September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

To kick off our book club’s first week exploring The Stories We Carry in September, we’re reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

According to Storygraph, Station Eleven is for “a reader who appreciates stories that explore the enduring power of art and human connection even in the bleakest of circumstances.” Which is what makes it ideal for our first book this month. This novel not only touches on the stories and books that have changed us, but the stories that we can’t seem to let go of no matter what happens to us.

Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel explores the fragility of human civilization through the lens of a devastating pandemic known as the Georgia Flu, which eradicates most of the global population. Rather than focusing on the violent mechanics of societal collapse, however, the opening half of the novel weaves together two distinct eras connected to the heart attack famous actor Arthur Leander has during a production of King Lear in Toronto that occurs just hours before the world starts to unravel.

The novel then shifts between the chaotic final days of the old pre-pandemic world and the quiet, haunting reality of the new post-pandemic one twenty years later. At its core, the first half of the novel functions as a somewhat nostalgic examination of the literal and figurative ‘stories we carry’ via the art, pages, plays, music, memories, and fragile physical artifacts characters cling to for identity and ‘sufficient survival’ as modern society vanishes.

The primary vehicle for the stories the characters carry in the post-flu landscape in the novel is the Traveling Symphony, a nomadic troupe of musicians and actors who navigate the smaller outposts of the Great Lakes region. Performing classical music and staging Shakespearean plays, their caravans move under a guiding manifesto: “Because survival is insufficient.”

Through the character of Kirsten Raymonde, a young woman who was an eight-year-old child actress on stage with Arthur Leander when he died, the novel establishes that art and storytelling are vital necessities for keeping the human spirit alive. Also, by carrying centuries-old scripts into a world without electricity or internet, the Symphony ensures that survivors do not lose their connection to a collective human experience or their shared memories.

These shared narratives are also distilled into physical talismans that characters fiercely protect as they move through the ruins. Kirsten carries a rare, self-published comic book titled Dr. Eleven, given to her by Arthur just before the collapse. Created by Arthur’s first wife, Miranda Carroll, the comic tells the story of a lonely physicist living on a fading space station. For Kirsten, these fragile, illustrated pages are a vital anchor to the world before it collapsed, demonstrating how a single piece of storytelling can become a lifeline. Alongside a glass paperweight she also carries with her, these items represent the heavy weight of meaning and memory that survivors choose to transport across a broken landscape of time and place.

As the Traveling Symphony journeys between the smaller outposts of the Great Lakes region in the first half of the novel, their peaceful mission is abruptly shattered when they arrive in the town of St. Deborah by the Water. Here, they encounter the Prophet, a charismatic and menacing cult leader who rules the settlement through religious terror and demands total submission to his warped worldview. The narrative shifts at this point in the novel from a nostalgic study of survival into a tense psychological thriller as the Symphony flees the Prophet’s territory, only for members of the troupe to mysteriously vanish one by one from the dark roads. By introducing this looming threat, the first half of Station Eleven positions the Prophet and what he preaches and represents as a dangerous perversion of the stories they carry, setting up a high-stakes conflict over whether humanity’s future will be defined by the beauty of shared art or the violence of absolute control.

As we read Station Eleven, let’s ask ourselves what stories these characters carry with them, why, and how they influence what they do, as well as how they connect to the overarching plot of the novel.

Station Eleven Buddy Read

💭Initial Reflections on Station Eleven

This book starts with an unforgettable scene that left me hooked literally and metafictionally. And it’s been so easy to get absorbed in it, especially because it ticks a lot of boxes for what I typically enjoy reading. It includes a dystopian setting with a nostalgic bent, stories about stories, mysteries, danger, and a multi-character narrative structure with multiple timelines. Chances are also high that I will enjoy a novel that incorporates Shakespeare’s work into it, like this one does. Just as chances are high that I will enjoy a novel like this one that focuses on storytelling and its value to humans beyond the page.

So, no, it’s not too surprising that I’m enjoying this novel as much as I am, and that so many others have before me. What is surprising, or at least worth taking a moment to document and notice, however, are the various types of stories this novel includes, so that we can try to unpack some of them and the significance they bring to the overall work.

The first half of Station Eleven is constructed through the internal stories, texts, and cultural references that its characters preserve and engage with. Rather than focusing on a singular, chronological plotline, the novel introduces a variety of fictional and historical storytelling mediums, each serving a specific structural and thematic purpose. Collectively, these micro-narratives illustrate how human beings depend on structured and unstructured storytelling to survive all sorts of trauma, archive the memory of a dying world, and establish a common language for a fragile new civilization. And in doing so, Mandel highlights the profound weight of the stories we carry, illustrating that it is often the specific texts and books and stories that changed us in our formative years that dictate who we become after everything else is stripped away.

The grandest of these internal narratives belongs to the theatrical works of William Shakespeare, specifically his tragedy King Lear. The novel opens in Toronto with a pre-collapse production of the play where the legendary actor Arthur Leander suffers a fatal heart attack on stage, mirroring the imminent collapse of the modern world. Twenty years later, the plays of Shakespeare become the primary repertoire for the Traveling Symphony, a nomadic troupe of actors and musicians who navigate the ruins of the Great Lakes region. Staging centuries-old scripts in settlements without electricity or technology serves a vital societal function and even mirrors Shakespearean times in a lot of ways. By performing stories about timeless human conflicts that focus on grief, betrayal, madness, reconciliation, etc. the troupe ensures that the post-apocalyptic world does not lose touch with a broader, ancestral understanding of human emotion and history, carrying forward a dramatic heritage that shapes the moral compass of a new generation by linking it to the older ones via storytelling.

Dr. Eleven, a rare, self-published comic book project created by Arthur’s first wife, Miranda Carroll, also makes its appearance in the first half of the novel. Telling the story of a melancholic physicist stranded on a fading space station, this fictional graphic novel acts as a vital psychological refuge for an adult Kirsten Raymonde, who carries a copy with her through the apocalypse. The comic serves a distinct narrative purpose from the shared public space of Shakespeare, however, as it represents the deeply intimate, personal stories that individuals use to process private grief, especially for its author. For Kirsten, the comic’s stylized pages are also the ultimate example of a book that changed her, serving as an emotional anchor to her lost childhood and fading memories. Her relationship with the comic illustrates how a piece of pure imagination can transform into a literal lifeline when reality becomes too devastating to bear, highlighting how deeply a single book can alter a person’s psychological survival. At the same time, it mimics the real post-apocalyptic world she is literally trying to navigate and functions as a roadmap in a lot of ways.

In stark contrast to the noble preservation of theater and fiction, the novel introduces Dear V., a scandalous book compiling the private letters written by Arthur Leander to his childhood friend, Victoria. Published shortly before the pandemic hit, these letters expose intimate details about Arthur’s infidelities, failed marriages, and desperate reflections on his fading youth, which Kirsten’s mother forbade her to read. This internal story represents the complicated, often messy nature of modern historical archives. For survivors like Kirsten, who eventually finds a copy of the text in an abandoned house, Dear V. is not a piece of gossip, but a vital historical artifact that contextualizes the mysterious man she once knew when she was a child. And the text alters her understanding of the past, underscoring the idea that written testimonies carry a transformative power, turning private human flaws into permanent narratives that change how survivors view the world before it collapsed.

The thematic archive expands further through the transcripts of the interviews Kirsten gives to François Diallo, the librarian and publisher of the New Petoskey News. Woven into the text as an ongoing, written interview fifteen years post-collapse, this narrative layer acts as a more formal record of memory and trauma. Through Kirsten’s stark, fragmented recollections of her earliest years on the road, the interview represents the deliberate, often painful act of turning personal trauma into historical memory. Diallo’s project shows that journalism and oral history remain vital tools in the new world, providing survivors with an opportunity to externalize their inner grief, while preserving history. These recorded interviews become the new books of the post-flu era, stories deliberately carried and cataloged to fundamentally change how future generations will look back at the collapse.

The preservation of the ‘Before’ world’s printed ephemera manifests with poignant specificity through the character of August, the Symphony’s second violinist, who holds fragments of poetry alongside a profound obsession with old TV Guide magazines. In the abandoned houses he and Kirsten scavenge, August often ignores practical survival gear to seek out mid-1990s television listings, memorizing the synopses of forgotten sitcoms, celebrity gossip columns, and broadcast schedules for shows he will never see again. This pairing of ‘high art’ and mass-media trivia throughout the novel serves an essential narrative purpose. While the poetry August writes and the Shakespearean works he knows allow him to articulate the transcendent beauty and grief of his current existence, his fixation on the TV Guide represents an archive of the mundane, everyday infrastructure of human connection and stories we all seek. For August, these once-disposable texts are almost like sacred relics, and serve as small, printed monuments to a complex, hyper-connected world where millions of strangers once watched the exact same stories at the exact same hour, highlighting how even the most ordinary publications carry the profound weight of a lost collective human identity based on storytelling.

Finally, the cultural fabric of the novel is further anchored by real-world pop culture references, most notably the Star Trek: Voyager quote that serves as the Symphony’s guiding manifesto, “Because survival is insufficient.” This line, alongside instances where troupe members discuss the show’s plot and cultural significance, establishes a bridge between ‘high art’ and popular media. The references also serve an essential narrative purpose by asserting that all forms of storytelling possess equal power to sustain the human spirit. By adopting a line from a science-fiction television show as their core philosophy, the Symphony proves that the stories we choose to carry forward do not need to be ‘high art’ or Classic literature to be profound, but can also be those fragments of popular human storytelling that resonated with us or permanently changed our worldview, reminding us that human beings require beauty, curiosity, and common connection and purpose beyond a mere intellectual or base animal existence.

Ultimately, the first half of Station Eleven stands as a testament to the enduring legacy of the written and spoken word in all its storytelling forms. And establishes that when global systems fail, the physical artifacts that survive are far less valuable than the narrative templates and stories left behind in our minds and hearts. Whether through a centuries-old play, a niche graphic novel, interviews based on memories, books based on private letters, an old television schedule, or a line of dialogue from a television show, the novel demonstrates that we are entirely defined by the stories that we refuse to leave behind because the books and stories that changed us in the old world become the blueprint for building the new one, proving that the stories we carry are not merely a reflection of life but the very vessel through which humanity preserves its common purpose and identity, even its soul.

As I read, I keep asking myself questions like:

• How do our memories affect the stories we carry, and vice versa?

• What are some of the stories I would carry into a post-apocalyptic world?

• What is the second half of the novel going to reveal about the essence of storytelling, now that troupe members are going missing?

