Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature

Finished on: 12/31/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

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I enjoyed the hell out of this book. Incredibly well-researched and thorough, my attention was hooked immediately and easily sustained for 300+ pages. Winkler tackles perhaps one of the thorniest debates in literary history with deft intelligence and a dash of snark. This book is a fascinating dive into the history of “the authorship question,” following various historical threads that have formed the knots of scholarly debate, and laying it all out for readers to evaluate themselves. When I wasn't reading this book, I was thinking about it—to the point that I'm the owner of a new hyperfixation, because this book will be sending me down the rabbit hole of scholarship on this subject (I have already purchased one of the books cited in Winkler's text). The book strikes the perfect balance of giving readers plenty to sink their teeth into without completely overwhelming us in minutia. The structure, pacing, and organization of information are all fantastic.

The only reason this book isn't a five-star read for me? The final chapter is weak—probably the weakest of the whole book. I did not at all expect Winkler to provide answers to "the authorship question," or to share whichever candidate she most favors as the author (if any), but I did expect a little more reflection in the concluding chapter, some broader synthesis and consideration of the body of research Winkler conducted. What, now, is the significance of all this research for her? What's the impact? Has any of it changed her own relationship to Shakespeare, or to higher education and the academy, or to her confidence in how we preserve (and ignore, and shape, and rewrite) history? She touches on the latter two points through the book, but I suppose I expected more thorough reflection on them in the conclusion. Instead, we're given a rather odd anecdote of an interview that Winkler clearly found frustrating, and I'm left to wonder why it was included. Why was that the final scene of the book? Why did one scholar's (apparent) apathy on the authorship question merit the concluding scene of the book? I'm not sure the anecdote did merit the spot, which made the conclusion feel a bit hollow to me. Disappointing after such a wonderfully meaty book.

That being said: don't let a weak final chapter deter you from picking up this book. It's absolutely worth the read.

Orbital

Finished on: 12/18/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

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Samantha Harvey said in an interview that she wanted to write a "space pastoral," and Orbital is the fruit of that effort. I think Harvey not only succeeded in her goal, but also wrote a moving love letter to Earth and to humanity. 

 

The experience I had reading this novel was sort of like standing before a painting—maybe Pollock's Shimmering Substance, or van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhône—and falling into its colors, its shadings, its intimations of movement across the canvas. This novel revels in descriptive imagery, in capturing the light and colors and textures of a rotating Earth as seen from 250 miles above it. As part of her research, Harvey watched hours of NASA footage from the International Space Station, which is evident in how well she evokes the astronauts' view through the space station's windows. 

 

And while Orbital beautifully describes planetary movements and the shimmering spread of galaxies, I found myself most engaged by its tender attention to the human beings aboard the space station. The readers become privy to the ordinary habits, conversations, and inner thoughts of these six astronauts, and these passages were my favorites of the book. I love that Harvey honors the everyday human concerns—how do you sleep in space? eat? pee? work your muscles?—that shape daily experience (and thus our lives). I love how the astronaut's everyday concerns effortlessly flow into meditations on the nature of time, human ambition, and our place in the universe. 

 

Readers get to see the astronaut's complex feelings about being in space, how they both long for and dread returning home, how their vantage point from space has re-contextualized their understanding of their own lives on Earth. For instance, we see the Japanese astronaut, Chie, receive news that her mother passed away while Chie is in orbit. We see her struggle with grief that feels displaced—literally at a remove from its rightful place, there, down on Earth—and yet her attempts to situate her grief, to make sense of it, are so easily recognizable to any of us. The environment in which it occurs may feel alien, but that ancient human impulse is intimately familiar. The novel consistently threads this needle with other characters, too, and it's a joy to read. 

 

This is not a story-driven novel, nor is it even an especially character-driven novel (despite how good the character vignettes are): it's a novel about place. It's a novel about human belonging to Earth, and our simultaneous yearning to pass beyond Earth's boundaries. Its sustained attention to imagery asks us to do what great paintings also ask us to do: fall into the colors and lighting and textures and see where we land.

 

It feels appropriate to end on these passages from the novel: 

 

"When he's seen through a telescopic lens the flowlines made by ships pulling at the ocean, or the ancient shorelines of Bolivia's bright orange Laguna Colorada, or the red sulphur-stained tip of an erupting volcano, or the wind-cut folds of rock in the Kavir Desert, each sight has come to him as a winching open of the heart, a crack at a time. He'd not known how capacious it was, the heart. Nor how in love he could be with a ball of rock; it keeps him awake at night, the vitality of this love.

