September 2025 Book Report

A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K Le Guin ❊ Ruins - Amy Taylor ❊ Flesh - David Szalay ❊ The Wall - Marlen Haushofer

After not reading for most of the month, I finished the following four books in the last few weeks of September. There are many instructive posts on this website and others about “getting out of a reading slump,” to which I can add my advice:

1. Wait.

2. Read something fun but a little mediocre¹ that will make you appreciate what more considered writing is “doing” (to your brain and as a creative object).

Unfortunately, the most important step was the waiting part.

Any writing about people who read quite a lot² has the same conclusion: it’s a choice instead of doing something else. I read less than I could³ because I watch television, movies, listen to podcasts, use my phone too much, and have very little time alone. Also, I hope it goes without saying: the horrors of the world beyond the page. I doubt that any of that will change anytime soon. Why then take books so seriously, treat them with such reverence? If we ignore the vague promise of cultural cachet—no authority is going to anoint you for reading books; reading books is a small action with only personal moral outcome—the boring truth is that I like the way books tell stories more than any other form, and that’s what I reward in the subjective metric of worthiness that is this newsletter.

Once I got back to reading, the books were quite different from each other, and each of them reminded me of how a good book works. In this case, by “good” I mean a story that works uniquely as a book—in contrast with books that would work just as well as a movie or a TV show, books that are weaker on interiority, style, and construction. The books I finished in the last weeks all felt worth reading and worth saying something about.

• A children’s classic standing the test of time

• Beach-y psychological thriller

• Very contemporary minimalist novel

• A reissued 1960s classic

A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K Le Guin

Before venture capitalists circle-jerked us all into looking at eerily smooth AI art, Facebook had stickers. They were commissioned from a variety of artists and were kind of weird and delightful. One of them haunts my psyche to this day, from the set “Mr Baldy & Friends” this specific emotion:

This little guy is how I feel reading my fourth Le Guin novel of the year. Please note: I’m sorry to all the serious readers and true Ursula K Le Fans for starting this review off on this note. I’m a casual at best, but every book so far has left me feeling like Mr Baldy, teeth clenched, hand in the air, like, yeah that’s the stuff!!! Previously:

Stating the Obvious, Reading Ursula K Le Guin

May 2025 Book Report

A Wizard of Earthsea is Le Guin’s first young adult novel and is structured accordingly. Each chapter feels like a contained adventure, a step on the protagonist’s hero’s journey. It’s the structure you need when reading a story aloud to a child. I know this because I read this book aloud in its entirety to my housemate, Josie—a lovely way to pass a few September afternoons, two adults reading to each other. It also made me stumble over dozens of names. The worldbuilding in this book is very simple: endless place names mentioned off-handedly and never returned to again. Their governance or relationship to each other is less relevant than the fact that they all exist. Helpfully, the book has a map if you want to consult it, or you can do what I did and ignore them all.

The book is about Ged, introduced as one of the greatest voyagers, wizards, and heroes recorded in songs—but we’re here for a story before all of that, and his future epics are not the subject here.⁴ This is a bildungsroman, a prequel to that epic life, of a story that was never recorded. In what I’m increasingly learning to know as Le Guin’s deal, personal growth and spiritual education are not a matter of epic adventure against external morality, but about confronting and balancing the self. Le Guin gets a lot of credit for inventing the conceit of ‘magic school,’ where a young hero gets to learn magic and fight with an annoying rich kid. But she’s also ahead of the game on stories for children⁵ in which the lesson is about the impact of ego and personal consequence.

The grand adventure of this book is thus: Ged is a very special, powerful boy in a magical world where speaking the true name of something gives you power over it. Everyone tells Ged how notable he is; they celebrate him for it! And, accordingly, he believes them (why wouldn’t he?). That belief leads him to take shortcuts to power more than he is capable of understanding. He unleashes a Dark Shadow and must sacrifice and work hard before he learns to stop running from it, but run towards it. No great evil, no great violence.