• What does this novel ultimately say about how we tell and preserve history, as well as why we do it?

• What stories that were once deemed as insignificant in the past are lauded as ‘high art’ now, and how does the novel help us confront this question in a deeper way?

Stay tuned for Friday’s post, which will include additional thoughts on this week’s book club pick, and notes on some of the literary components and elements that make up the books that have changed us.

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Favorite Quotes and Passages from the First Half of the Novel

“He was thinking about the way the dropped curtain closed off the fourth wall and turned the stage into a room, albeit a room with cavernous space instead of a ceiling, fathoms of catwalks and lights between which a soul might slip undetected… Not quite a room… It was more like a terminal, he thought, a train station or an airport, everyone passing quickly through” (p.5)

“Jeevan’s understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he’d seen a lot of action movies.” (p. 21)

✨An Incomplete List of all the things we probably take for granted in a non-apocalyptic world on pages 31-32

“They’d performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.” (p.38)

“She never feels more alive than at these moments. When on stage she fears nothing.” (p.57)

“Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape. And now in a twilight once more lit by candles, the age of electricity having come and gone, Titania turns to face her fairy king.” (p.57)

✨When Miranda discusses why she works on the comics, not caring whether others see or understand her art or not on page 95

“There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyone would find it easier to sleep that night. At other times it seemed a difficult and dangerous way to survive and hardly worth it, especially at times when they had to camp between towns, when they were turned away at gunpoint from hostile places, when they were traveling in snow or rain through dangerous territory, actors and musicians carrying guns and crossbows, the horses exhaling great clouds of steam, times when they were cold and afraid and their feet were wet.” (p.119)

🗣️Book Discussion Questions

1. Why does the novel value everyday items like TV Guide magazines just as much as Shakespeare’s plays?

2. How does memorizing a book completely change its value to a survivor like Kirsten?

3. What is the difference between the stories we share publicly and the stories we keep hidden in secret?

4. How does the Prophet use stories differently than the Traveling Symphony does?

5. Why are physical artifacts like letters or comic books so dangerous or powerful in a lawless world?

6. If you could only save two books or pieces of media before civilization collapsed, what would they be?

👇 Drop your thoughts, reading progress updates, and favorite quotes from the book below! Or join our Buddy Read in Storygraph to share your thoughts there based on where you are in the book. I can’t wait to see what everyone thinks of this book so far! 👇

Station Eleven Buddy Read

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📝 Bonus Writing Prompts for Drafts

This is for the active writers, journalers, and literary artists in our community. If this book has your creative wheels spinning, consider completing one or both of these writing prompts.

Creative Prompt

Imagine you are a scavenger twenty years after a global collapse. You break into a preserved suburban home and discover a single piece of printed ephemera from the world before the collapse, such as a weathered restaurant menu, a handwritten letter, a teenager’s diary, or a niche magazine. Write a short scene from your character’s first-person perspective as they encounter this object. Focus on how your character interprets the ordinary, everyday stories trapped within and associated with the artifact, then write about why they decide to slip it into their pack and carry it with them.

Reflective Journaling Prompt

In Station Eleven, Kirsten and August survive the psychological trauma of a lost world by anchoring their identities to the specific texts, comics, and poetry that permanently changed them. Strip away the modern technology, digital libraries, and global digital infrastructure around you. Take a few moments to reflect deeply on your own life and ask yourself: “What are the literal stories I carry in my mind?” Then write a journal entry identifying the specific books, lines of poetry, or pieces of media that fundamentally altered your worldview, or those stories that will always be with you. Consider: How have these texts shaped your moral compass, and how would they help you preserve your humanity if everything else vanished?

Share what you write in the Drafters Workshop Chat.

Join the Drafters Workshop Chat

💬 Let’s Dialogue

Writers and readers can have varied creative lifestyles and approaches. Let’s discuss them!

• Which book from your childhood or past shaped who you are today more than any other?

• If the world ended tomorrow, what is one story or piece of literature you would want to memorize so it wouldn’t be lost?

• Do you prefer to keep your favorite, most meaningful books private, or do you feel a strong need to share them with others?

• Can an ordinary, everyday text (like an old magazine, letter, or cookbook) carry just as much human history as great literature?

• If you could only pass down one single story to a generation that has never seen a computer or a TV, which one would you choose?

Share your responses in the Dialoguers chat or leave a comment.

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Not able to read this book with us this month? No worries! We have other options to choose from. See our other September Book Club Picks here.

Whether you join a chat, one of our Buddy Reads in Storygraph, or lay it all out in the comments, I look forward to hearing more about your thoughts on our book club picks this month!

If you enjoyed this post, please like and share it so others can enjoy it and read with us too. Thank you and happy reading!

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Continue Exploring September’s Theme, The Stories We Carry

This week’s Posts: The Books That Changed Us

Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us

The Book of Answers

Can a book genuinely change who we are?

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But me a coffee to say thanks

ICYM August’s Theme, The Creative Life

Go more in depth with The Creative Life Writing Collection

September’s The Stories We Carry Writing Collection is coming soon!

Popular Posts from Week 4: Preparing for What Comes Next

Writing Prompts for What Comes Next in Your Creative Life

“Did we ever…?”

Reading Notes: Possession

Popular Posts from Week 3: The Messy Middle

Writing Prompts for Navigating ‘The Messy Middle’

Continuing Without a Trace

Reading Notes: The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Popular Posts from Week 2: Creative Habits

Immersive Storytelling Mode and the ArXiv

Reading Notes: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

The Habits That Help Me and My Creative Life Most

Popular Posts from Week 1: Making Space

A Day Alive in the Lakeside Library

How to Make Space and Time for Your Creative Life

The Creative Life as Play and Work

If you want to explore past themes, paid subscribers also have access to the full archive, including previous writing prompts, discussions, and reading lists, as well as full access to the community chat and Daily Drafters Exclusives writing collections.

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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

📚 Read with Us in September!

In September, our monthly theme is, The Stories We Carry, so over the next five weeks we’ll begin exploring how books help us examine the stories that shape our identities, memories, relationships, writing, art, and understanding of the world.

Our weeks for reading books and posts run Saturday–Friday:

Week 1 (The Books That Changed Us)

Sat., Aug. 29 — Fri., Sep. 4

Week 2 (Memory & Storytelling)

Sat., Sep. 5 — Fri., Sep. 11

Week 3 (The Stories We Tell Ourselves)

Sat., Sep. 12 —Fri., Sep. 18

Week 4 (The Stories We Tell Others)

Sat., Sep. 19 — Fri., Sep. 25

Week 5 (What Makes a Story Last?)

Sat., Sep. 26 — Fri., Oct. 2

Whether you read one book, all five, or one of your own books in between some of our reading selections, I hope this month’s selections give you plenty to think about, and plenty to talk about with us.

ℹ️ HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR READING SCHEDULE

This book club is designed to fit your personal reading pace and schedule.

Here’s an overview of the suggested reading schedule options to choose from, to make joining this book club fit into your existing schedule and reading goals. Though you can, of course, always read whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want!

Feel free to adjust the option you want to follow based on whatever you’re reading outside the club, as well as what we’re reading and covering that month in other posts. There is no ‘right’ way to read with us, only the way that works best for you and your life in any given week or month.

👥OPTION 1: One Book Per Week Reader

Read with us week-by-week by reading one book per week. This schedule will align best with Tuesday’s check-in posts, in which we’ll cover our initial thoughts on the book we’re reading for that week and introduce any questions and topics worth exploring further as we continue reading the book.

This option is best for those who want to take their time exploring and discussing each work in tandem with the focus of other posts and conversations happening on Daily Drafts & Dialogues.

📚OPTION 2: The Poly Mood Reader

Weave all five books together throughout the month so that you can read two or more books at the same time while still staying close to the sequence of discussions we’ll have about each book on Tuesdays.

This is a great option if you want to alternate between denser prose and faster-paced plots in the same week, listen to one book on audio while reading another in print, or simply follow your reading mood from day to day.

It offers greater flexibility while still allowing you to join the weekly discussions by meeting the weekly benchmarks.

☀️OPTION 3: Daily Page Goal Reader

Keep a steady reading rhythm across the full 35-day reading period by following a daily page goal.

Because this month’s five-book stack is approximately 2,192 pages in the editions used for the estimates in this post, completing the entire stack in 35 days works out to roughly 63 pages per day. Your actual page count will vary by edition, font, format, and reading medium, so think of 60–65 pages per day as a guide rather than a rule.

This option is great if you just want to set your reading stack in the order you want to read each book and focus on the number of pages you read each day. It is also great for those who are building a reading routine, as well as those who already have an allotted hour or so dedicated to reading each day— those who read with their morning coffee, right before bed, or during their lunch hour or while they commute by train or bus or carshare most days.

⏳OPTION 4: One Book Per Month Reader

Choose just one specific book to read at a slower pace over the entire month with us.

This option is especially good for building a reading routine that will stick, or for readers who have several other books they want to read over the course of the month. You can choose the book that interests you the most and use the weekly targets below to give yourself plenty of room to read, reflect, reread, and participate in your selected book’s discussion.

🗣️ How to Join Book Discussions

You are welcome to tackle the entire list or jump into book discussions for individual picks.

👥 Each book selection will have a Buddy Read available. All Buddy Reads will be hosted in the StoryGraph app. This Buddy Read feature helps ensure you don’t encounter spoilers and never feel rushed, so you can read at your own pace.

Every Buddy Read will remain accessible in StoryGraph past its designated end date as long as you join it in the app before its designated end date—the end of our September reading cycle on Friday, October 2. This means you can continue logging your thoughts and chatting about the book at your own pace, no matter which reading schedule you choose or whether you’re following the Tuesday check-in posts here on Daily Drafts & Dialogues.

💬 You’ll also have the opportunity to discuss each book in the comments of Tuesday check-in posts and in chat threads in upcoming Daily Drafts & Dialogues Books posts.

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📚 OUR 5 MAIN SELECTIONS FOR SEPTEMBER: THE STORIES WE CARRY

🌟 Week 1: 📕 Popular Pick: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

🌟 Week 2: 📗 Real World Application Pick: Educated by Tara Westover

🌟 Week 3: 📘 Diverse Perspectives Pick: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

🌟 Week 4: 📙 Literary Dive Pick: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

🌟 Week 5: 📖 BONUS Pick: The Book of Love by Kelly Link

📅 SEPTEMBER READING SCHEDULE OPTIONS

👥 OPTION 1: The Weekly Buddy Read Schedule for Tuesday Reading Notes and Check-Ins

Use this reading schedule if you want to read all five books, one book at a time, one book per week.