 

[...] So many astronauts and cosmonauts have passed through here, this orbiting laboratory, this science experiment in the carefully controlled nurturing of peace. It's going to end. And it will end through the restless spirit of endeavour that made it possible in the first place. Striking out, further and deeper. The moon, the moon. Mars, the moon. Further yet. A human being was not made to stand still."

Something in the Woods Loves You

Finished on: 12/10/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐  

 

                                         

 

On finishing this book, I initially wanted to rate it somewhere around 2 or 2.5 stars. After reflecting on it a bit longer, I've decided to bump it up to 3 stars for a couple reasons: I respect the ambition behind this book, and I admire Jarod Anderson's honesty and vulnerability in discussing a difficult subject. As a fellow sufferer of lifelong depression, I can imagine the courage it took to publicly share his experiences.  

 

So while the content of the book—its subjects and themes—has merit, its execution and presentation aren't doing it any favors.

 

Firstly, this book is marketed as literary memoir when, in fact, it reads much more like self-help. While there are certainly elements of memoir present—Anderson uses his lived experience as a prism through which to explore healing from depression—I'd argue the book devotes most of its pages to describing and extrapolating on therapeutic coping/healing tools. This makes it feel like reading self-help, which is exacerbated by some of Anderson's stylistic choices, such as directly addressing the reader and adopting a conspicuously motivational tone through much of the prose. 

 

I want to emphasize: there is nothing wrong with writing or reading self-help. But when a book presents as literary memoir (which is how the dust jacket and all the marketing materials describe it), and a reader expects literary memoir, it's jarring to pick up the book and find self-help instead. 

 

That’s not to say there’s no literary craft here. I underlined a handful of passages for their loveliness; some chapters make strong use of metaphor to explore their chosen subjects (“Morels,” “White Trillium,” and “Fieldmouse” stand out to me in this regard). Anderson's writing is strongest when he's sketching the outlines of metaphor and allowing the readers to fill in the rest. 

 

That being said, the structure and style of this book often undermine its strengths. The chapters are structured like blog posts rather than chapters in a narrative. Had I read these chapters in the form of blog posts, I'd likely be far less critical of the writing, because the aims of a blog post are different from the aims of literary narrative. Blog posts can afford to be more loosely structured, they are meant to be informal, and as such they are typically less concerned with concision of language. But chapters in a literary memoir? Cohesive narrative that relies on imagery and metaphor to drive meaning? That must be concerned with linguistic concision, it must strive for precision in imagery—and too many of these chapters fail to do that. They are too unfocused, too repetitive, and far too wordy.

 

It’s that repetition and wordiness that bothered me the most as I read through the book, because it feels like a symptom of the author’s distrust of his readers. Anderson is not confident that readers can parse his metaphors and imagery, so he follows them up with bald explication of their meaning. There's no room given for us to simply sit with the metaphor, to let it play in our imaginations and inform how we interpret the text. Instead, the author insists on explicitly stating what is already clearly communicated via imagery/metaphor, and it gets old fast. It's the irritation of hearing a hammer repeatedly bash the same nailhead. "Enough," I kept thinking, "I get it. I promise I get it. Can we move on now?" 

 

The central concepts of the book are also on repeat, continually repackaged and re-delivered to the reader. While I get that Anderson is trying to create touchstones that connect the chapters, the repetition becomes tedious. It feels like another form of authorial distrust: the reader can’t be trusted to remember and link themes/concepts between chapters, so those concepts must all be repeated ad nauseam. 

 

Ultimately, despite meditating on meaningful subjects, Anderson does not make the best use of his chosen genre, which creates a frustrating reading experience. If this book had been more memoir than self-help, and had the prose valued concision and trusted its readers, I would’ve enjoyed it more.

 

For anyone interested in reading literary memoir centered on the author's relationship to their environment, and which makes the most of the genre's strengths, I'd recommend:

 

• The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry by Joe Wilkins
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard 
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green
• Literally any of the nonfiction written by Barry Lopez or Wendell Berry, you can't go wrong

 
 (P.S. It's not the same without you, Starr, but I'm ready to carry on this little project of ours. Miss you, and thinking of you every time I finish a great book.)