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.

 

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."