Every Tuesday, a dedicated community check-in post will go live to complement that week’s main selection, featuring reading notes and discussion questions for a deeper look at that book’s specific angle on The Stories We Carry.

A note about page counts: Page counts below use readily available U.S. editions as a planning reference. Your edition may have a different page count, so feel free to use chapter/section progress rather than exact page numbers whenever necessary.

📕Week 1: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (~352 pages)

In the aftermath of a devastating pandemic, a traveling troupe of actors and musicians moves through the scattered communities of the Great Lakes region. Moving between the world before the collapse and the world after it, the novel asks what remains worth carrying forward when almost everything familiar is gone.

📆 Daily Target: August 29–September 4 — approximately 50 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 1

This week’s post will dive into The Books That Change Us. We’ll consider the role books, art, performance, and culture play in helping people remember who they were and imagine who they might become.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

1. What books, stories, performances, or works of art become especially meaningful to the characters after the collapse, and why?

2. How does Station Eleven suggest that the stories we encounter can change the way we understand our own lives?

3. What does the novel suggest we should preserve when we can no longer preserve everything?

Station Eleven Buddy Read

📗Week 2: Educated by Tara Westover (~368 pages)

Tara Westover recounts growing up in an isolated survivalist family in rural Idaho without formal schooling before eventually making her way to college and Cambridge University. Her memoir explores the complicated relationship between memory, family, identity, education, and the stories we inherit about ourselves.

📆 Daily Target: September 5–11 — approximately 53 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 8

This week’s post will dive into Memory & Storytelling. We’ll explore how memory shapes memoirs, how our understanding of the past can change over time, and what happens when different people remember the same history or events differently.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

1. How does Westover’s understanding of her childhood change as she gains distance from it?

2. What is the relationship between memory and identity in Educated?

3. When does telling your own story become an act of reclaiming your life?

Educated Buddy Read

📘Week 3: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu (~288 pages)

Willis Wu is a background character in a fictional television procedural, perpetually trying to move up the hierarchy of stereotyped roles available to Asian-American actors. Through its inventive screenplay-like structure, the novel examines race, assimilation, family, ambition, and the stories society teaches us about who we are allowed to be.

📆 Daily Target: September 12–18 — approximately 41 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 15

This week’s post will dive into The Stories We Tell Ourselves. We’ll look at the identities we construct, the roles we perform, and what happens when the story we’ve been given no longer feels big enough to contain us.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

1. What ‘role’ does Willis believe he needs to play in order to be seen or valued?

2. How does the novel distinguish between the stories we create about ourselves and the stories other people create for us?

3. What does Interior Chinatown suggest about the possibility (and difficulty) of rewriting an inherited identity?

Interior Chinatown Buddy Read

📙Week 4: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (~544 pages)

After the mysterious death of her sister Laura, Iris Chase reflects on her family’s history, her own life, and the manuscript Laura left behind. The novel layers memoir, family history, romance, political history, and a story-within-a-story to explore the distance between what happened, what is remembered, and what is told.

📆 Daily Target: September 19–25 — approximately 78 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 22

This week’s post will dive into The Stories We Tell Others. We’ll examine unreliable narrators, secrets, omissions, storytelling as power, and the ways people reshape the past when they tell it to someone else.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

1. Who gets to tell a story in The Blind Assassin, and whose version of events are we asked to trust?

2. What do the characters conceal from one another, and what does that concealment allow them to control?

3. How does storytelling become a way of protecting, manipulating, remembering, or reinventing the self?

The Blind Assassin Buddy Read

📖 Week 5: The Book of Love by Kelly Link (~640 pages)

Three teenagers who disappeared, and were presumed dead, return to the small seaside town of Lovesend, Massachusetts, drawn into a supernatural mystery involving magic, death, love, and the balance between worlds. As they try to understand what happened to them, the novel encourages readers to ask questions about what we owe one another and what kinds of stories can survive across time.

📆 Daily Target: September 26–October 2 — approximately 92 pages/day to finish in one week.

🔔 Tuesday Check-In Post: September 29

This week’s post will dive into What Makes a Story Last? We’ll consider why certain stories stay with us, how stories are transformed when they’re retold, and what makes a narrative feel bigger than the moment in which it was created or encountered.

💬 Possible Discussion Questions:

1. What makes a story endure in The Book of Love, and what makes certain stories worth carrying forward?

2. How do love, grief, memory, and imagination influence the stories the characters create?

3. After reading this month’s selections, what do you think makes a story last?

The Book of Love Buddy Read

📚 OPTION 2: The Month-Long Poly Reader Schedule with Weekly Benchmarks

If you’re reading two or more selections simultaneously but prefer to weave them together over the course of the full month rather than reading one book at a time, aim for these weekly benchmarks:

📕 End of Week 1 — Friday, September 4: Finish Station Eleven

📗 End of Week 2 — Friday, September 11: Finish Educated

📘 End of Week 3 — Friday, September 18: Finish Interior Chinatown

📙 End of Week 4 — Friday, September 25: Finish The Blind Assassin

📖 End of Week 5 — Friday, October 2: Finish The Book of Love

Reminder: The goal with this option isn’t to read only one book each week, but to reach the corresponding benchmark highlighted above by the end of each reading week. This way, if you’d rather read 20 pages of one book in the morning and 40 pages of another at night, you can do what works best for both your schedule and mood!

☀️ OPTION 3: The Daily Reading Schedule

Use this option if you want to finish all five books across our full 35-day reading period while maintaining a steady, structured reading rhythm. Rather than worrying about finishing one book each week, simply aim for your daily page goal and move through the stack in order.

✅ Your Daily Commitment: Aim for approximately 60–65 pages per day across the full stack.

📑 Your Complete Monthly Roadmap:

📕August 29–September 3: Read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

📗September 4–September 9: Move into Educated by Tara Westover

📘September 10–September 14: Continue with Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

📙September 15–September 23: Dive into The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

📖September 24–October 2: Finish the month with The Book of Love by Kelly Link

Reminder: Your goal is to read your daily pages and keep moving forward. If you read more one day and less the next, that’s completely fine. Just think of 60–65 pages as your average daily target rather than a hard rule to keep, especially if it ends up stressing you out.

⏳OPTION 4: The Monthly Schedule (Pick ONE Book for the Whole Month)

Do you want to focus on just one specific book for the entire duration of September that explores The Stories We Carry?

If so, use these relaxed weekly targets to space your chosen book across all five weeks and give yourself plenty of time to unpack all it has to offer.

📕If reading ONLY Station Eleven: Read approximately 70 pages per week (about 10 pages/day).

📗If reading ONLY Educated: Read approximately 74 pages per week (about 11 pages/day).

📘If reading ONLY Interior Chinatown: Read approximately 58 pages per week (about 8 pages/day).

📙If reading ONLY The Blind Assassin: Read approximately 109 pages per week (about 16 pages/day).

📖If reading ONLY The Book of Love: Read approximately 128 pages per week (about 18 pages/day).

Again, this plan is based on the editions referenced above, so use your own edition’s page count if it differs.

🏛️ Library & Reading Notes

There is no prize for finishing all five books, or a penalty for reading only one.

You can read ahead. You can fall behind. You can switch schedules halfway through the month. You can listen to the audiobook versions while reading the ebook versions, annotate every page in your printed copy, read in tiny bursts, or spend an entire afternoon disappearing into one of these books.

However you decide to read with us, the point is not to turn reading into another obligation. It’s to make space for the stories that stay with us.

So, pick the schedule that makes you want to open a book, then come talk to us about what you find there when you can. 📚✨

All book selections should be available through your local library. It will be incredibly rare that we have a book selection that is not available there. So, please support and use your library. That’s what they’re there for— free books! And the lovely librarians there will make it easy for you to get your card if you don’t already have one.

💬Drop a comment below to let us know which reading schedule and book(s) you are choosing this month!

✨Stay tuned for Tuesday’s check-in post, which will include reading notes and discussion questions for Station Eleven. And don’t forget to join The Daily Drafts & Dialogues Book Club in Storygraph so you can join Buddy Reads!

I can’t wait to read with you in September and see how what we’re reading deepens our discussions!

Please remember to like and share this post with your network so other readers can join us too! Thank you 🫶

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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 4: Preparing for What Comes Next

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August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 3: The Messy Middle

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August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 3: The Messy Middle

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August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 2: Creative Habits

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August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 2: Creative Habits

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August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 1: Making Space

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August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 1: Making Space

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Welcome to the NEW Daily Drafts & Dialogues Book Club

Step into a new chapter with us!

Starting in August, we will start reading books centered around our monthly themes together on Daily Drafts & Dialogues. And I would love for you to be part of it!

For August, our theme is The Creative Life.

So, over the next four weeks, we will explore the absolute magic, the intense obsessions, the messy collaborations, and the heavy sacrifices that go into making art by exploring four very distinct works. Because reading widely and attentively is one of the best ways to explore our monthly themes.

Why four books each month?

Exploring four books each month will allow us to maintain the rhythm of our existing weekly post schedule. It will also allow us to explore works that span genres and topics of interest that are written by diverse authors with diverse perspectives since the advent of literature with zero restrictions on our imaginations and writing goals. Which is the best way to use our book club reading selections to delve into and fully grasp any of the topics that will be explored via drafts and dialogues on Daily Drafts & Dialogues.

Classics and popular books can be wonderful to discuss, and we will discuss them. However, reading lesser-known works by lesser-known authors can also be wonderful to discuss! My main concern is that you will be able to secure a copy of whatever we’re reading from your local library or on Libby for free, or at minimal cost online. I will also try my best to consider audiobook accessibility for most options, as I know many titles are not easily available in braille.

We will be discussing nonfiction works as well as fiction. I will try to include at least one nonfiction option each month. Yet rest assured, I will try my best to ensure they align with our monthly themes as much as I can, based on what information I am able to gather about each book before I read it myself.

Each month, new book selections for the club will be announced in the final Friday Books post of the previous month (like this one!), which is why the books that will typically be easier to acquire will be scheduled first. Yes, there will be reading schedules, but they are only options not requirements. Keep reading to see what that means.

📚Typical Monthly Reading Lineup

📕Week 1: Popular or Bestseller Pick

If they aren’t brand-new releases, these books tend to be the easiest to get at the library since libraries end up acquiring additional copies for more popular titles over time, which means they are ideal for kicking off a new month of reading when there is a shorter window to grab a copy. They may include everything from award winners to bestsellers from the past few decades to books that have recently been turned into films, and might even include classics like Wuthering Heights, Project Hail Mary, The Odyssey, etc. They will also have plenty of ongoing discussions available that we can tap into right at the start of the month, which will boost discussions right out the gate.

