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Read more: The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong | As one of the legions who fell hard for On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, I can’t believe I’m giving Vuong’s sophomore novel just three stars. I will have to let it sit and write more later. My expectations were so high, so the disappointing elements really knocked me for a loop. I could have handled some overwrought prose, but the scenes where the whole gang banded together to embark on a far-fetched quest were (dare I say?) cringe-worthy, calling Shaggy and friends to mind even before they all jumped in a van and, on the way out of town,…
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Read more: James
by Percival Everett | I had heard all the praise for James, but it took me a while to sink into it. Just a few pages in you learn that Jim and all the other slaves speak refined English when amongst themselves, but to stay out of trouble they affect “slave talk” when white folks are around. I get it, but it felt like an overwrought conceit, and it rubbed me the wrong way. But the story was a page turner, so I moved through the book quickly. The conceit stopped bothering me, even as the story swerved a little…
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Read more: The Sentence
by Louise Erdrich | Read: August 2025 (thank you, Nan!) Reviewed: I came to appreciate this novel gradually. I didn’t like the first chapter at all, so had to be won over. I’m a sucker for a good haunting, and this book has a decent one. It’s set during the pandemic and it was definitely interesting to look back from a few years down the road. (Side note: we saw Eddington — Ari Astor starring Joaquin Phoenix — while I was reading this, a very different story set during the pandemic!) There are definitely some good potential book club topics throughout, but the thing…
If I Had a Book Club 