On this day in history, 5 years and 2 platforms ago, a Book Report was born. As we know, I can’t think too much about this blog/newsletter, or that people I know and do not know read it (!), or about the passage of time. It’s too weird! But I do feel gratitude toward everyone who opens this email/reads each post, and toward original Friend of the Report, Julia, who encouraged me to start writing it so many years ago!

What I read in February:

Xochitl Gonzalez, Olga Dies Dreaming (2022)¹ —I nominated this novel for Book Club based on its description, its blurbs, and, most importantly, its setting (mostly NYC, but also some Puerto Rico), as the club’s annual retreat this year was in Puerto Rico. I went in with loose expectations, understanding that while the book might not be a rom com proper,² it was still essentially about a woman facing one of the genre’s characteristic challenges: how to lead a fulfilling and balanced life while pursuing an ambitious career. I knew there was romance, too, which is something I struggle to find interesting in fiction.

Well I read it all! It’s not short (complimentary)! I can’t say that I liked or didn’t like it. I found much to appreciate, including a thoroughly sound structure/effective use of flashbacks as well as the overall ability to bring real history into the novel without dissolving into didacticism—having several characters explicitly involved in a spectrum of political affinities and activities enabled the lessons to seem more organic to the narrative than something additional to it. By reading this profile of Bad Bunny before I was deep into Olga Dies Dreaming, I gained a sharper understanding about the history of Puerto Rico, specifically the history of how Puerto Rico’s history has been taught (or not taught!) to generations of people.

More than anything, reading Gonzalez’s novel made me feel a little sad and melancholy because it’s clearly from a time when the major publishing houses had just a hint of conscience about their role in shaping the book market, when they realized something they are already conveniently forgetting—that there’s so many stories to be told not from the perspective of the historically dominant authorship classes. In other words, I read with a sadness that even if this novel wasn’t the kind of story or the kind of framing that I tend to “love,” I’d rather read a book like this than any other book by a [REDACTED], and it really doesn’t seem like major publishers are so interested anymore in diversifying their catalogues.

IDK, the more I think about it the more I feel like, why shouldn’t I like Olga Dies Dreaming? It held my attention! It explores a lot of good questions about identity and purpose and place and it doesn’t feel like those recent movies that cheekily critique their capitalist cake and eat it, too, the ones that advance fully defanged critiques of capitalism, encouraging their consumers to smugly believe they’re above it all and not in any way complicit in anything that would make them “feel bad” if they thought for more than 2 seconds about it. No, it’s not a radical novel, but it is different enough for me to admire what it does within its genre. Good for Gonzalez for writing it and I’m glad I read it. Time for me to calm down by reading some Adorno and Horkheimer.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick: Or, the Whale (1851)—Nineteen years ago to the month (!), I first read Moby-Dick in an American Literature class, where it low-key changed my life. An insane claim, but true. To be fair, books were changing my life on a regular basis in those years, but Moby-Dick stood out among the others. I hadn’t yet even seen the ocean with my own eyes—like the “desperado from Buffalo,” Steelkilt, I was a “Lakeman, in the land-locked heart of our America, [who] had yet been nurtured by all those agrarian freebooting impressions popularly connected with the open ocean. For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,—Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,—possess and ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean’s noblest traits” (267)—but Melville’s writing was so powerful that it fully captivated me.

What so impressed me that I then spent the next nearly 20 years saying Moby-Dick was one of my top five, all-time favorite books? And would those elements still impress me this time around? I’ve lived a lot of life since undergrad and returning to this novel would mean learning just how much I have or haven’t changed since then.

I dove in.

It’s still amazing.

Melville—what a mind. He was a visionary. Perhaps other fiction from his time is just as preternaturally modern, and maybe there are a bunch of other writers whose style mirrors and predates Melville’s, but I feel like that’s not possible? I love his writing in Moby-Dick and elsewhere because even through all the infinity commas and the extravagant vocabulary, it still communicates so clearly in the present moment. IMPORTANT CAVEAT: if an old book has jokes that make me laugh, I’m virtually guaranteed to think it is a work of genius. And Melville’s got jokes. He’s got jokes and he’s got a deadly seriousness about the big questions of life and he also, of course, has respect for the ocean and its creatures (which, please don’t ask me how that can be true in a book about killing a whale).

I think in popular culture what filters through about this novel is the whale and Ahab’s singular drive for vengeance. For me, in college and now, Moby-Dick is about so much more than that. What I love about this novel is its narrator—Ishmael is easily one of the most singular fictional narrators in the western canon—and all the other characters. Melville built a whole world and the way he writes about that world is endlessly fascinating to me. Ishamel! Every time I’m on the beach I think of him: “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever” (4). In Puerto Rico, like him, I experienced “the serene weather of the tropics” that “to a dreamy meditative man . . . is delightful” (169). If the insights about humanity that Melville voices through Ishmael had been mediocre, this book would have been insufferable!

In a way, reading this book was my version of Ishmael on whale-watch at the masthead. When lost in its pages, as Ishmael is “lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves,” a “sublime uneventfulness invest[ed] in [me]” (169), helping me to travel to a time before I was born and also back to a time when the worst president of my life so far was in office and the future was looking bleak. Then, as now, I loved mentally living inside a fully formed world, a world that was so specific to a time and place but that still managed to contain people and systems that seem familiar today. What a gift!

What I’m looking forward to reading in March:

Ali Smith, Gliff (2025)

Natasha Brown, Universality (2025)

Alba De Céspedes, tr., Ann Goldstein, There’s No Turning Back (1938/2025)

Teffi, tr. Rose France and Elizabeth Chandler, Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me: The Best of Teffi (2016)³

1  Book Club selection for February.

2  In fact, it’s classified in the Library of Congress as “Domestic fiction,” which apparently means “Works of fiction that feature home and family life.”

3  Book Club selection for March.