📗Week 2: Real World Application Pick

This book selection may be fiction or nonfiction. But I will try my best to select an option that directly applies to our monthly theme so we can see the theme applied to the page in real life or via a real-world example. For example, in August we’re covering The Creative Life, so we’ll be reading the journal entries of a well-known creator, Sylvia Plath, who regularly discusses and applies this topic in her journals and body of work.

📘Week 3: Diverse Perspective Pick

This book selection should offer an interesting and diverse perspective on the monthly theme and will push the conversations we’re having forward in interesting ways. It might include a diverse voice or work that has pushed the limits of what literature and writing can (or arguably should?) do. Regardless, it will likely stand out from the other books we’re reading for the month in some interesting ways that encourage us to consider the month’s topic from a different or new angle.

📙Week 4: Literary Dive Pick

This book selection will likely include literary prose and elements that are tied to the month’s theme. And it will typically offer readers a chance to take deeper dives into literary devices, techniques, etc. I will typically schedule this option for the last week of the month as it might require additional time to read. For works with denser literary prose and concepts like the ones that will likely be scheduled this week, you might want to start reading them a week or two before as they are typically meant to be savored and studied, not read at top-speed.

ℹ️ HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR READING SCHEDULE

This book club is designed to fit your personal reading pace and schedule, so in this post you will find four distinct reading schedule options, which will be available for all future months as well.

Here’s an overview of the suggested options to choose from, to make joining this book club fit into your existing schedule and reading goals. Though you can, of course, always read whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want!

Feel free to adjust which option you want to follow based on whatever you’re reading outside the club, as well as what we’re reading and covering that month too. There is no ‘right’ way to read with us, only the way that works best for you and your life in any given week or month.

OPTION 1: One Book Per Week Reader

Read with us week-by-week by reading one book per week. This schedule will align best with Tuesday’s check-in posts, in which we will cover our initial thoughts on the book we’re reading for that week and answer the discussion questions for the book provided. This option is best for those who want to take their time exploring and discussing each work in tandem with the focus of other posts and discussions happening on Daily Drafts & Dialogues.

OPTION 2: The Poly Mood Reader

Weave all the books together throughout the month so that you can read two or more books at the same time but still stick close to the sequence of discussions we’ll have about each book on Tuesdays. This will be best if you want to alternate between denser prose and books with faster-paced plots in one week, for example. Or if you want to listen to one book on audio while reading the print copy of another in the same week. It offers greater flexibility to read what you want when you want while allowing you to join weekly discussions by meeting weekly benchmarks.

OPTION 3: Daily Page Goal Reader

Keep a steady 28-day schedule for the whole bookstack by following a daily page goal of 45-55 pages per day (1-2 hours per day, depending on the book and your chosen reading medium). This option is great if you just want to set your stack in order and focus on the number of pages you read each day. It is great for those who are building a reading routine, as well as those who already have an allotted hour or so dedicated to reading each day— those who read with their morning coffee, right before bed, or during their lunch hour or while they commute by train or bus or carshare most days.

OPTION 4: One Book Per Month Reader

Choose just one specific book to read at a slower pace over the entire month with us. This option is also great for building a reading routine that will stick. And it is great for those readers who have a few other books they want to read over the course of the month as well.

🗣️How to Join Book Discussions

You are welcome to tackle the entire bookstack with us each month or jump in for the individual picks you want to read. It’s up to you!

Each selection will have a Buddy Read available. And all our Buddy Reads will be hosted in The StoryGraph app. This app feature ensures you don’t encounter spoilers and never feel rushed.

Every Buddy Read room will remain open and active for the entire month, allowing you to log your thoughts and chat at your own pace, no matter which reading schedule you choose below, or if you’re following Tuesday check-in posts on Daily Drafts & Dialogues.

You’ll also have the opportunity to discuss each book in the comments of Tuesday check-in posts and chat threads in upcoming Daily Drafts & Dialogues Books posts.

📚 OUR 4 SELECTIONS FOR AUGUST: THE CREATIVE LIFE

🎮 Week 1: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

✍️ Week 2: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (1955-1959)

🪦 Week 3: The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez

📜 Week 4: Possession by A.S. Byatt

📅AUGUST READING SCHEDULE OPTIONS

👥OPTION 1: The Weekly Buddy Read Schedule for Tuesday Reading Notes and Check-Ins

Use this reading schedule breakdown if you join us each week to read all four books, one book at a time, one book per week. Every Tuesday, a dedicated community check-in post will go live to complement that week’s main selection, featuring reading notes and discussion questions for a deep-dive analysis of the book’s specific angle on the creative life.

🎮 Week 1: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (~400 pages)

A multi-decade journey following two friends who design video games, charting the soaring highs of success and the bitter lows of creative jealousy.

Daily Target: Days 1-7 (approx. 55-60 pages/day) to finish in one week.

Tuesday Check-In Post: August 4, 2026: This post will dive into the book and its focus on the mechanics of creative collaboration. We will reflect on how artistic partnerships thrive on vulnerability, and what happens when professional ambition and individual egos begin to strain a shared lifelong vision.

Join Tomorrow... Buddy Read

✍️ Week 2: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (~250-page selection, 1955–1959)

The actual, unedited diaries of a literary icon, capturing her daily writing routines, intense perfectionism, and deep creative self-doubt.

Daily Target: Days 8-14 (approx. 35-40 pages/day) to finish in one week.

Tuesday Check-In Post: August 11, 2026: In this week’s check-in post, we strip away fiction to look at the psychology of the creator. We will discuss how Plath navigated the internal warfare of perfectionism, the rigid discipline of daily drafting, and the crushing weight of artistic isolation.

Join The Journals Buddy Read

🪦 Week 3: The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez (~250 pages)

A Dominican-American author literally buries her unfinished drafts in a plot of land… only for her abandoned characters to start talking back.

Daily Target: Days 15-21 (approx. 35-40 pages/day) to finish in one week.

Tuesday Check-In Post: August 18, 2026: Our third check-in post tackles creative legacy and abandoned art. We will explore the emotional toll of letting stories go, the guilt of leaving manuscripts unfinished, and the idea that our creative ideas have a living, breathing life of their own.

Join The Cemetery... Buddy Read

📜 Week 4: Possession by A.S. Byatt (~500 pages)

A Booker Prize-winning masterclass following two modern scholars who unearth a secret, forbidden romance between two famous Victorian poets through hidden letters.

Daily Target: Days 22-28 (approx. 70-80 pages/day) to finish in one week.

Tuesday Check-In Post: August 25, 2026: We close the month by looking at artistic obsession and research in this check-in post. We will explore the fine line between celebrating an artist’s work and completely losing oneself in their historical footprint, examining how the past continually reshapes the modern creator.

Join the Possession Buddy Read

📚OPTION 2: The Month-Long Poly Reader Schedule with Weekly Benchmarks

If you are reading two or more selections simultaneously but prefer to weave them together over the course of the full month rather than reading one book at a time each week, aim for these weekly benchmarks:

🏁 End of Week 1 (Friday, Aug. 7th): Finish Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

📝 End of Week 2 (Friday, Aug. 14): Finish The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (1955–1959 selection)

🪦End of Week 3 (Friday Aug. 21): Finish The Cemetery of Untold Stories

🏛️ End of Week 4 (Friday Aug. 28): Finish Possession

📅 OPTION 3: The Daily Reading Schedule

Use this option if you want to finish all four books comfortably across our 28-day period and maintain a steady, structured rhythm that fits your existing or desired daily reading schedule.

Your Daily Commitment: Aim to read approximately 45 to 55 pages per day.

Your Complete 28-Day Roadmap:

• Days 1 to 7: Focus entirely on Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (~57 pages/day).

• Days 8 to 12: Pivot to The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1955–1959 selection (~50 pages/day).

• Days 13 to 17: Dive into The Cemetery of Untold Stories (~50 pages/day).

• Days 18 to 28: Dedicate your final 11 days to the dense pages of Possession (~45 pages/day).

📖 OPTION 4: The Monthly Schedule (Pick ONE Book for the Whole Month)

Do you want to focus on just one specific book for the entire duration of August that focuses on The Creative Life? If so, you can use these more relaxed weekly targets to space out your chosen book across all four weeks, to really unpack all it has to offer:

🎮 If reading ONLY Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: Read 100 pages per week (approx. 14 pages a day).

✍️ If reading ONLY The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (1955–1959 selection): Read 62 pages per week (approx. 9 pages a day).

🪦 If reading ONLY The Cemetery of Untold Stories: Read 62 pages per week (approx. 9 pages a day).

📜 If reading ONLY Possession: Read 125 pages per week (approx. 18 pages a day).

🏛️ Library & Reading Notes

All book selections should be available through your local library. It will be incredibly rare that we have a book selection that is not available there. So, please support and use your library. That’s what they’re there for— free books! And the lovely librarians there will make it easy for you to get your card if you don’t already have one.

💬Drop a comment below to let us know which reading schedule and book(s) you are choosing this month!

✨Stay tuned for Tuesday’s check-in post, which will include reading notes and discussion questions for Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. And don’t forget to join The Daily Drafts & Dialogues Book Club in Storygraph so you can join Buddy Reads!

I can’t wait to read with you in August and see how what we’re reading deepens our discussions each month!

Please remember to like and share this post with your network so other readers can join us too! Thank you 🫶

Join the Book Club

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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 3: Sharing the Work

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July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 2: Taking Creative Risks

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July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 2: Taking Creative Risks

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July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 1: Beginning Before You Feel Ready

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July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 1: Beginning Before You Feel Ready

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SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM TO SEE TODAY’S WRITING PROMPT

This non-exhaustive reading list includes some of the books I have read over the past five to six years. I believe everyone should read at least a handful of them soon to honor the USA’s 250th birthday this year. Yes, I have read every single one of the books on this list, and have even included my book reviews for some of them.

Please, take your time looking at this list. Hopefully you’ll see why these books made it on the list, though I will admit that some are obvious choices while others may not seem as obvious at first glance. I did not put them in any particular order after the first few on the list, which are front-and-center for clear reasons, I hope.

Let me know if there are any other books you would add to this list in the comments. I know there are plenty of others out there worth mentioning and reading!

The Constitution of the United States of America and Selected Writings of the Founding Fathers by various authors is a book everyone should read right now. Yes, I read every single one of its 826 pages, and you should too. The Constitution itself is short, but how it came to be was an arduous, collaborative, yet highly contested endeavor. And you should know some of the points and arguments that were made during its creation, many of which we’re still having today.

