The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

Finished on: 8/10/2026

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

 

 

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Reading Wendell Berry's nonfiction these days feels like an antidote to a ubiquitous poison. Grounded, wise, and unflinchingly honest, Berry's voice is exactly what I need in this moment, even in the odd spot or two where I’m not in complete agreement with him. In the midst of our daily inundations of sales pitches, political propaganda, corporate shilling, big tech grifting, the whole loud apparatus of the capitalist system… in the middle of all that noise, hearing truth is a balm to mind and soul.

 

Given our current moment in history, it’s perhaps no surprise that I was particularly struck by how accurately Berry predicted the trajectory and ethos of the tech industry, long before the tech industry as we know it existed. I don't think Berry had "big tech" in mind at all: he was simply observing the realities and inevitable ends of America's large-scale, industrialized, exploitative economy. 

 

Yet it’s astonishing, the degree to which Berry's observations—mostly written in the 80s and mid 90s—ring true for the current rise of the Al industry. The two essays that stick out most to me in this regard are "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" and "Economy and Pleasure." In the latter essay, I found this passage especially noteworthy:

 

"Whatever 'new age' is at hand at the moment must be heralded in 'with a rush' because of the profits available to those who will rush it in. It seems that we have been reduced almost to a state of absolute economics, in which people and all other creatures and things may be considered purely as economic 'units,’ or integers of production, and in which a human being may be dealt with, as John Ruskin put it, 'merely as a covetous machine.' And the voices bitterest to hear are those saying that all this destructive work of mindless genius, money, and power is regrettable but cannot be helped."

 

That passage was written in 1988, yet I instantly felt its applicability to gen AI and its reckless development. Because while the tools may be new and “innovative,” the methods by which the tools are created and sold—the whole economic system in which they arise—remain the same: extractive, greedy, and ultimately destructive for both nature and human culture/community. 

 

Berry’s prescience about where we’re heading, and the fundamental changes we must make to course correct, make this a sobering but grounding (and, I think, ultimately hopeful) read.

 

 

 

Harriet Tubman: Live in Concert

 

Finished on: 6/20/2026

Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

 

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I really wanted to like this book more than I did. Its conceit sounds so cool (and to be clear, I still think the core idea shows creativity and potential), but packaged in the form of a novel, this falls flat for me.

 

This book desperately wants to be a stage play or a musical, but it consistently fails to take advantage of the novel as a medium. All the qualities that make the novel a desirable medium for a story—room to be expansive with plot elements, room to explore interior character voice, etc.—are underutilized here. The book brushes against interesting subjects (e.g. the creative process, the cultural legacy of pioneering historical figures, etc.) but doesn’t offer especially meaningful exploration of them. The strengths of the book are the energy of the dialogue and the small, tender moments and collaborations between characters... all of which would've shown to better advantage in a script.    

 

  

Orlando

 

Finished on: 6/10/2026

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

 

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This novel preoccupies itself with the tension that exists between the public self and the interior self, between what is perceptible and everything that lies underneath perception. In that vein, it’s very much a novel about social custom: how gender identity and expression are culturally understood and enforced, and how that does and does not shape our view of ourselves. The trappings of Orlando’s life change when their gender identity does—their modes of expression and of moving through the world materially change—but their fundamental, interior understanding of themself remains constant. 

 

This is also very much a novel about art, particularly literature. The story focuses as much on Orlando’s artistic, authorial pursuits as it does Orlando’s experience of gender. From beginning to end, Orlando engages with the world through literature—struggling to express truth within the limitations of language, wanting to contribute to the “cloud of witnesses” who came before, and being disillusioned by the experience of literary fame and success. I really enjoyed Woolf’s attention to the significance of language, its simultaneous power and impotence to reflect our experience of the world.

 

“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? […] What could have been more secret, she thought, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate […]?”

 

Despite how weighty all those subjects sound, this is a funny book. The narrative tone is satirical and wry, poking fun at the social norms it describes, and even poking gentle fun at the characters for taking themselves a little too seriously. (The way the narrator occasionally jabs at a young, painfully earnest and melodramatic Orlando struck me right through the heart, because oh boy was I the same way as a teenager.) I was surprised but delighted by this comedic tone—it very effectively demonstrates the absurdities of social custom, and it also felt like the author sharing a little joke with me.

 

Woolf’s descriptive language was my favorite part of the book. The first chapter, particularly the scene of the frozen-over Thames river, is a glorious example of her skill in this. These such passages kept me most engaged throughout the novel. That said, I think the first half of Orlando is significantly stronger than the latter half. There is a focus and a momentum to the first half of Orlando’s story that gets lost by the end. Orlando’s experiences—including significantly life-altering events like marriage and childbirth—get progressively more hazy, muddy, and disorienting. Time seems to collapse on itself, and Orlando’s interior world becomes the sole locus of action as the exterior world becomes more and more unknowable. Woolf did this intentionally—the subjectivity of time is certainly an intentional theme here—but I’m not certain this choice succeeds for me. It strips a lot of power from the very thing I most enjoyed about the novel: the rich descriptive language and stage-setting. 

