I was feeling that I’ve been listening to a lot of popular froth, so I chose this novel about a Turkish-American freshman at Harvard. It’s very insightful about very bright, insecure young people in a rarified environment. Selim falls in love with a Hungarian Senior, a manipulative guy who seems to enjoy exercising power over her (and seems to be hoping that he can get her to throw herself at him, presumably so he can have sex with her without feeling any responsibility himself). Her charm is that she’s naïve but has a lot of personal integrity. I got a bit impatient with the minutely dissected love story, but still, the novel is compelling.

I loved this novel about a lap dancer/stripper at a seedy men’s “club” in San Francisco. She kills her stalker, gets 35 years in prison, loses the only thing she really cares about, her little boy. The novel combines her memories of growing up feral in S.F., life in prison, stories of the friends she makes there. I spent my teenage years in San Francisco and Kushner nails it. She read the audiobook herself. It was absolutely brilliant.

I saw this on a recommended list, but confused the writer with Patricia Highsmith. Turns out it’s a wonderful memoir-like novel about a woman who is a successful blogger and social-media wit, but is addicted to an essentially empty life online. Her sister has a baby with the same syndrome that created the Elephant Man, whom they all love and who, in her short life, gives meaning to their lives. Beautiful and heart-rending. Lockwood is a poet, and her language is gorgeous.

I’d read this before and enjoyed it, but saw it again on a list of books with a claim to being a “great American novel.” It is—and how. A beautiful piece of writing, certainly one of the best noir novels ever written, probably one of the best Jewish books, too. I loved it, and I loved hearing it read.

I really liked most of the stories, and found that I’d read many of them elsewhere, including my favorite Bog Girl and Black Corfu, stories that start with a bizarre premise and make it produce utterly convincing results. What an imagination this woman has. I’ll definitely come back to this book for inspiration.

I loved this book. It’s an exploration of what it takes for a Black man to exist in a racist society, but it’s also a crime story, set in 1960’s Harlem and beautifully developed. The lead character is a guy whose father was a crook. He’s achieved some respectability at the proprietor of a furniture store, but he’s a fence on the side. Great moral ambiguity. The reader was superb.

This novel about Thomas Mann felt like a biography much of the time, although it dramatized moments of family conflict and revealed the queer fantasies of Mann, who apparently never or seldom acted on his natural impulses. I think the problem may be that Mann was an intensely reserved and private man (forced to be, by his sexual orientation, but also by culture, coming from north Germany.) It was hard to get at his real feelings. Anyway, it was engaging throughout, and I enjoyed it.

I really loved this novel about the imagined lives of five children who were killed in a V-2 rocket attack during the London Blitz. What if those children had lived? What would their lives be like? Spufford follows all five lives in roughly 15-year intervals, from elementary school to their early 70s. The stories are completely engrossing and very moving. It was read by the English actress Imogen Church, who is brilliant. I mentioned her in a tweet promoting this book and she responded with a thank you.

I’ve been reading good things about this story collection for quite a while, but when I got it, I realized that I’ve read a couple of the stories in Best American Short Stories and that I follow her on Twitter. She’s terrific, an old-fashioned writer who creates vivid characters and situations and lets them drive the plot. Among my favorites was Boys Go to Jupiter, a story of cascading racism that begins with a confederate-flag bikini.