Immigration Reform: The Corpse That Will Not Die by Charles Kamasaki is one of the end-all be-all sources you’ll want to consult for immigration legislation and reform in the US. And I did my graduate thesis on rhetoric in immigration law and reform, so I feel like I can say this with confidence. I also met the author, and he is as kind as he is diligent with his work. This is a dense piece of work, but so worth it.

America, América: A New History of the New World by Greg Grandin is one of the most important history books written in the past few decades, so luckily, it’s as engaging and accessible as it is comprehensive. And I say this as someone who studied Latin American and Latino history in grad school. I cannot recommend this book enough. Starting with the Spanish conquest of the Americas, followed by the English conquest, this book lays out the intermingled histories of the Americas as we know them today and how it’s impossible to disconnect their histories if you want a realistic and comprehensive compilation of them, though most history books wind up doing just that. It also does not sugarcoat one iota of those intermingled histories. The brutality and industry of historical and modern-day conquest and slavery and oppression are outlined thoroughly, just as the ideals and writings of humanistic leaders and authors and activists are, as they push and pull each other into a new millennium across continents. Read my full review here.

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville has had the singular honor of being, even to this day, the work that political commentators of every stripe refer to when they seek to draw large conclusions about the society of the USA, as it offers first-hand insights from the era when the USA was being birthed.

A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present by Howard Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties. (This one is a bit older but still has valuable information in it. However, I would encourage readers to compare its information to what research is available now, as well.)

Let the Poets Govern by Camonghne Felix is an important book that will require you to reflect on the power of language and how we choose to wield it. So of course I loved it. It reads as part memoir, part manifesto, part homage. Poets, linguists, activists, lit nerds, anyone unsettled during this time in history, and anyone who appreciates what language has done and has the potential to do, will enjoy this book. Those interested in US history will want to read the section where she discusses the Pledge of Allegiance and its poetic power in the US education system. Read my full review here.

American War by Omar El Akkad is a novel about a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle of a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself. I read this years ago and am still always recommending it.

Murder the Truth: Fear, the First Amendment, and a Secret Campaign to Protect the Powerful by David Enrich is such an important book to read right now. At first, libel laws may not sound that interesting, but truly, this is one of the most necessary nonfiction books to read this year. Enrich does a superb job ensuring that it’s easy to follow and hard to put down. I would recommend picking it up as soon as possible, especially if you value democracy and having a free press. Read my full book review here.

How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt posits that democracy no longer ends with a bang— in a revolution or military coup— but with a whimper: the slow, steady weakening of critical institutions, such as the judiciary and the press, and the gradual erosion of long-standing political norms. And its authors have spent more than twenty years studying the breakdown of democracies in Europe and Latin America, so they know what they’re talking about. The good news is that there are several exit ramps on the road to authoritarianism. The bad news is that … Well, read the book to find out.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.

Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person’s Guide to Taking Back the Bible from Fundamentalists, Fascists, and Flock-Fleecing Frauds by John Fugelsang is as thorough as it is entertaining. A perfect blend of scripture and historical context. Full of much-needed reminders of what Jesus Christ actually did, said, and represents— reminders most of us in the USA will find both useful and meaningful right now.

The Moral Basis of Democracy by Eleanor Roosevelt employs the history of human rights to establish the idea that at the core of democracy is a spiritual responsibility to other citizens. Roosevelt also calls on all Americans, especially the youth, to prioritize the well-being of others and have faith that their fellow citizens will protect them in return. She defines this trust between people as a trait of true democracy.

Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson packs a lot of history and historical context into less than three hundred pages. But luckily, it’s as engaging and eye-opening as it is easy to read. While there are a lot of dates and names and pieces of legislation to remember, you’ll never feel like you’re reading a textbook, although you will still learn a lot as if you were reading one. Even those of us who think we know everything there is to know about US history will pick up an interesting nugget or two as they read this book. Read my full review here. P.S. —This author also has a pretty popular Substack, if you want to check that out too.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is a novel that brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for Black people in the pre-Civil War era, its narrative seamlessly weaving the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. It is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes by Leah Litman ended up being an unexpected and timely read when I read it on Labor Day weekend last year and is as thorough and informative as it is alarming. Beware: this book is extremely depressing— and for that reason, I would recommend reading its conclusion when you are halfway through the book. Seriously, if at any point this book starts making you feel defeated and depressed, read its conclusion ASAP, or plan to read other books on voting rights and advocacy at the same time. It is still informative and worth the read, however. Read my full review here.

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The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt begins with the rise of anti-Semitism in central and western Europe in the 1800s and continues with an examination of European colonial imperialism from 1884 to the outbreak of World War I. Arendt explores the institutions and operations of totalitarian movements, focusing on the two genuine forms of totalitarian government that have influenced our time—Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—which she adroitly recognizes were two sides of the same coin, rather than opposing philosophies of Right and Left. From this vantage point, she discusses the evolution of classes into masses, the role of propaganda in dealing with the nontotalitarian world, the use of terror, and the nature of isolation and loneliness as preconditions for total domination. It is as poignant now as it was when it was first published and can certainly be applied to the current socio-political climate in the USA.

One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad is one of those books that will stay with you long after you read it, as it will likely prompt you to act thoughtfully and humanely as soon as you’re done reading it. Akkad does not hold back in any way in this book, as he holds powerful and traditional institutions in the West to account while simultaneously pleading for readers to tap into the most humane and honest parts of themselves. Read my full review here.

When you read [Re]Coding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka, be prepared to have some of your preconceived notions about the US government and how it works challenged, especially your notions about how technology in the government and by the government works. And no, it doesn’t matter what side of the political aisle you’re on when faced with this challenge. Not really. Because in the end, as Pahlka’s book suggests, government tech works better when it is created for the people, by the people, in line with democracy itself. Read my full review here.

Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America by Stacey Abrams offers a blueprint to end voter suppression, empower our citizens, and take back our country. A recognized expert on fair voting and civic engagement, Abrams chronicles a chilling account of how the right to vote and the principle of democracy have been and continue to be under attack. Seriously, read this book if you want to learn more about voting in the US, and how it can and needs to be protected.

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind by Annalee Newitz is an important book to read right now, as it highlights how stories shape what we believe, who we are, and what we do. In this book, Newitz highlights how critical it is to be aware of how certain stories have been weaponized against us for eons, especially after social media came onto the scene, though it started much earlier than that. Luckily, however, the author does also highlight what we might be able to do about it at the end of the book, so the book does end on a more positive note. Overall, the portions of the book that discussed the stories centered around US Indigenous communities and the ‘myth of the vanishing Indian’ resonated with me the most. I also appreciated the historical context provided regarding how propaganda began to surface and be understood. Read my full review here.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck creates an intimate portrait of two men facing a world marked by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness in late 1930s America. Though the scope is narrow, however, the theme is universal: a friendship and a shared dream that makes an individual’s existence meaningful, especially in the US.

On Corruption in America: And What Is at Stake by Sarah Chayes — “If you want to save America, this might just be the most important book to read now.” –Nancy MacLean, author of Democracy in Chains Sarah Chayes

It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis is a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy, an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America. It will convince you that yes, yes it can happen here.

Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman is a collection of quintessentially American poems, the seminal work of one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century. Whitman wrote a lot of poetry during the Civil War and produced some of the best work of the time.

Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum details how modern dictators, kleptocrats, oligarchs, and other non-democratic leaders run sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, security services, and technological experts providing surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. And while these networks are primarily connected across autocratic countries, they’re often found in democracies too, with the aim to repress citizens’ autonomy and undermine anyone who challenges them—in short, to repress any instance of democracy anywhere it appears. Read my full review here.

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas follows 16-year-old Starr Carter, who bridges two vastly different worlds: her impoverished, predominantly Black neighborhood and an affluent, mostly white prep school in the USA. Her life shatters when she becomes the sole witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed childhood best friend by a police officer.

Infinite Country by Patricia Engel is a deeply moving novel about a Colombian family torn apart by United States immigration laws and deportation. It explores the heavy burdens of the diaspora, the arbitrariness of borders, and a mixed-status family fighting to reunite across continents.

Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books by Kirsten Miller is a novel that takes an important, heavy, timely topic (growing book bans in the USA) and makes it highly entertaining and extremely relatable while never sacrificing deep meaning, contemplation, and human empathy. I knew the instant I read the blurb of this book that I’d love it. But I didn’t know how much of an impact it would have on me once I was done reading it, and that I will probably recommend it to everyone as required reading for years to come. Read my full review here.

Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt by Arthur C. Brooks is a rallying cry for people hoping for a new era of American progress. Most of all, it is a roadmap to arrive at the happiness that comes when we choose to love one another despite our differences. I don’t agree with all its core arguments but do think it is a helpful book to read right now, especially since the author explicitly invites you to (respectfully, of course) disagree with him. Read my full review here.

Trust by Hernan Diaz explores wealth, power, and how history is written by the privileged. Set in 1920s and 30s New York, the novel questions whether an enigmatic Wall Street tycoon is a genius or an exploiter, revealing his true motives through four interconnected accounts.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is one of those novels that will resonate with me for a long time, as it will for many others, as it simultaneously inflames reflection, curiosity, empathy, and horror. It might also prove more prescient now than it did when it was first published in 1953, as society continues to grapple with how certain people and groups in power leverage technology like AI to obfuscate reality to subdue the masses and torch the power of books (even if not the literal books themselves), reminding me how Ray Bradbury himself once said: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Read my full book review here.

Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein reveals the structural and psychological forces behind America’s descent into division and dysfunction. Neither a polemic nor a lament, it offers a clear framework for understanding everything from Donald Trump’s rise to the Democratic Party’s leftward shift to the politicization of everyday culture. Read my full review here.

The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times by Jane Goodall is told through stories from a remarkable career and fascinating research, touching on vital questions including: How do we stay hopeful when everything seems hopeless? How do we cultivate hope in our children? Filled with engaging dialogue and pictures from Jane’s storied career, this book is a deeply personal conversation with one of the most beloved figures in today’s world. And it will indeed make you feel more hopeful.

Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning by Liz Cheney offers a behind-the-scenes account of what happened leading up to, during, and after the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Cheney’s no-nonsense, smart, diligent, and civic-minded fortitude comes across in this book in waves and allows her to offer a clear account of what matters to her above all else: the Oath of Office each public servant and official takes to defend and protect the US Constitution. Read my full review here.

