Absolute renaissance of a month for me in terms of number and quality of books read. If only I could always be browsing in British bookstores, taking trains and planes to exciting places, and putting in serious hours at beaches on islands in the Adriatic sea!

What I read in August:

Rachel Cusk, Transit (2016)—There’s a hypnotic quality to Cusk’s prose, likely something to do with the relative plotlessness of the narratives in the Outline trilogy and the straightforward approach (in the sense of: word choice and delivery, via conversations) to complex concepts. It makes for novels that pair very well with air travel and with the beach. So! Having finished her book set in the Mediterranean (Outline) ahead of the second leg of my trip, I naturally brought the one set in London (Transit) and the one set in an unnamed continental city² (Kudos) with me to Croatia.

Transit picks up the narrative thread from Outline, with its narrator-protagonist, Faye, moving into a more substantial yet still transitory³ phase of life following her divorce. Similar to how Outline syncs its temporal and physical setting (one week in Greece, teaching a writing workshop, while children and soon-to-be-ex-husband remain in the English countryside) to the liminal space of Faye’s fresh separation, Transit takes place over a longer period of time and in locations rich with personal + national history, showing Faye moving back to London, purchasing a home, and navigating parenthood, relationships, and career over several months.

Both the subject matter, parts of which are particularly designed to provoke further thinking (often about meta topics such as thinking and/or writing), and the portability of conversational scenes made this the perfect novel for me to read between dips in the Adriatic. Each time I reached a natural pausing point, I was also ready to cool off in the water. Bobbing around in the sea, I carried out my own conversation with the novel in my mind, contemplating just what Cusk was saying and working out where and why I agreed or disagreed with her.

I know for a fact that this reading experience primed me to be much more generous toward “Cuskie,” as the Waterstones cashier enthusiastically referred to her, than I might have otherwise been. Not unlike Lynn Steger Strong, Cusk makes bourgeois problems interesting enough for me to keep reading.

Rachel Cusk, Kudos (2018)—I learned, in reading the final book of the Outline trilogy under the same conditions I had read the middle book, that there are advantages and disadvantages to reading all three books in 9 days. Namely, I appreciated the ability to consider the books as parts of a set—surely my engagement with the books’ themes, some of which branch out into different questions and others of which are explored in greater depth across the trilogy, was focused in a way it could not have been had I been reading, for example, in real time as each book was published in 2014, 2016, and 2018. But being able to see everything so close together also meant that some of the magic wore off by this third installment because it was also easier to see the elements that felt stretched thin or at least the parts that felt, after so many returns, approaching exhaustion.

In Kudos, Faye is once again in an airplane, talking to a stranger (callback to Outline), en route to a multi-day literary event (this time, a conference). After landing, she’s still going, having conversations about “art . . . family . . . politics . . . love . . . sorrow and joy . . . justice and injustice.”⁴ The conversations about art and writing resonated most with me—the thinking about contemporary fiction and the people who write, sell, and read it reminded me of Sigrid Nunez’s more recent novels. I guess if the right woman is writing about it, I can’t get enough discourse about books these days.

What I liked most about Kudos is how several of its conversations stayed with me (are still with me!) after I finished reading. Not even whole conversations but specific moments that come back to me when I see something in New York that conjures observations made by Cusk’s characters—remarks about people who “accept the mystery of the roadworks as a way of avoiding asking themselves the bigger questions” (141), who “act . . . as though they are victims of fate, but in fact the[y are experiencing] events that could have been seen from a long way off and avoided” (167).

Despite my criticisms, I’m very glad to have read the Outline trilogy this month. Thanks to Friend of the Report, Adam, for periodically nudging me toward Cusk over the years, as well as to all the other Friends of the Report whose occasional positive mentions of Cusk did eventually sink into my brain :)

Asako Yuzuki, tr. Polly Barton, Butter (2017/2024)¹—Logically, the only place to go after 3 meditative narratives about gender, capitalism, writing, and the self, was to a meditative narrative about gender, capitalism, writing, and the self, but also with MURDER and set in JAPAN.

In truth I was excited to read Asako Yuzuki’s “international bestseller,” because it seemed like the perfect “beach read”—whateva that means—for me. Naturally, I read the majority of this book on airplanes and all over London. That I didn’t read a single page on the beach did not affect my enjoyment of this book.

I enjoyed it, but acknowledge that it may not be for everyone. No fewer than 3 different British women who had read or were in the process of reading Butter told me that it “goes on and on.” It is in fact a big dog, clocking in at 452 pages. And I do agree that the book could lose at least 100 pages and not suffer from the loss of those sentences. But! This is the rare novel whose bagginess I didn’t mind! I didn’t mind for two reasons:

1. I was curious enough to want to know where the narrative was going. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book like this one, which very much uses the premise of the “relationship” between a female journalist and a female serial killer as the basis for dramatizing evergreen issues related to gender and capitalism.

2. A lot of the novel’s “excess” constitutes food writing—in this story’s world, convicted murderer Manako Kajii has scandalized a nation for daring to express no shame about her body (not skinny) and her love of food. Kajii’s monologues about specific dishes plus the insights that journalist Rika Machida discovers as she reproduces Kajii’s recipes as part of her research process make for some genuinely mouth-watering reading!

In this novel, there aren’t groundbreaking revelations about what it means to be a woman in society, but Yuzuki does, imo, address an impressive range of perspectives without turning the book into a treatise or collection of research notes.

I think because I went into reading Butter without many expectations, I was able to enjoy the process of following a narrative that’s not as faithful as one might assume to the crime thriller genre!

