2025 in Review
2025/12/24
The year is almost over. I don’t think I could put together a halfway compelling listicle, so instead here are a couple of reflections on the past twelve months in reading.
I Read Don Juan
Despite being a lifelong reader, and a reader of literary fiction in its many forms and flavors, I have never been a serious poetry reader. I barely even bothered to glance at the poems in the New Yorker, and I assumed everyone else ignored them as well. When I did actually read one, it only fed my ungenerous suspicions about poetry. But earlier this year I read Lord Byron’s mock heroic epic, Don Juan. For those who do not know it is a retelling of the Spanish libertine, inverted to satiric effect, so that the hero is the hapless victim of circumstance and more experienced women. It is also highly biographical, topical, and sensational. It has war, cannibalism, Orientalism, and a ghost. It consists of 17 Cantos and written in stanzas adhering to an impressive regular rhyming scheme. It is clear Byron meant to keep on writing it as long as he lived, but he dies young, and the 17th Canto is left unfinished, the story left on a cliffhanger.
My reading of Don Juan was slow, conducted in the dark, on my phone, usually while waiting for my child to fall asleep. But I did have some help. Whenever I got stuck, which was frequently, I copied the stanza in question into the Claude app, and asked the AI to give me a line by line commentary on the poem, explaining the various references. The output was invariably enlightening. I was even able to get Claude to explain the convoluted grammar in certain passages when subject, object, and verb became tricky to identify. In rather tiresome fashion, it would conclude each essay by informing me that the stanza was a fine example of the satiric form that Byron was famous for. It was tiresome, but the more I read, the more I began to appreciate how each stanza was structured with a satiric punch at the end.
So now I am a poetry guy, I guess. Picking up something like Paradise Lost seems like a much less daunting task with an impressively well read LLM ready to offer commentary. I even read the occasional New Yorker poem now. I recently found some unintended humor in the following lines of Last Time By Nick Laird.
I dropped Turk at the station and back home
stacked the shed for a bit, and was up the ladder
cutting back the multiform rose when the radioannounced we were, now, at war. So I got a beer
from the fridge and brought Andy’s new translations
of Bashō to the hammock.
It is a poem in the vein of Ecclesiates, about commencement of the War in Ukraine. You can date the poem events of the poem pretty easily due to Laird buzzmarketing a friend’s new translation of Bashō.
Yes. Artificial Intelligence
Here is a stanza from Don Juan that I particularly liked:
‘Where is the world?’ cries Young, at eighty—‘Where
The world in which a man was born? ‘Alas!
Where is the world of eight years past? ’Twas there—
I look for it—’tis gone, a globe of glass!
Crack’d, shiver’d, vanish’d, scarcely gazed on, ere
A silent change dissolves the glittering mass.
Statesmen, chiefs, orators, queens, patriots, kings,
And dandies, all are gone on the wind’s wings.
The stanza is a reflection on the passing of time and how increasingly transient the given state of affairs begins to look as one regime gives way to another. (Ask an LLM to give a little commentary if you struggle to parse it.) I found it particularly resonant not only as political winds change, but as it has been becoming clear that generative AI was changing society. I remember what the internet used to be like as a teenager, and then when Youtube and Facebook arrived. I can see what it is like now. There is much to dislike about the effects, and soon we will be talking about the pre and post-slop eras. The slop is real, and so is the resentment. You can find it in the opinion pages and in the comment sections. AI is insunuating itself into our way of life. The Venture Capitalists funding it are forcing it on us. Or forcing it down our throats, even. For every hype man there are also the haters. The hype men imagined a future that was delusional, and the haters who are in a state of principled denial. It isn’t just that AI might not reach AGI, might not solve all our problems, might not match the sci-fi inspired visions of tomorrow that have been guiding the principal architects of these companies. It it not simply that AI might have bad consequences. To the true haters generative AI is a scam and a fraud and it doesn’t work and it is a stochastic parrot and a theft machine and that it is also has the power to drive our children stupid and insane. That the AI bubble is going to burst, and when it does, then everything might just go back to the way it was before. The real issue is that AI does actually work very well in many respects, and might only improve.
