Library
This library is a record of books that I’ve read, with a written response to each. There are no ratings here. I limit recommendations, and I do not write with the aim of reviewing. A book might make me think about something else, I may engage extensively with one passage, or I might evaluate the argument of the text as a whole. The texture of my responses will shift depending on the text.
One caveat: the write-ups from before 2024 read more like book reviews, because that’s what they were. Most started life on Goodreads, a few in graduate seminars, back before this site existed.
Some of my responses are short (perhaps a few paragraphs) while others may be entire essays. The amount written is a reflection not of the quality of the book, but of my own thinking.
My books are listed in reverse-chronological order by when I completed them. Each entry is listed in full bibliographic form, with a short annotation below. Some of these I own, others I do not.
2026
Two refusals shape Nasr’s Sufism: a perennialism that is not relativism (all traditions from one source, none interchangeable), and the rule that the esoteric is nothing without the exoteric, no shortcut past shari’a. The Garden of Truth is the Divine Reality where all is One, reached through knowledge, love, and goodness. It found the part of me already drawn to Sufism and left me where al-Khidr does: I search, but I also wait.
I read it less as science fiction than as a treatise on alterity: the truly Other cannot be reached, and what we seek in the cosmos turns out to be mirrors rather than other worlds. It stayed with me for its ending, where Kelvin reaches out to a wave that envelops his hand without ever touching it. No contact.
Clarke, Susanna. Piranesi. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.
Captivated less by the plot than by Clarke’s attention to a vital, living world and her refusal to resolve whether Piranesi’s animist ontology is objectively true; lingered most for its humane, layered picture of a self that protects rather than pathologizes what it cannot bear to remember.
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2004.
Found Robinson’s spare, hedging prose a quiet masterclass in epistemological humility, and her open-ended reckoning with grace, race, and the prairie’s lost abolitionism genuinely unsettling; came away thinking that to write like this would be to count a life a success.
Kingfisher, T. What Moves the Dead. Sworn Soldier, 1. New York: Nightfire, 2022.
Kingfisher reworks Poe’s House of Usher as fungal possession, drawing on the Weird and on real mycology: fungi as genuinely alien life, the perfect engine for cosmic horror. It’s her attention to detail: the fungus can’t pronounce labial consonants because it’s still learning to speak, a logic so exact it makes the impossible feel alive.
May reframes winter (seasonal and personal) not as death but as transformation, the same move St. John makes with the dark night, the alchemists with the nigredo, astrology with Pluto. Against my own year-and-a-half winter, it was less a map than validation: someone else went through this, and the other side was waiting.
Dawson, J. R. The Lighthouse at the Edge of the World. New York: Tor Books, 2025.
I was more captivated by Dawson’s atmospheric prose and her themes of grief and impermanence than by the plot; the book is eerie in Fisher’s sense, presence where there should be absence. Its teaching about death: not to fear it but to treasure the ephemeral, the drop returning to the sea.
Brooks’ premise is that knowing another person resists optimization; it’s the opposite of efficiency, all patience and unhurried attention. The part I acted on: I asked my father how he learned guitar and learned more in forty-five minutes than in years. The same move a productivity system can’t perform, because the system assumes you already know what you’re looking for.