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah forces readers to look in the mirror and candidly ask questions like: Who is exploited or suffering due to what we consume (especially when it comes to entertainment)? How are bodies, minds, and hearts controlled in our society? How far away are we from having gladiator games again? Or are we already there in a way? What are the ways we can recognize and change the New Jim Crow environments and institutions we’ve created? Who is ultimately responsible? What should and can we do now to preserve and maintain our humanity? When is someone no longer redeemable or worthy of love, if ever? Etc. There are so many important questions this book raises that need to be discussed ASAP!! Read my full review here.

Beloved is a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel by Toni Morrison. Set in 1873, it follows Sethe, an escaped enslaved woman living in Cincinnati. Haunted by the traumatic memories of slavery and the ghost of her own infant daughter—whom she killed to save her from enslavement—Sethe must confront her past when a mysterious young woman arrives.

Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao is a well-researched account of how Sam Altman has vied to create an empire of AI via OpenAI from its inception, often affording him more altruistic credit at the dawn of his pursuits and endeavors than he’s probably due. It also ultimately serves as a rallying cry for the careful, intentional stewardship we need to amass when using and developing AI now and in the near future (in the US and worldwide) if we truly want it to ‘benefit humanity.’ Read my full review here.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones is a contemporary novel exploring the devastating impact of wrongful incarceration on a young Black couple in Atlanta. When Roy is wrongfully convicted of a rape he did not commit and sentenced to prison, he and his wife Celestial are forced to navigate a testing separation.

The Dead Zone by Stephen King is a classic 1979 science-fiction thriller novel that follows Johnny Smith, a teacher who awakens from a five-year coma with precognitive powers after physical contact. After having a terrifying vision that a rising populist politician named Greg Stillson will become a tyrannical U.S. President and trigger a global nuclear holocaust, Johnny sacrifices his life to stop him.

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of Democracy by US Representative Jamie Raskin mostly reads like a love letter to his now deceased son, Tommy. Through his recollections of Tommy’s life, which tragically ended by suicide one week before the January sixth insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021, Raskin shares his personal experience during those times. Raskin also mentions that he decided to write this book in response to the thousands of letters he had received after both his son’s death and the insurrection at the US Capitol. Read my full review here.

Mỹ Documents by Kevin Nguyen is a book that has rich, complex characters who bring the nature of unconstitutional detention to life in a profoundly meaningful way. It also excels at resisting the many narratives out there full of outdated one-sided tropes regarding the oppressor-oppressed relationship by giving real multi-faceted voices to those characters in the novel who are directly and indirectly affected by unconstitutional detention. This novel’s power lies in its nuance and humor and candor. Read my full review here.

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith follows the bright and resilient Francie Nolan as she navigates grinding poverty, family dysfunction, and the immigrant experience, ultimately rising above her circumstances through the transformative power of education and writing in the US.

Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could by US Representative Adam Schiff is a 2021 memoir detailing the threats to American democracy during the first Donald Trump administration. It blends personal background with a behind-the-scenes account of the Russia investigations and the first impeachment trial he led.

The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami is for literary nerds, those who enjoy retellings of lost or ignored histories, and those who want to learn more about Spanish conquests in the Americas in the sixteenth century. Read my full review here.

Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman is a remarkable new collection that reveals an energizing and unforgettable voice in American poetry and includes “The Hill We Climb,” the stirring poem she read at the inauguration of the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden.

1984 by George Orwell is a masterpiece of rebellion and imprisonment where war is peace, freedom is slavery, and Big Brother is watching. Thought Police, Big Brother, Orwellian — these terms have entered our vocabulary because of this novel. This story of one man’s Nightmare Odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory is a prophetic and haunting tale that is more relevant than ever before, exposing the worst crimes imaginable: the destruction of truth, freedom, and individuality. And many readers in the US are relating to it right now.

Burn Down Master’s House by Clay Cane is one of those books I’ll never forget, with its vivid characters who are based on real people who resisted and opposed chattel slavery in the US, and inspired others to fight against a system that was built on the subjugation of Black and Brown bodies. It will make you feel uncomfortable, very uncomfortable. It might even make you mad. And it will certainly make you sad. But hopefully, so does the mere concept of chattel slavery, as well as the centuries of horror it unleashed, and continues to unleash. Read my full review here.

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn examines the collapse of the American working class. Through intimate stories and data, they argue that compounding policy failures have created a ‘social depression’ of poverty, addiction, and despair, while offering systemic solutions to rebuild the safety net.

The Reformatory by Tananarive Due is a chilling historical fiction and horror novel set in 1950s Jim Crow Florida. It follows 12-year-old Robert ‘Robbie’ Stephens, who is unjustly sentenced to six months at the brutal Gracetown School for Boys for defending his sister, and his family’s fight to free him from the systemic horrors of the segregationist reform school. It is based on real places and events. Read my full review here.

Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang is a moving memoir that recounts her childhood as an undocumented Chinese immigrant in 1990s New York City. Through the innocent lens of a young girl, the book details the extreme poverty, racism, and constant fear of deportation her family faced while living in the shadows. It contrasts the Chinese name for America—Mei Guo, translating to ‘Beautiful Country’—with the gritty reality of poverty and sweatshops.

In A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind, award-winning bioethicist Harriet A. Washington exposes how environmental racism inflicts lasting cognitive and physical damage on marginalized communities. She dismantles racist myths about inherited intelligence, arguing instead that disparities in cognitive metrics are driven by toxic exposure and institutional inequity.

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark is a dark fantasy historical novella that reimagines 1920s Georgia. In this alternate history, the Ku Klux Klan are not just human bigots, but literal, shape-shifting demons called “Ku Kluxes” that feed on racial hatred. The story follows a small resistance group hunting these monsters to prevent them from bringing Hell to Earth. It is a visceral novel and I am always recommending it.

A Fighting Chance and Persist by US Senator Elizabeth Warren cover how and why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the lower and middle class, and demonstrates why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America’s government can and must do better for working families. She not only tells us what’s broken but details the work she’s doing to fix it and how we can join in those efforts.

The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past by Nate DiMeo is such a beautiful collection, but also difficult to summarize, as each story in the collection is so unique and interesting in its own right. This book of short stories will show readers from all sorts of backgrounds how history should be told: via narrative and storytelling. It will also prove that history can be engaging and based on thorough research without being boring, if it also includes key human elements and emotions when it’s being told. Read my full review here.

Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki is an important book to read right now. Quote from the book: “Exploring decades of research, I discovered that cynicism is not just harmful, but often naive. Hope and trust, by contrast, are wiser than most people realize. They are also skills we can build through habits of mind and action.” Read my full review here.

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell is a book about language, the Cultish language. And most readers will likely find it incredibly engaging. And what a relief that is, as more people need to pay attention to and learn about the language they use that surrounds them every day, which this book will help them start thinking about. Read my full review here.

A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present by Glenn Adamson is packed full of facts and information on the movers and shakers of futurology. The book starts with detailing how the turn from spiritual and religious beliefs to come to terms with the future shifts to a more secular and modern understanding of the future during the first quarter of the 1900s, then ends with an open-ended but surprisingly upbeat message: “We owe the future all the enthusiasm and imagination we can summon in ourselves.” Read my full review here.

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Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn’t Enough is a thought-provoking book by Iranian-American author Dina Nayeri that examines how society determines credibility. Blending memoir, reportage, and criticism, the book argues that being believed often relies on privilege, class, and the ability to perform trauma in a way that gatekeepers expect.

Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener offers nuanced insight into what it was like to work for a startup in Silicon Valley in the 2010s, and how it was so easy to become entrenched in a borderline cult-like world of CEOs with zero experience leading teams let alone growing companies, mandatory ‘fun’ and team ‘vacations,’ ‘actualization’ and ‘biohacking’ and usernames as real names, inane and diverse chat feeds, a skewed view of how reality looks outside tech bubbles, relaxed yet oddly intense office cultures and business networks, and weird cliquey language that surpassed and usurped programming languages and typical business jargon and everyday speech. Read my full review here.

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Christopher L. Hayes is a book that will have you reflecting on what you pay attention to (especially online, and on social media), why you pay attention to what you pay attention to, and why it’s so important you reflect on what you pay attention to on a regular basis. It’s a book for anyone wondering how and why we got to where we are right now as humans— perpetually reaching for our devices eager to learn something, be entertained, or forge human connections, yet inevitably feeling unsatisfied, anxious, and alone when we do. Read my full review here.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism is a 2025 memoir by former Facebook Director of Global Public Policy Sarah Wynn-Williams. The book chronicles her journey from an idealistic diplomat to a disillusioned insider, exposing the USA-based company’s ‘growth at any cost’ culture, unethical corporate behavior, and the immense, reckless power wielded by its billionaire leadership. Read my full review here.

No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson by Gardiner Harris is a book that will open your eyes to the routine and outright duplicitous practices of one of the best-known, frequently trusted, and largest pharmaceutical companies headquartered in the USA known today. It will shock you and make you rage and cry and scoff, and then some. By the time you’re done reading it, you will want to tell everyone all about it, as you will feel deeply and ethically obligated to do so. Read my full review here.

Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara is a unique book I highly recommend reading at the dawn of AI innovation. It’s been a while since I’ve read a piece of nonfiction as poignant and creative as this, as it is as informative and interesting as it is vulnerable and inspiring. Read my full review here.

In High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, journalist Amanda Ripley investigates the toxic, intractable feuds that hijack our minds. She distinguishes between healthy conflict—which pushes society forward—and ‘high conflict,’ a good-versus-evil trap where the conflict itself becomes the destination.

In Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, anthropologist Kristen R. Ghodsee argues that the traditional nuclear family and private property model are failing modern society. She draws on 2,000 years of communal experiments—from Pythagoras to modern ecovillages—to offer a hopeful, actionable guide to reimagining domestic life, co-parenting, and community.

The Power of Language: How the Codes We Use to Think, Speak, and Live Transform Our Minds by psycholinguist Viorica Marian explores how multilingualism and linguistic codes rewire our brains. It reveals that speaking multiple languages enhances cognitive control, fosters creativity, protects against dementia, and alters how we perceive reality and make decisions.

John Milton’s Paradise Lost is one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. It tells the story of the Fall of Man, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind’s destiny. The struggle rages across three worlds— heaven, hell, and earth— as Satan and his band of rebel angels plot their revenge against God. At the center of the conflict are Adam and Eve, who are motivated by all too human temptations, whose ultimate downfall is unyielding love.