There has been a great deal of commentary about generative AI, and I can’t say I’ve been impressed by much of it. A lot of it seems reactionary and lazy. But I think the following pieces are very good:
Somers has been on the AI beat for a while, and has a good grasp of the technology, and you can read other pieces he has written in the New Yorker. His piece is good because it appreciates that we now have an utterly unprecedented insight into how the human mind works. It may far from complete, and in certain respects it may be misleading, but nothing we had before was even remotely close to this kind of progress.
My general verdict on LLMS is that they are a fantastically powerful and useful tool that I should be allowed to use, obviously. But I’m not so sure about everyone else. And this really is one of the fundamental problems.
I Started A Book Club
In late 2024 I started a book club, and some way into 2025 we really got into the swing of it. I had a list of rules to guide what we would read:
- Recently published novels.
- Literary fiction, as it is broad construed.
- Not too long; below 300 pages, ideally.
- No books about writers and writing.
- When we discuss the book, we hold off a final thumbs up/down until the end of the discussion.
I initially placed a restriction on translation, mostly because I felt that novels written in the Anglosphere, though we ended up including quite a lot of translated fiction.
These were good rules, in that they had the desired effect. Within what is considered literary fiction there is a wide variety of material. Because the books are recent releases, their reputations haven’t been solidified. There certainly have been disappointing books, even among those picked out from prize shortlists, but because they have not been overlong, few of them overstayed their welcome. And because they are short, I don’t think we’ve has a single instance of anyone having half read the books. Book selection is fun, as far as I’m concerned, and not particularly difficult. Even if you were totally clueless about the literary scene, the major prizes have shortlists that provide more than enough candidates.
So far we have done the following:
Creation Lake - Rachel Kushner
Orbital - Samantha Harvey
Glorious Exploits - Ferdia Lennon
James - Percival Everett
Blue Light Hours - Bruna Lobato
Let Us Descend - Jesmyn Ward
Rejection - Tony Tulathimutte
The Vanishing World - Sayaka Murata
Intermezzo - Sally Rooney
Perspective(s) - Laurent Binet
Perfection - Vincenzo Latronico
Audition - Katie Kitamura
Universatily - Katie Brown
The Emperor of Gladness - Ocean Vuong
The Emperor of Cake
2025/12/21
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
It is revealed somewhere just before halfway through The Emperor of Gladness, Ocean Vuong’s latest novel, what the secret ingredient in BJ’s famous cornbread is. BJ is the manager of the East Gladness branch of the fast-casual, always-thanksgiving, red roofed restaurant chain, HomeMarket. She runs a tight ship, taking pride in her work while also hoping her amateur wrestling act might go pro. And the secret of her cornbread is that it is cake.
“Listen, we deceive people by calling this bread. Bread sounds wholesome. You tell the public this is boring old bread, but then it hits their tongues and–boom–it’s cake! And even if it’s the shittiest kind of cake, which it is, they’d think they’ve eaten the best bread in the world. […] But the question is […] At what point, my friend, does the corn bread become corn cake? Can you locate the crumb where this deception happens.”
I was rather struck by this revelation, because if you swapped “bread” for “literature”, then you might be tempted to level the accusation at the novel. To accuse it of lacing itself with something sugary and unwholesome and unsatisfying, something artificial and cheap, in order to pass it off to an under-discerning public who might pick up this book, much like the diners at HomeMarket eagerly consume the food they are served, without understanding that they are consuming reheated pap from industrially packaged plastic sacks.
The protagonist of The Emperor of Gladness is Hai, a first generation Vietnamese immigrant to America. He is a queer college dropout who is addicted to pills and ready to throw his body and life off a bridge to be swallowed up by the cold river below. He does not. He is talked down by an elderly lady, Grazina, who invites him to live with her so that he does not have to return home to his mother who thinks he is off in Boston, at medical school. He soon finds himself in the role of her carer, taking the place of the nurses assigned to her by the state, but who never appear. And when her funds are insufficient to cover the costs of feeding them the cheap ready meals she favors, he finds work at the HomeMarket where BJ and Grazina are merely two of the many clearly delineated characters he will meet.