At the end of the day, it is a novel written for children. It is told (by which I mean the structure, the concerns, and the tone) as a children’s book, but not written like one. Le Guin wrote this book because her publisher asked her to write a children’s book, and our girl sat down to teach the children about the perils of hubris. It’s not the wizard, it’s a wizard. The impression I was left with is that the moral choices of young people are a vital quest.

Reading it out loud allowed me to appreciate Le Guin’s style even more: she’s controlled and serious. It’s a book about arduous hard work, drawn out by Le Guin’s stylistic descriptions that bring every physical space or emotion alive through repetition: tight little lists (e.g., “Anger welled up in Ged’s heart, a hot rage of hate against all the cruel things that tricked him, trapped him, hunted him down”) that made it a delight to read to someone else.

It goes without saying that I recommend this book, all the more so if you can read it to someone.

Ruins - Amy Taylor

Probably the most frivolous book on this list, I picked up Ruins based on the promise from Sean Delone’s description of a well-executed literary thriller in the style of Patricia Highsmith. As Delone writes, it takes familiar elements—the distortion of a steamy vacation; psychosexual drama of a couple at crossroads—and does them very well, with an acute sense of pace. It’s the kind of book that could have a percussive beat playing in your mind as it hits each beat exactly on rhythm. There are beats you see coming down the line and appreciate when they land on queue.

Ruins tells the story of a couple on vacation. The cover shows a woman swimming, perhaps to sell to a beach-y audience, but the vast majority of the book takes place in the city of Athens as it slowly empties over the summer’s sweltering heat. Emma and Julian are on vacation after a miscarriage that has shifted their personal and professional ambitions. They’ve come to Athens because a friend has an empty apartment, and they hope that briefly living somewhere laden with history will help them escape from their own.

The story alternates first-person perspectives between the two halves of the couple, clarifying exactly how, when, and why they have failed to connect at home or abroad. The choice to tell both sides makes the conclusions obvious in a way only a novel can: we know their inner lives in exactly the way a couple attempting to rekindle their relationship avoids sharing with each other.

This is a great vacation read: soapy, quick, but with characterization that feels believable enough. I have some quibbles with some peripheral events—a bafflingly easy job offer, some background inconsistency—but the action and prose make up for those complaints.

Flesh - David Szalay

This book is going to be polarizing, though it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and I loved it. It is a rags-to-riches story of a man from Hungary who eventually moves to England. The prose and characterization are sparse: lots of dialogue and basic description. Each chapter reads almost like its own short story—the book places a blank page between every chapter, creating an effect like blinking into the next moment, using the book as an object to tell the story.

The power of this book is in the cumulative effect. The main character, István, is buoyed along by the plot—and lots of things happen in this book!—unchanging, just barely feeling, present in body though unclear if in mind as good and bad things happen fall to his feet. Occasionally (and extremely memorably), he acts out of pure impulse, something he himself cannot predict or understand. Otherwise, István is a rock. While they are very different in style, the book reminded me of Eva Baltasar’s Boulder as depictions of characters that are an immovable force around which the world bends.

István is living in an eternal present, a fleshly body. When he does reflect, he finds it hard to string together that the past is real, that the events of the past affect him at all. Some reviews have described the book as a reworking of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon through the 1975 Kubrick movie adaptation. I can’t directly compare it to either, but as a whole, the novel has a recognizably 19th-century novel’s moral and narrative arc: rising and falling action, subtle satire, and realist description.

The other selling feature of this book is that it is quick: hypnotic is a good adjective. It’s 350 pages, but many of those are long stretches of dialogue, with István saying little more than “Yeah,” or “Okay.” If you read for atmosphere or character development, I don’t think you will love this book—it is immersive because Szalay keeps the story moving and the tension mounting, but the world is one of surfaces that István never cracks. Near the end, reflecting on the age he was at the start of the novel, István thinks of adolescence, the age of “burgeoning physicality” as being when you first learn that “you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing.” The body, your flesh, is another surface. The soul is another question. It’s a book whose sparseness is open to interpretation, making it ripe for discussion.

