Personal, Communal, Existential, Structural.

What I Read November 2025

Why does November always feel like someone handed me a blinking device, said “cut the wires, good luck,” and wandered off to make a sandwich? November wasn’t catastrophic. I mean, no one actually handed me a bomb, none of my kids ran away to join a third-tier circus, and absolutely nothing went wrong on Thanksgiving (though my holiday prep was questionable, as usual). Like I said, November simply feels like that all happened.

(*le soupir*) November is just that month. It’s a little dumb and a lot chaotic and kinda drafty.

I don’t care much for dumb drafty chaos, so I hid and read. And by accident, subconscious choice, or cosmic joke, I read four books that each dwell in chaos. Personal chaos! Communal chaos! Existential chaos! Structural chaos! What a spread!

Sloane Crosley mines the human experience (hers, yours, mine) and comes up with glinting stories to share. James McBride unleashes riotous confusion in a Brooklyn neighborhood, where it morphs into grace. Katherine May slows everything down until the mess reveals a mossy, watery texture. Jennifer Egan fractures time and form, letting chaos spool into something Pulitzer Prize-winning.

Look, I get it. Life (November) is mostly uncontrollable, and yes, it can still be meaningful, funny, periodically beautiful, and let us not forget the glory that is this. But, sheesh, can things settle down a little? Or can we at least keep the chaos to the page? I can always pause that kind of bedlam for a moment by putting the book down to go make my own sandwich or cut the wires or whatever.

Which is all just to say, here are the books I enjoyed enough to finish this month:

• Deacon King Kong by James McBride

• Enchantment by Katherine May

• I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Note: For sanity and scale (mine, yours, and the internet’s), what follows are the openings of each review. Full versions are linked below.

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Deacon King Kong by James McBride

The world of Deacon King Kong absolutely pulses from the get go. We start with a cinematic, panoramic sweep that situates us in late-1960s Brooklyn, where, the Cause Houses are a fully realized sociocultural ecosystem. And because the neighborhood is so fully formed, and its residents carry the whole spectrum of human feeling, the world of the book feels piercingly real and often achingly funny.

Aging deacon Sportcoat shoots a young drug dealer, Deems, in broad daylight. The mystery of why Sportcoat did this is the narrative aperture, and the mystery expands, matryoshka-like, into a larger one: how does an entire community swallow, digest, argue over, misremember, and metabolize such an event? Through this violent and abrupt act, McBride explores community, memory, and the layered structures of power shaping the neighborhood…

(continued here)

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Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May

Katherine May’s Enchantment rearranges your insides. It’s a little uncomfortable until you realize you can breathe! Wonderful!

She defines enchantment as “small doses of awe” (which sounds about right. Larger doses would be too much). Her small doses of awe are the everyday sparks of joy, moments of breath, and our decision to pay attention.

The book is organized into four sections: Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, which sounds a bit woo-woo, but each section reads like a grown-up, old-time fairy tale, the kind scuffed and weathered and passed forward by wind and rock and tide. May documents a lived folklore of how humans can and should make meaning in noticing. Even the structure is soothing.

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I Was Told There’d Be Cake By Sloane Crosley

Sometimes the universe takes an ordinary Tuesday, shakes it like a snowglobe, spritzes it with lemon juice, then publishes it as Sloane Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake.

I Was Told There’d Be Cake wanders through human experiences from childhood mishaps, to mall culture, to bosses who probably should not have been in charge of anything, to boyfriends who definitely should not have been in charge of anything. These worlds are recognizable, but tilted just slightly so we can see their underbellies.

(continued here)

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A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Sometimes literary fiction still pulls off a magic trick. Sometimes you open a book and discover an entire small galaxy.

Which is to say, I just finished Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad.

It’s marketed as a “novel in stories,” though that undersells it. It’s quite not a traditional novel, but it’s also not 13 stand-alone stories. It’s something hybrid, slippery and recombinant and fluid.

(continued here)

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And there be the November reads. As always, I welcome any recommendations! Read any good books lately?