Most of the novel is split between his relationship to Grazina, whose mental state is rapidly deteriorating, and his life with his coworkers at the HomeMarket. For those who want to argue that this novel is laced with cake, then there is plenty examine in the crumb. There is a sentimentality to the characters that Vuong presents. Everyone has a tragic dimension and everyone is found to be beautiful. There are gnomic fragments such as the opening line: “The hardest thing in the world is to only live once”. Vuong owes some heavy literary debt. When decribing the culinary arrangement of the HomeMarket menu, we are getting a full force David Foster Wallace pastiche: “All this was mixed with the artificial flavors and aromas wafting from the vats of industrially produced food: diacetyle, acetylpropionyl, acetoin, and hydroxybenzoic acid, along with the metallic scent of colorings like Sunset Yellow FCF, tartrazine, Patent Blue V, and Green 3.” This reads like the pharmaceutical inventories that clogged up the footnotes of Infinite Jest, and if Vuong is making some parallel between them and food additives, then I think the point seems a little glib.
I think the cake accusation is not completely untrue, but misguided. Vuong has essentially combined up-lit with the trauma plot in a particular kind of way. The characters can be broad, and the humor of goofy and sitcom adjacent, but that is a perfectly legitimate strategy in that chess game we call writing a modern literary novel. For those who do not keep up with what we must now accept is current literary discourse, Vuong has been getting blowback. There are some really vicious reviews, that to anyone who is only familiar with the novel, it must surely seem utterly deranged. As far as I can see this is in large part an extra-textual imbroglio. There are entire cohorts of American writers out there who resent someone getting a MacArthur “Genius” grant for cornbread laced with cake.
Night
2025/12/20
Night by Edna O’Brien
Mary Hooligan lies in bed, recollecting in a high modernist stream of consciousness the various incidents of her life. Most of those incidents are sexcapades of some sort, but there is also her family, her home town, her musings on her final resting place. Growing up in Coose, in rural Ireland, she flees to England after being caught in the act with a “jackeen”, that is to say some city boy, after the fancy dress parade on St Peter and St Paul’s day. Hooligan’s proclivities mean that Ireland might not be the best place for her. She crosses the sea to England where her various liaisons see her engaging with the full range of society, from a Duke who wants to make an honest woman of her, to a penniless waiter who ruins his chances with his moaning. She has lived a rich life, if you are to judge by the breadth of her romances, even if not the depth. “I can’t cavil. I’ve had my share, even a lumberman from Scandia with a very radical thrust. A motley crew, all shades, dimensions, breeds, ilks, national characteristics, inflammatingness, and penetratingness.”
It is Hooligan’s bracing openness to all manner of encounters, and her particular way of words that give her story its charm."…I even had a bit of a yen for a Black Mass, which as I understood it, entailed semen in the belly, a great gout of demon’s shampoo." she muses when the Duke propositions her for something a little beyond the ordinary. It is not merely stream of consciousness we are getting here, but O’Brien’s full creative drive to play with language. But the reader will do well to keep up. Hooligan is not much concerned with the usual business of table-setting or introducing the guests as they arrive. Reviewers have been ready to compare Hooligan to Joyce’s Molly Bloom, and it is hard not to imagine that O’Brien had her in mind, and wrote hoping to claim her place in that tradition. You don’t write a novel like this by accident.
The back of my copy describes Mary Hooligan as “memorably unhinged”, “compelling”, and “garrulous”. I find the idea of Mary as memorable interesting. In fact I think the contradiction about both people and characters like Mary is that however striking their arrival in other people’s lives, they are a gone soon after. For many of the men she encountered, I suspect the memory of her would be as slippery as Mary’s own recollections. There are those who she has a more lasting bond with: an unsympathetic ex-husband, a solitary father, a son who we learn of mostly through his mail. But these relationships put Mary in a bind. They are shadows of a more perfect love that has eluded her. After declaring her desire to be buried alone, early in the novel she asks, “Do I mean it? Apparently not.”