Natalia Ginzburg, tr. Dick Davis, The City and the House (1984/2025)—By this point in The Report you may be wondering, “did she buy all these books on her trip? How did she get them home without paying a heavy luggage fee?” The answer is that I bought all of these books and more⁵ and it’s proprietary information how I got them home without paying an extra fee. As a wise book reporter once said, “it’s not shopping if it’s books.” And this was a book I simply would not have been able to purchase in America!⁶  

Ever since I first read Ginzburg in August 2022, I’ve wanted to read more Ginzburg. Perhaps ironically (given my above-detailed experience bingeing the Outline trilogy), I’ve also wanted to pace myself, spacing out my encounters so that I . . . have something to look forward to? or so that I don’t become tired of her books? Well, this month I was in the mood for Ginzburg’s last novel, which takes place in the mid-1980s and does not, therefore, focus on life under fascism.

As Natasha Brown notes in her introduction, a contemporary, realist epistolary novel set in the 1980s might have been something of a stretch for a reader’s imagination—it was an era of peak telephone and, despite the costs of calling, few people “in real life” would communicate seemingly so exclusively via letter as do the characters in The City and the House. I mention this not to be like “ummm, excuse me, this entire novel is way too unrealistic” but to express my admiration for Ginzburg. Honestly, if Brown hadn’t pointed it out, I don’t know that I would have noticed how odd it would have been to write so many letters at that time, that relative blip in history when telephone calls had displaced the letter’s centuries-long reign as the dominant mode of interpersonal communication but before the phone became an object largely for relaying text-based messages, whether SMS or emails, as the primary mode of “talking” to people.

With its epistolary structure, The City and the House returns to one of the genre’s earliest forms and reminds this reader how riveting it can be to learn about a social world and watch relationships evolve strictly through the letters characters write to and about each other. It is, to mix metaphors, not unlike being an unsavory switchboard operator tuning in to the latest neighborhood gossip. In the classic Ginzburg way, The City and the House is pure domestic drama, the minor and major events of the everyday that accumulate into a life. As Brown observes:

Ginzburg’s last novel is nearly 300 pages, but that number felt more like 100 in the sense that I couldn’t believe how quickly I read through the pages. Needless to say, I could have happily read at least 100 more if she had written them.

Marlen Haushofer, tr. Shaun Whiteside, The Wall (1963/2022)—I added this book I’d never heard of to my stack of purchases because when I picked it up from the display next to the register, the book man came alive with enthusiastic praise for it. He said it was incredible. I said I’d read and liked Ice (1967)—”by Kavan???” he screamed (inasmuch as a British bookseller can scream), nodding his head excitedly—and asked if I might therefore like this novel. Of course his answer was “yes.” Having now read The Wall, I am delighted to see that the book man and I were fully aligned. This book is nothing like Anna Kavan’s 1967 apocalyptic thriller, and YET! There’s an indescribable vibe shared between the two. I understand why the book man was so excited for me to read Haushofer’s “utopian and dystopian” tale of solitude.

A woman in the Alps for a weekend with her cousins finds herself suddenly alone, trapped behind a transparent wall that has appeared overnight and permanently stilled all life (including the woman’s cousins, who had gone to town for dinner) on the other side of it. The novel is narrated from the woman’s perspective, 2.5 years after the onset of the wall, as she writes the story of her survival on the pieces of paper she’s scavenged from her cousin’s hunting lodge and other huts and cabins within walking distance.

In one sense, The Wall is very much a book about writing, about who writes and why they write and for whom they write—Haushofer pursues this question by stripping away an audience (“I don’t expect these notebooks will ever be found” [1]), and both commercial and artistic ambition (“I must write if I am not to lose my reason . . . I’ve taken on this task to keep me from staring into the gloom and being frightened” [1]) from her protagonist-narrator. And it’s just really elegant how Haushofer builds a case for writing as an essential component for survival through the narration of a story about physical survival.

To make a patently unfair comparison, which only even occurs to me because I read the all of these books in the same month, The Wall is similar to the Outline trilogy, in that all 4 novels feature a middle-class woman writer who has experienced loss, and all of these books explicitly meditate on meta questions of writing and gender. But where Cusk’s protagonist experiences alienation and loneliness in bustling cities and from within the material comforts of her upper-middle-class world, Haushofer’s writer does so in the absence of other people and of things that would not have seemed like luxuries in her pre-wall life—matches, green beans, pens and paper, bandages.

This book is gripping. It’s Little House on the Prairie for grown-ups, minus the weird, imperialist trad life fantasy of the Ingallses, and plus extensive reflections on the relationship between humans and the environment, specifically how humans under capitalism exploited natural resources while alienating people from themselves, from their labor, from other people, and from animals. It is also just a story about a woman and the cows, the dog, and the cats who form her post-wall family. Not unlike Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (2018), The Wall explores the emotional highs and lows that come with loving a pet. Yes, this is a content warning that some of the animals die in this book!

If you can’t tell already, I loved this book. And even though I keep comparing it to other books—don’t even get me started on its spiritual connection to I Who Have Never Known Men (1995/2018)—The Wall is actually like nothing else I’ve ever read.

What I’m looking forward to reading in September:

Francisco Delgado, On Remembering My Friends, My First Job, and My Second-Favorite Weezer CD (2025)

Helen Oyeyemi, A New New Me (2025)

Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You (2025)

Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain (2024)⁸

1  Book Club selection for August

2  I guessed somewhere in Spain; the internet tells me it’s probably Lisbon.

3  See what I did there?

4  Per the back jacket description.

5  Three more, to be specific.

6  Ok, this edition, with this introduction by Natasha Brown.

7  Once again, I failed the “write a late-summer Book Report without mentioning that I went to the US Open” challenge.

8  Book Club selection for September.