Idk where the month went. I mean, I do, but it’s a boring reason and I won’t sully the virtual pages of this Report with the details.¹ I read A book, and YOU can read about my reading experience below.

What I read in September:

Helen Oyeyemi, A New New Me (2025)—The premise is classic Oyeyemi, exploring concepts of identity, relationships, and place as though in a funhouse mirror, distorted just enough to defamiliarize commonplace ideas that typically operate as the silent assumptions powering everyday life. In A New New Me, protagonist Kinga Sikora has outsourced different parts of her personality to a specific Kinga for each day of the week. Kinga-A, Kinga-B, Kinga-C, and so on, each is her own fully formed consciousness, who remembers only things that happen on the day she is the dominant consciousness, and who learns what she has done/where her body has gone on the other days of the week by reading journal entries left by the other Kingas.

I see how on its own, this conceit could not propel a full narrative. Or could it?? No, something else has to connect the different Kingas, and the something Oyeyemi has chosen is a mystery/thriller that begins when Kinga-A comes home from work on Monday to discover a man tied up in her pantry, left there by the Sunday Kinga, Kinga-G. Questions about who this man is, how he knows Kinga-G, and why he must hide out in the Kingas’ apartment for the upcoming week provide that larger structure for this novel’s extended meditation on identity.

Keep scrolling.

It is well documented in the archives of this book blog that I both love and often do not understand books by Helen Oyeyemi. This is still true, though I loved A New New Me a little less than her other novels.

There was a Memento-esque element to the narrative, which restarted with each day and each new Kinga catching up on the previous days while narrating her own day, that made it difficult to stay in the flow of the narrative. The different Kingas would also reference things and people and past events not mentioned by the others, and the volume of such references made it extra difficult to follow the two main threads of: there are 7 distinct personalities inhabiting the body of a character and these 7 personalities are pursuing a mystery that may or may not involve an international boundary–crossing crew of robbers who stuff people into suitcases and fill the extra space with human teeth and blank checks (I repeat: CLASSIC OYEYEMI). About midway through, it also emerges that maybe this different-Kinga-a-day setup is not as unanimously agreed to as it initially appeared, that maybe some of the Kingas are more in control than others and many of the Kingas have come to resent the arrangement. For me, personally, it felt like too much. My confusion more often outweighed my delight in Oyeyemi’s sentences. Did it help that I read this book 20 pages at a time across an entire calendar month? Probably not.

Well, they can’t all be winners!

What I’m looking forward to reading in October:

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

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817)³

??????? Scared to “commit” to more than the above because who knows what I’ll actually end up reading.

1  It was work, ok? WoRk. I worked a lot. 😑

2  I can’t even talk about how hard it was to go to the museum knowing The Clock (2010) wasn’t there anymore.

3  Book Club selection for October.