 

Finally, I would be remiss not to mention: Woolf’s racism and the racism of her time/culture are very much on display in this novel. Black people are dehumanized and objectified, treated as the trophies of a white ruling class. And while yes, it’s important to place the novel within its historical context, it’s equally as important to honestly acknowledge the harm of these depictions and this language. If readers choose to engage with this text, it should be an informed choice: all who enter here should be prepared to encounter these upsetting, dehumanizing depictions.

Death Does Not End at the Sea

 

Finished on: 5/7/2026

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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In the titular poem of this collection, Adesina writes from the perspective of an imagined gravedigger: 

 

"Burial: byrgan from Old English meaning 'to conceal, to shelter.' / I shelter the dead. / Burial: bergan from Old Saxon meaning 'to hide, to protect.' / I protect the dead."

That’s one of the foremost preoccupations of this stunning, moving collection: protecting the memory of the dead, sheltering them inside us, and apprehending our own transience here, how we too will one day be a memory and a song. This attention to memory is both deeply personal (as seen in the poems about the loss of Adesina’s father) and also communal. It extends to figures like James Baldwin—whose ghost Adesina chases across multiple poems throughout the collection—it extends to the ancients who crafted our languages, it extends to migrants and displaced peoples throughout time, whose legacies have shaped our present lives. Adesina’s poems beautifully weave together the personal with the communal, the past and the present, grief and the joy of living. 

 

It feels right to end on this line from “Citizen”: 

 

It is not true that I praise the dead. I merely ask them to teach me their song. 

 

The Mourner's Bestiary

Finished on: 4/21/2026

 

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

 

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Caffall had an uncle who kept a photo album full of friends who had died from HIV/AIDS, which he referred to as his “book of the dead.”

 

I think, ultimately, that’s what The Mourner’s Bestiary is too: Caffall’s own book of the dead, a tribute to family—father, grandparents, uncles and aunts—who died from kidney disease, a tribute and meditation on what they suffered, and a kind of reckoning with everything she herself lost to genetic kidney disease. It’s a memoir about her life with the disease, but in so many ways it feels like a tender eulogy.

 

Caffall’s prose is skillful, peppered with lovely passages, and there’s a confidence to her voice that can only come from a seasoned writer. That said, I found the conceit of the book—the way it continually pairs Caffall’s experiences with phenomena in the natural world—to be a bit forced. About halfway through the book, I found myself almost bracing for the sections that would force a metaphorical meaning from a marine biology fact, or extrapolate on a connection until it felt so stretched it could snap. I’m not conceptually opposed to this kind of structural conceit—I’ve seen this done masterfully in books like Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass—but in The Mourner’s Bestiary it at times feels heavy-handed and clumsy rather than organically emerging from the events Caffall describes. I could feel Caffall pulling on the strings, so to speak, which took me out of the book sometimes. That’s why the 3.5 rating rather than a 4 or higher.

 

(Listen, I know all literature is artificial in the original sense of the word: it’s artifice, it’s craft, it’s in no way organic because it must necessarily be formed, structured, refined, etc. etc. It’s just that in my estimation, excellent writing makes you forget that reality—the artifice is so good you can mistake it for something naturally-occurring, y’know? My issue with The Mourner’s Bestiary is that I too often felt the artifice.) 

 

However, this book is definitely worth picking up if you’re interested in literary memoir, or reading firsthand accounts of life with chronic illness. Just prepare for some occasionally heavy-handed scaffolding around the lovelier parts.

Vigil

Finished on: 4/14/2026

 

Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

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I’ve been a fan of George Saunders’ work since I first read his short story collection, Tenth of December, back in 2016. (I’ve had it in my “Forever Favorites” list on various book-tracking apps ever since.) After it fundamentally changed my brain chemistry, I immediately sought out Saunders’ first short story collection, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, which then confirmed me as a true George Saunders fan. For the last decade, I’ve eagerly followed his career and read every book. His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, deserves every accolade it has received. I won’t even start discussing the masterful craft evident in his 2020 short story “Love Letter"—which in my opinion is his best work of short fiction to date—or we’ll be here all day. I’ve always loved Saunders’ skill in balancing humor with emotional poignancy, brutality with grace, the mundane with the surreal. His writing style is rife with "wit-to-power,"  as Dwight Garner puts it, but that wit has always been grounded in real heart: in an evident love and respect for humanity, for everything we are, despite a clear-sighted understanding of our capacity for harm. I’ve always come away from a piece of George Saunders fiction with a sort of grimly hopeful awe at the human capacity to change, to shift gears, to reorient ourselves towards something better. 