Long Walk to Freedom is the autobiography of Nelson Mandela. It traces his journey from a rural childhood in South Africa to becoming the nation’s first Black president. The memoir details his anti-apartheid activism, 27 years of imprisonment, and his pivotal role in negotiating the end of institutionalized racial segregation. All nations and politicians can learn from his example and the lessons he shares in this book.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel set in the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian theocracy that overthrew the US government. Facing an environmental fertility crisis, the regime forces fertile women, known as ‘Handmaids,’ to bear children for elite, infertile couples.

The Trial by Franz Kafka is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, this novel has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) is a speculative fiction novel set in a dystopian 2020s where climate change and severe economic inequality have caused societal collapse. The story follows 15-year-old Lauren Olamina, who escapes her destroyed neighborhood to build a new community based on her hopeful, foundational philosophy, Earthseed.

The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins is a dystopian saga set in Panem, a post-apocalyptic nation comprised of a wealthy Capitol and 12 impoverished districts. To exert control, the Capitol forces each district to send one boy and one girl to fight to the death in the televised Hunger Games each year. There have been two other books added to the trilogy in recent years: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping. Here is my full review of Sunrise on the Reaping.

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June Baby by Shannon Garvey is a melancholic novel about dealing with grief when it is tied up with nostalgia and longing. It’s for those readers who don’t always need a fairy tale ending but enjoy an ending that feels like a true and realistic beginning. Though potential readers will also want to note that there is some suicidal ideation in this novel, multiple deaths of loved ones, infidelity, and discussion of abortion.

The novel begins with Ruth’s father sending her to Block Island after her mother dies of cancer when she’s seventeen. He sends her there to stay with Diana, a woman her mother knew when she was younger, whom Ruth doesn’t know. The two form a bond that lasts a decade, until Ruth is called back to the island for Diana’s funeral when she dies from cancer. From there, we learn bits and pieces of Ruth’s past nine summers on the island with Diana and Diana’s nephew, Charlie, who also visits her there every summer.

As Ruth confronts her grief of Diana’s passing, she also confronts her grief of losing her mother at a young age, feelings of resentment toward her father who shipped her off, and her unresolved feelings for Charlie, all while struggling to make ends meet. In all facets of her life, Ruth is struggling to understand the threads that tie together who she is and how she wants to reconcile her precarious past and future, which offers an intensely emotional and introspective ride for the reader.

At Diana’s funeral, Ruth learns of Charlie’s intention to marry someone else, right after she decides to tell him that she wants to be with him for good. And then she receives Diana’s last wishes for her, which sends her into a tailspin of self-doubt and uncertainty about what she’s doing, or should be doing, with her life. Meanwhile, she also gets tangled up romantically with an old friend on the island and learns more about her mother’s past with Diana, all while Charlie is being indecisive about how he feels about her, which makes her continue to question everything else she thought she knew about her mother, her past, her future, and herself.

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Full disclosure: I empathized with the main character in this novel in ways that most readers may not be able to, as my mother passed away when I was in my early twenties, a few weeks shy of my college graduation, when I was also waiting tables and considering what to do with my future without my college boyfriend who was making not-so-subtle plans to move to China without me, all while living in Florida and visiting beaches as a way to cope. While other readers may be able to sympathize with losing a parent at a young age or getting caught up in the confusion that nostalgia can bring while you’re grieving, or struggling to figure out their pasts and futures, it almost felt like this book was written specifically for me, and I’ve truly never felt that way about a book before. As I was reading this book, Ruth’s reluctance to commit and believe in a path forward for herself, let alone with anyone else, as she’s struggling to survive, all while dealing with such monumental losses, hit me right in the gut. In so many ways, this novel made me feel seen and granted me some space to reconcile a few things.

Admittedly, Ruth’s intense melancholy and indecisiveness, as well as her affinity for Charlie and treatment of Louis, might not make sense to some readers and might even frustrate them. But for me, it perfectly captures what it actually feels like to go through such intense loss and longing and uncertainty during pivotal moments in life, all at once, when things seem bleak but there are still different paths to choose from and glimmers of hope left if you’re looking for them.

I also appreciated the scenic details in this novel, as they made me feel like I was on the beach again, somewhere in between an unplanned vacation and day-to-day living. And I found the dialogue to be engaging, as it highlighted each character’s nuances and personality well.

Overall, I would recommend this novel to those who want to get lost in a story that will remind them that looking back doesn’t always need to keep them stuck in the past, or present, and that it’s okay to want a realistic, authentic ending without passionate romance. The ending of this novel is for those who are okay with choosing themselves and their future, even when it’s messy and they’re scared, and even when they’re still holding onto memories of those they have loved.

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Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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Week 1 (June 1-7) — Part I and Part II Chapters 1- 11

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The Hill by Harriet Clark is a coming-of-age novel that offers readers a steady stream of captivating prose that mimics its plot, stuck between the known and unknown. Readers in a more introspective mood will enjoy it, as well as readers who enjoy novels that force them to slow down and witness the intricacies of everyday life in another world rather than experience it at a hurried pace, which is unique for a coming-of-age story, and also what other readers may not enjoy about it.

The premise of the novel is revealed within its first pages: “To stay or to go, that is a question. But on the hill it wasn’t a question. Anyone who could leave left.” And the remainder of the novel is about young Suzanna grappling with her relationship to the hill, or Hillcrest, her mother who is incarcerated there, and her grandmother with whom she lives, who refuses to visit the prison, as she comes of age. Through dry humor and stories created, remembered, retold, and embellished, Suzanna grows up, reluctant to abandon her mother and start her own life, despite her grandmother’s and other adults’ best efforts, as she learns bits and pieces about their histories.

Without fail, Suzanna visits her mother every Saturday at Hillcrest until she comes of age, claiming she is as loyal as a dog, despite the death of the elderly around her, despite her grandmother’s disapproval and death, despite looming eviction, despite getting ready to graduate high school. And she seems to find comfort in the various places that seem to mirror the prison in the novel, as well— the museum with guards and artifacts stuck in time and place where she interns, and the apartments full of death and noise and lack of privacy that she frequents. Which makes sense for a girl who grows up visiting her mother in a prison. Where others see freedom stifled, Suzanna seems to see predictability and solace.

Over the course of the novel, Suzanna’s narrative and perspective matures with her as she learns more about what her mother did to end up in prison, what her grandmother did to end up in New York, and how their stories intersect and diverge with the one she is reluctant to begin writing for herself. As her grandmother encourages her to write her own story and leave her mother behind, Suzanna’s grandmother still needs her nearby, constantly and reluctantly offering her guidance on how to live as she dies, though not without mixed messages and morals. And as her mother lives her own life in prison, busying herself training service dogs and appreciating mundane experiences others on the outside take for granted, Suzanna experiences what predictable patterns and places look like. So, the irony is hard to miss when Suzanna ultimately discovers more of herself and who she wants to be inside the prison’s walls than outside of them.

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I enjoyed the introspective, straightforward prose in this novel the most. However, not much happens over the course of the novel and I did find myself periodically tuning out, until I encountered the next batch of disarming or interesting prose. Essentially, the novel ends where it begins. “Call this the call to adventure or call it what it was: choosing the life I had, which strikes me still as wise a choice as any.”

I also never found myself rooting for the main character or empathizing with her all that much, never ultimately caring whether she stayed or went or became incarcerated herself… which could have been the point? Though it still never felt like she made a choice in the end but that choices were made for her, that her path was decided for her. Even the runaway train ride at the end of the novel was decided for her, as it passed the prison without her taking action or deciding anything on her own, just as her missing her mother at the end was not her doing. So did she ‘come of age’?

I also felt like I was left in the lurch regarding Suzanna’s mother’s and grandmother’s supposed radical past actions and histories. While we got glimmers of what they did, who they were, and where they came from, their stories still seemed incomplete. Sure, this could have been intentional, as how the stories of their pasts were relayed reflect most children’s experiences when they hear about their forebears’ pasts. Yet in the context of the novel being responsible for revealing and reflecting on the consequences of their supposed radical pasts, it led to flatter characters, and a flatter story arc in certain aspects, I am afraid. Though many readers may not care about this.

Overall, I would recommend this novel to literary fiction readers who enjoy introspective prose with a hint of dry wit and literary symmetry that moves at a steady pace.

Here are some notable passages from the novel:

“A fact, well-known, that vows get tested. You promise you’ll come to a particular hill at a particular time, promise you’ll do it again and again, all your life. Then no driver on hand, and just like that, you don’t. The hill, the climb, the women waiting. The longer I stayed away the more it seemed I’d made the prison up or only imagined my time there. So that as weeks became months, the hill became something else—between real and unreal, at the edge of being forgotten or disbelieved. And my mother became something else too—more occasional and farther away.”

“This had not occurred to me and it pleased me to remember that there was in fact a place like the one I dreamed of for myself. Not a place that necessarily existed but that other people had imagined long before me and for their own reasons.”

“A great effort, it turns out, to stay where you are. No sooner do you let a sleepwalking stranger move into your home than news comes that you still have to leave.”

“A nostalgic choice, my mother called the museum. The most familiar option in the list of options I’d been given. But being in the gem room did not feel like going back in time. It felt, if anything, like a break from time.”

“‘... It wasn’t good, I thought, to treat the living like the dead.’”

“There were times still when the prison was extraordinary to me but my mother and I were ordinary to each other and if I left, we wouldn’t be.”

“Now the train window served this purpose: a lens so familiar I could imagine traveling with it into the unfamiliar. … Nothing was more familiar than the views from these windows, though the faster we went the more the views changed, scenes from an old life as seen from a new one.”

“Again the road rose, rose and stretched onward, and this was just how the world worked: it made you keep going, made you keep circling round.”

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Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke

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Week 1 (June 1-7) — Part I and Part II Chapters 1- 11

Week 2 (June 8- 14) — Part II Chapters 12- 27

Week 3 (June 15- 21) — Part II Chapters 28- 42

Week 4 (June 22- 30) — Finish Book

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Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond

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Week 1 (July 1-5 )— Prologue- Chapter 1

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Angel Down by Daniel Kraus won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and offers much to consider regarding war and human nature, or should I say the nature of men who war? The novel has been lauded for its unique, single-sentence narrative— no really, the entire novel is a single sentence that has no beginning or end, with every single one of its paragraphs beginning with ‘and.’ It’s also been lauded for how it blends genres like horror, allegory, and magical realism. Yet many readers may find it a bit gimmicky and superficial in the end. [Warning: There are a few spoilers in the rest of this review.]