The Wall - Marlen Haushofer (trans. Shaun Whiteside)

A pithy review to start: “Transcendentally boring. Five stars.”

Haushofer’s novel was first published in German in 1963, translated into English in 1994, and reissued by New Directions in 2022. It tells the story of a woman on vacation in the remote Alps, who wakes one morning to discover that an invisible, immovable wall has trapped her alone in a mountain valley. She has only the lush surroundings, the contents of a vacation home stocked in Cold War nuclear paranoia, as well as a cow, a dog, and a cat for company.

The jacket copy of my edition describes it as a “Cold War era dystopia.” Not to quibble with a stranger, but⁶ the book did not read as such. The hallmarks of Cold War fiction—paranoia, irony, and claustrophobia—are not here. It does feature that central Cold War fear: an all-encompassing, history-stopping event (the wall). But the narrator accepts her fate readily. The origin, meaning, and future of the wall are never analysed. The novel is a chapterless, dialogue-less account of the preceding two years. She alludes to things to come in the narrative (such as the fact that her beloved dog has died) quite early on. She knows and we know, that her resources are limited, both in what has been left to her and in her survivalist skills.

For me, the book felt like a project in exploring what enlightenment could look like. The unnamed character spends very little time mourning the lost world, and the majority of her emotional inner life is attuned to the animals in her care. If A Wizard of Earthsea depicts the necessity of hard work and self-acceptance, this book is truly about nothing else. There is neither god nor religious principles in the book, so it is not a religious book by any means; however, the only lingering markers of the human calendar are Christmas and some other Christian holidays, leading me to joke several times to friends that this was a book about the Protestant work ethic.

This book depicts my idea of hell: hard work and no one to complain about it with. But the narrator of The Wall doesn’t feel that way. She is not desperate to escape nor is she smothered by claustrophobia. The opposite, she is elevated and saved by the labour that sustains herself and the animals in her care. She develops a profound connection with the landscape and a spiritual kinship with her animals. It’s a feminist novel in that it subtly emphasizes the narrator’s innate call to care and maintenance over conquering and exploration. It’s 230 pages of her work and inner life, her growing only made possible through isolation from the rest of the world.

It is not challenging to read—the writing and translation are beautiful and precise—but it is slow going. The book is the daily pace of her life, walking, thinking, working, and admiring. Haushofer could not have imagined the world I’m reading this book in, where we’re melting the ice caps off the novel’s alpine peaks to write emails slightly faster, but its ethos was so strikingly relevant. The gentle undercurrent of philosophy: she will die, we will all die, regardless of the wall, regardless of her efforts. She is at peace with this and knows she will continue trying to stay alive as long as there are things to be loved left in the world. Her burden is to be the only thing alive that can understand meaning, that can pass judgment. Now that everything (capitalism, the expectations placed on women) has fallen away, she can finally be free.

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At the risk of overstaying my welcome: thank you as always for reading. I’m thankful to have read so many good books. It’s now October, which means it’s time for spooky, freaky stories—but as I said at the start, it’s very hard to plan for your attention span.

1. In my case, Freya Marske’s Swordcrossed. It is a romantasy novel about boys who fight and then have sex. I cannot think of very much to say about it, hence its lack of inclusion in this list—Marske is quite excellent at coming up with an interesting world, but her writing style and characters are all (intentionally) paint-by-numbers. This book in particular felt like wind-up dolls moving through their roles, telling us how they were feeling every few paragraphs so we don’t have to ask. To the point I make later in the post, it would work just as effectively in any other format. But! It’s readable within 48 hours to act as a kickstart to the reading engine.

2. Cf, this recent article in The Cut.

3. I’m aware that an average of four books a month is more than some, but whomst am I to stop the relentless pursuit of Doing More and Being Better.

4. Fittingly, we never get the songs either. I imagine we learn of his deeds in later books, but I have avoided learning too much so I can enjoy those books in the future.

5. An obvious exaggeration: Der Struwwelpeter and the Brother’s Grimm got here centuries earlier.

6. Title of my memoir