 

 

So as you might expect, I went into Saunders’ newest novel, Vigil, with eager anticipation. 

 

 

To be blunt: I felt let down. 

 

 

While Vigil still has whiffs of classic Saunders—the surreal premise, the borderline slapstick humor lightening otherwise morbid scenes, the attention to interior character voice—the story feels anemic, incomplete. It flirts with hefty subjects like greed, free will, and atonement, but it says nothing substantive about them. The conclusion of the novel, in particular, feels hollow to me, a hurried and muddy ending to a book with little direction.

 

 

Vigil is the story of K.J. Boone, a wealthy 87-year-old oil tycoon dying of cancer, who, upon the night of his death, is visited by a spirit (or angel, perhaps) named Jill "Doll” Blaine. Jill is our point-of-view character, our guide through the story just as she is Boone’s guide and “comfort” as he lay dying. The reader will not be surprised to learn that Boone is less than repentant for the harm he caused in life (an antithesis to Dickens’ Scrooge), and the entire novel is Jill grappling with this. 

 

 

But here’s my problem: Jill grapples to no purpose. Because while the story gestures at interesting themes around human selfishness and mortality, determinism and free will, they are ultimately empty gestures that lead nowhere. Jill begins the novel believing that circumstances shape (determine) who we are, and she still believes that by its ending. The novel begins with Jill attempting to comfort one dying life, and it ends the same way. There’s no movement toward any denouement, no sense of turning or of change. The story remains one flat line from start to finish. Even Boone’s eventual death—the only scene that arguably resembles a change or turning point—is narratively de-fanged, treated as meaningless, or at best impotent. The story ends in precisely the same place it began, and I was left with the feeling that this 175-page novel had nothing much to say. 

 

 

Where George Saunders’ older work has heart and movement, Vigil is a shrug, a half-finished gesture. I’d hoped for more from a writer who’s consistently shown better skill than this.

The Brothers Karamazov

 

Finished on: 3/29/2026 

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ 

 

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The Brothers Karamazov can arguably be summarized in this line from W. H. Auden's poem, "September 1, 1939":

 

"We must love one another or die."

 

The Brothers Karamazov—part murder mystery, part treatise on the crisis faced by the human soul under threat from "the scandal of evil"—is fundamentally a novel about what happens when people fail to love each other. It's about brotherly love in the broad, traditionally Christian sense of that term, embodied in the three Karamazov brothers. It's through the brothers that the novel's central preoccupation becomes clear: "What does the world look like when no one is his brother's keeper?" Over the course of the novel, we see this question play out in intricate detail in both the Karamazov family and also in the larger community of Skotoprigonyevsk. We see what Sharon Cohen calls the "breakdown in communal responsibility" ("Balaam's Ass," p. 2) towards vulnerable characters like Stinking Lizaveta and Smerdyakov, and Dostoevsky takes great pains to show the ripple effects of such communal breakdowns—or breakdowns in brotherly love. Those ripples ultimately create the central conflict of the novel, which leads to the ruin of two Karamazov brothers. The reader sees again and again the moral and spiritual wounds both sustained and inflicted by characters who refuse to be responsible for one another.

 

Dostoevsky makes clear his interest in human nature, on both the individual and communal level. None of the characters in this novel feel flat—they are all utterly, deeply human, and the reader becomes privy to their hopes, their temptations, their inconstancy, their fears, etc. They are complexly textured and layered, and Dostoevsky puts them through their paces. Michael Katz points out in the afterword of this edition that in Dostoevsky's Literary Notebook, in reference to Book Five of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky wrote, "And so I believe in Christ and confess Him not like some child; my hosanna has passed through a vast furnace of doubt." The characters in The Brothers Karamazov also pass through this furnace of doubt, and it's in the furnace that we meet them. 

 

It's the intimate, granular details of the characters and their relationships that fuel the novel's story. This makes for a slow pace as Dostoevsky establishes the intricacies of each character, and I'll admit to wondering—especially towards the middle of the novel—whether there'd be any "pay off" to all the detail, all the seemingly inconsequential conversations in parlors and village streets. I found the characters interesting, but hoped for more than a handful of interesting character sketches before the end of the novel. My attention and reading stamina occasionally flagged when I doubted the arrival of any pay off. But! The end of the novel (specifically, Book Eleven) delivers what I'd been hoping for, and in fact made me want to revisit all those small, granular moments again to better appreciate how seamlessly they built towards the denouement. Book Eleven, in my opinion, coalesces the individual character portraits into an artistic, masterful theme. The 600+ pages it took to get there felt worth it. 

 

All of which to say: I think this novel rewards the effort to read it, but go into it with the right expectations. It is slow, and meticulous, and fundamentally preoccupied with themes of depravity, redemption, and the absolute necessity of love.