The novel opens with a literal bang, and a promise for rebirth for Cyril Bagger, a con man who shirks the frontline by ensuring he’s relegated to gravedigging duty. He literally crawls out of the mass grave he’s digging, unscathed after a mortar blasts everyone else in it to shreds, covered in human body parts. He joins up with four other soldiers after the blast, who are then all ordered by their commanding officer, Lyon Reis, to end the shrieking coming from the center of the battlefield, in No Man’s Land. And they play Rochambeau (Rock, Paper, Scissors) to determine who’s going to be the sacrificial lamb to climb out of the trench to do it. Bagger ends up going with a fourteen-year-old kid soldier named Arno, who he has been looking out for and reading The Son of Tarzan to as if it were a field manual he gets to embellish. And they end up ‘saving’ and bringing back what appears to be a woman to their trench.

Shortly after, the soldiers determine the woman is actually an angel, as she has a glowing halo and is dressed like the Madonna in Old Glory’s colors and can grant “maybe-miracles” for the soldiers who start fighting and killing to possess her for what they believe she can and should give them or do for them. Then graphic scene after graphic scene ensues as each of the soldiers try to kidnap her, each meeting his own demise in direct relation to how he played Rochambeau. Until it is down to Bagger and Arno, whom Bagger has to make wagers with the ‘angel’ to save over and over again, until he threatens suicide and the angel spares him, but not until after she takes him to the underworld, where Bagger sees how human bodies are being forged into bullets and how the “... trenches of the Great War evolved into the entrenchments of ideology, of hatreds and superiorities and vanities and comforts and riches, most of all riches…”

The best part of this novel is how its narrative structure (a never-ending sentence that has no beginning or end) calls attention to the never-ending dread and carnage of war, allowing readers to internalize this lack of reprieve, this lack of a break. Since the characters never get a reprieve from the war, neither does the reader.

“... it could be male or female, human or animal, but whatever it is, it’s dying, dying slow, dying loud, ripple after glissading ripple of agonized lament, and Bagger, already weighed down in mud and blood, further heavies in the dreary certainty that the shriek won’t ever end, just like the war won’t ever end, like the carnage won’t ever end, it’s a sentence in a book careening without periods, gasping with too many commas, a sentence that, once begun, can’t ever be stopped, a sentence doomed to loop back on itself to form a terrible black wheel that, sooner or later, will drag each and every person to their grave,...” (p.6)

The novel’s structure, ending exactly where it begins, symbolizes the inescapable, unrelenting wheel of war. It acts as an indictment of the industrial and political machinery that continuously converts human lives into combat feedstock.

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There’s also a ton of religious symbolism in this novel, which shouldn’t come as a surprise as its entire plot revolves around an ‘angel down,’ who represents both a beacon of hope and a deadly burden. Instead of inspiring innate goodness in the war-weary soldiers, her presence amplifies their inner demons. Her light becomes something to covet, hoard, and exploit by the soldiers, symbolizing how humanity’s spiritual bankruptcy transforms the miraculous into an object of greed and violence.

Bagger’s red pocket leather Bible (which belonged to his father who was a bishop) also transforms into a layered symbol of sacrifice and parental protection. When it literally stops bullets, saving the protagonist’s life, its imagery of the Solly Madonna absorbing violence, the collision between human devotion and the brutality of the trenches is highlighted, and parallels Bagger’s personal inner conflicts regarding his parents and faith.

Likewise, Bagger’s and Arno’s obsession with pulp adventure novels function as a cracked mirror. These stories represent idealized, antiquated concepts of masculinity and heroism, which stand in stark contrast to the dehumanizing, industrial slaughter they are trapped in— though the inclusion of the pulp novels ultimately remain part of and uphold the overtly masculine tone of the novel itself instead of negating or subverting it.

The Great War is also portrayed as an unsurpassed mechanized slaughter, where soldiers are transformed into consumable resources and their ‘heroism’ is exploited for personal gain— which is a direct commentary on the commodification and capitalistic nature of war. Rather than heroic patriots, the soldiers are treated as interchangeable units of labor. They suffer and die solely to advance an absurd “war machine” fueled by the greed and vanity of military leaders like Reis. Cyril Bagger is also the embodiment of cutthroat capitalism. He survives not through valor, but by swindling his peers, using gambling debts and financial leverage to force poorer, weaker men to take his place on the frontlines. The discovery of a fallen angel in No Man’s Land becomes an ultimate test of morality, as well, because the soldiers fall into a frenzy of jealousy and paranoia, attempting to hoard or profit off the celestial being instead of universally recognizing her presence as a miracle. And, of course, there is the unforgettable imagery offered by the underworld war machine the angel permits Bagger to see.

Needless to say, due to its structure and symbolism and literary elements, I can see how this novel won one of the most coveted literary prizes. However, it did venture into tired patriarchal, gimmicky territory.

First, I was not a fan of the clichéd and stereotypical testosterone-addled cartoon-like characters and viscera suffusing this story, which is driven by a con man with a tropey black-and-white noir-style gangster voice who is constantly sensorily bombarded by oozing body parts, as that’s already saturated most stories about the Great War for decades now.

Sure, one could attempt to argue that the angel’s presence and aims in the novel complicates the male characters’ ‘I am a man so therefore should be afraid of real human feelings’ and ‘I love violence and will kill blindly because I only care about myself no matter what’ logic and behavior, which is extremely debatable, as the angel ultimately only exists in relation to the warring soldiers’ flaws, to point out their flaws, bringing no profound moral counterweight or meaning to the underlying patriarchal narrative overall, essentially saying something akin to ‘Oh well, boys will be boys, forever and ever and ever, amen, and there’s nothing I can do ‘bout that, so bye,’ and not much else in the end.

There is also a lot to be said about the willingness of the angel to be literally manhandled, because would an angelic entity with a moral compass and divine affiliation subject themselves to human-generated games of war with no real aims to end said war or human suffering, etc.? Admittedly, angels often serve as detached messengers and harbingers of truth and nothing more. However, the angel in this novel doesn’t successfully embody that essence, as it directly partakes in and instigates the soldiers’ human games of war, not maintaining the angelic detachment and objective distance central to other parables and narratives with angels in them— therefore, it cannot be read strictly as parabolic.

I appreciated the technical risk this novel took by embodying a run-on sentence to embody the never-ending essence of war, overall, but wouldn’t say it pushed the literary envelope in a profound enough way, or that it captured the essence of war with a truly fresh, literary (or human) lens. At least, not in a way that will resonate past another year or so. Still, readers who enjoy getting lost in the unrelenting deluge and carnage of traditional war stories won’t want to miss this one.

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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

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Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein is one of those books that pulled me in with its wit and candor right away, almost making me forget that it promised a poignant story about a young woman growing up in the late 90s during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. It had me laughing out loud and thinking deeply at the same time, which is a rare treat.

At the beginning of the novel, forty-something Jean Dornan receives an email from David Harwell, a professor she had an affair with during a study-abroad program in France when she was nineteen, who was in his forties at the time. The email invites her to his retirement ceremony and prompts Jean to seek out and reread her journals from that time in her life, leading her to realize that their affair took place during the exact same summer as the infamous Clinton-Lewinsky scandal—a parallel she completely missed when it was happening because she had been too caught up in David and her desire for him.

This realization sends Jean into an emotional spiral as she’s forced to reckon with her newfound empathy for what Monica (who was also young and only in her early 20s at the time) went through, and how her own affair derailed her life. At the beginning of her emotional spiral, she finds herself in a church basement and conjures the ghost of Monica Lewinsky, who ends up acting like a ghost-from-Christmas-past, guiding Jean as she unpacks the power dynamics of her youth, and the guilt and shame her affair with David caused, so that she can view her younger self with a more realistic and compassionate lens.

The majority of the book includes flashbacks centered around how Jean’s desire for David developed over the summer of 1998 as they stayed in a castle owned by an eccentric prince and visited and studied churches and their cultural and architectural histories with a small group of students and one other professor. In these flashbacks, readers see virgin Jean struggle with her budding desire for a married man who is kind and attentive as she is still trying to figure out who she is and what she really wants out of life. As they visit churches full of history and complex architecture across France, she is constantly comparing herself to the other students and doing what she can to get David to notice her (who is more than willing to oblige) as she learns about the history of the women upon whose sacrificed bodies many of the churches were built, who were all vilified and martyred for other men’s desires, as well as their own— all while hearing about what is going on with Monica Lewinsky over periodic radio and television broadcasts.

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The brief chapters covering the women saints and how they reached sainthood parallel the storylines of Monica and Jean, who are all continually shamed and punished for their desires, or lack of desires. By placing these women martyrs alongside Lewinsky, the novel inevitably challenges readers to consider why society only reserves sainthood or reverence for women who suffer for their chastity, while simultaneously punishing women like Lewinsky who assert their sexuality or transgress patriarchal boundaries. Through this novel, Lewinsky is reframed from a subject of tabloid ridicule into a modern-day martyr, as a woman who survived mass humiliation and came to embody resilience and grace, all while she helps Jean learn to forgive herself for her past desires as well.

This novel ultimately forces readers to reevaluate how young women are continually vilified, punished, and scapegoated for illicit affairs and missteps with older men, and forced to forgo their promising futures, while the older men (David Harwell and Bill Clinton) in these affairs emerge unscathed and protected by their power and status. At the same time, however, this novel never victimizes the women who participate in these affairs or depicts them as weak, and never depicts the men as creepy predators either— and it is because of this that it is able to successfully capture the complexities of how young women are meant to feel ashamed and get punished for their desires, while men (especially those in positions of authority or power) do not. Instead, it depicts how the older men in these affairs can carry on in their personal and professional lives as if nothing happened, while the young women must be the ones who change jobs and struggle with their intimate relationships and feel guilt and shame.

Most of all, I appreciated the humor in this novel. It made a difficult topic easier to explore on an intellectual and emotional level without ever outright demeaning anyone or losing the main purpose of the novel’s plot, although I can see how and where such humor could ruffle a few devout Christian feathers. I also thought the humor in this novel helped capture Jean’s struggles in an engaging and approachable way and ensured Monica’s apparition was relatable and funny but also reasonable and emotionally intelligent.

Yet I did finish the book wishing I had received more of Monica’s personal backstory for more context and empathy, as it seemed as if it was assumed readers would know the details of everything she experienced. I was also left wishing I had a better understanding of what Jean experienced during the decades between the affair and the email she received from David, as I felt much of that was glossed over.

Overall, I would recommend this novel to Xennials (older Millennials) who would like to revisit where they were during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and the effect it had on them, as well as those who like to laugh and think as they learn a little more about saints and religious history.

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© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

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