and well-read while also being tech savvy and very into his fandoms. I would not go so far as to say his work is easy reading; the concepts he explores are deep and challenging, and he does not simplify his delivery or spoon feed the reader. He is clear and, sometimes, funny. But these are not particularly hilarious times we're living in, and the essays reflect that.

Carlo Rovelli was in an article I read in Quanta magazine, and I liked his style as a physicist, so I borrowed the audiobook of Helgoland because it was available. I don't really get quantum physics, but it turns out neither do most physicists. Luckily, they keep trying to get it and explain it, and I keep trying to get it and read about it. Rovelli was particularly good at explaining how the observer of a quantum state doesn't have to be a scientist, or even a being with eyeballs. It's about how everything in nature is in relation to everything else. Also, he makes a small, humane tweak to the Schroedinger's cat thought experiment. After listening to this, I bought a used copy of the hardback ... and three other used Rovelli books.

There is a woman in my neighborhood who has a sweatshirt that reads, in block letters, "I am Elena Ferrante." I told her how much I liked her shirt, and she said a surprising number of people assume that's her name and call her Elena whenever she wears that shirt. Ferrante was engaged to deliver a series of lectures on literature, so she wrote them and hired someone to read them for her in the lecture hall; In the Margins is the published form of those lectures. I currently have a rather intense relationship with Dante's Commedia, so I especially appreciated her final lecture on Dante and Beatrice.

I recently joined Perfectly Imperfect, where people just make recommendations to each other, everything from music to, like, being kind. One person recommended wrapping the string of the tea bag around the handle of the mug. I recently recommended chaider (1/2 apple juice, 1/2 chai concentrate from a box, microwave until hot). No ads. The often have well-known people make recommendations, and someone in a punk band said she devoured Flea's memoir Acid for the Children in the van on tour. That's a good enough recommendation for me to borrow it from the library. Flea turned out to be very into literature and, probably therefore, a better writer than you probably expect. He also did insane amounts of drugs when he was a kid.

The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes was probably the most normal book I read in November, and therefore the one I would most likely recommend to most people. It was a very funny book about middle-aged siblings dealing with aging British parents who insist on living in a dilapidated manse in the French countryside. Come for the inter-family shenanigans, stay for the llamas.

KHG’s latest translations, Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 1: Rebellion, Volume 2: Spectacle, and Volume 3: Luck, are available now. Volume 4: Payback will be published January 27, 2026.