My reading habits have become so compulsive, I’ve started to consume books somewhat rapidly/rabidly, ignoring proper digestion etiquette and simply moving onto the next course before I can get the gas out. The solution to this seems easy enough, write down my thoughts before they fade into the ether of my subconscious. Who’s to say if it will work. Anyway, welcome to my monthly Reading Roundup.
Read more: Reading Roundup – February 2025
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
It took me well over a decade, but I finally sat down with this one.
“The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” is a seminal text for me as a writer. It’s one of those stories you read in college that changes how you look at a story, at reality and its relationship to merit, and at the very ways we try to say something when we write.
Yet, I hadn’t read a single other piece by García Márquez. With Netflix creating a series and nervous about succumbing to watching it without having read the book, I scooped a used copy of One Hundred Years and got down to work.
It was worth the wait. Probably better because of it. This one is a marvel. There’s the repeated use of family names, of Targaryen-like incestual desires—but it all serves to help construct a wobbly foundation of politics, theology, and magic and then tear it all down.
At one point, a character says, “What shocks me about you … is that you always say exactly what you shouldn’t be saying.” I thought that was pretty metal.
I wonder what a version of this book looks like in 2025, if it would be dragged down by “Big Ideas” instead of focusing on the story. Maybe Netflix will show me.
Either way, very satisfied with this one. Kudos to this dead man. He made me feel very alive.
Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah (2010)
My good friend Bella has been on a reading tear herself, so I offered to read whatever she was reading next, for the sake of friendship and all, and because I like sharing a text. So, that’s how I ended up reading a novel by Kristin Hannah—a writer I’d never heard of, but seems to be pretty popular.
How to be charitable about this … Reading Winter Garden was an easy experience. The pages flipped quickly, and I was happy to sit with it, maybe because I knew I’d be grabbing a coffee to talk about it and share a laugh.
But this book is bad. The sentences are bad. The story is bad. The dialogue is atrocious. The structure is interesting at first, then turns completely absurd. It reeks of “I owe my editor a draft so let me write something”—which we’ll return to below—and probably could’ve been half as long.
Reading the way these characters speak to one another, it makes me think the author has never been in a real relationship. I get the impression her ideas of dating, and marriage, and even families, come from pop culture dramas like 90210, The OC, or One Tree Hill. Everyone is as snippy as a twelve-year-old. They speak with melodramatic venom.
Let me caveat here: I am not the intended audience for this. There are those who read for the twist-and-turns of commercial fiction and there are those like me who read to be wowed by big ideas packaged into tight sentences. So, for those who love a book like this, more power to you. I’m just happy you’re reading. Don’t let my opinion stop you from having fun.
Soft Core by Brittany Newell (2025)
A couple weeks ago, I brought this one to the bar to read on my lunch break and a woman and her two friends approached me to ask, “Is that what I think it is?”
“What do you think it is?”
“Well … you know…”
“It’s about a stripper, who becomes a dominatrix, and her missing ex-boyfriend.”
“Is it spicy?”
The thing is, not as spicy as one might think. Maybe I’m desensitized. Maybe I’m deranged. I thought Soft Core pulled punches when it came to opportunities for spiciness.
Soft Core has plenty working for it. The setting, both internal (strip clubs, submission rooms) and external (San Francisco), offers much to pull from. There’s a late-night texture that lends itself to the muddled, murky “truth” that’s at the heart of the plot.
There is also a splendid cast, from our protagonist Baby, her ex-boyfriends, her co-workers, and the sprawling tapestry that is her clientele. We love the weirdos out there.
I think the hiccups for me came at a sentence-dialogue level. Newell is a strong writer, but not quite a polished one, and I’ll be very curious to read her next project to see what growth may come. I think the spoken dialogue between characters could’ve been sharper, less tv-like.
All that said, there’s an open-ended quality to the story, a mistrust with the narrator in question and her experience that I was into. Worth a read, despite the underwhelming spice.
Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Ackner (2024)
Technically this carried over into March, but whatever. I’d read Brodesser-Ackner’s first novel Fleishman Is In Trouble around the time of its paperback released and had a great time. For commercial fiction, it had a tight narrative and some snappy writing. I remember finishing it and searching “Books like Fleishman… “
I won’t be doing the same for Long Island Compromise.
Like The Winter Garden, this reeked of “well, I owe my editor something.” The writing is pretty lazy and uninspiring at times, the dialogue even worse (though not as bad as The Winter Garden), and the plight of the characters — oh, I’m not rich anymore, damn — doesn’t make for a page-turner.
Which is unfortunate, because there are moments (like Beamer’s manic bender that closes his section about a third through the book; Jenny’s escape into a virtual video game called Mogul; Phyllis believing she was de-aging because she’d developed systemic scerloderma) where Brodesser-Ackner shows us she can do it. There’s an artist in there, just not much art in this book.
Consider Fleishman, which is a marriage story turned on its head. It offers something rich in the landscape of divorce, co-parenting, and what it means to (re)discover yourself. Even when Fleishman turns a little insufferable and vicious, there’s a grace with which Brodesser-Ackner approaches the subject.
There isn’t enough like that in this one. Which happens, I guess.
Caleb Michael Sarvis 