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@lukeshelf

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@lukenotjohn
reading mostly lit fic, poetry, social theory, & theology
hoping to make bookish friends & enemies

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10 months ago

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2 years ago

2022 was a year for the books…literally.

i ended up reading 85(!!) books over the past twelve months, & 15 of them were five-star reads. for reference, that’s equal to the amount i read the past two years combined, and double or triple my average annual five-star ratings.

i’ve always loved reading, but something shifted & deepened this year. i felt companioned by these books in a sincere, serious sort of way. insights from the nonfiction changed how i navigate the world, lines from the poetry reverberate in my memory, & characters and scenes from the fiction seem to resurface like (mostly) friendly ghosts.

here’s a shot of those fifteen faves 🤍 by @lukeshelf

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4 years ago

I visited LA for the first time in February and was enchanted as anyone by my hike through Griffith Park with the Hollywood sign overhead. Back in Ohio, I wanted to read something that might revive the experience and remembered hearing about this book about a queer mountain lion living exactly there. While the writing wasn’t quite the vivid, atmospheric scene-setting I’d imagined, it was something singularly distinct and delightful in its own way.

Writing in the earnest, lonely anthropomorphized voice of our orphaned mountain lion, Hoke offers a surprisingly affecting portrait if you can settle into the story. There are interesting parallels drawn between hunger and desire, collapsing blood/lust into an experience that can be difficult to differentiate. The novel also explores the ways that the climate crisis and urban expansion has displaced the animal kingdom only to render humans homeless too. These themes are partially obscured by the straightforward, childlike voiciness of the text but are there all the same.

While I think of this is a pretty special little story, I did find its pacing a bit too quick and wish we’d gotten to spend some more time getting to know the lion in his not-so-natural habitat before he makes his way indoors and the plot starts to really drive the narrative. by @lukeshelf

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13 days ago

“Order out of chaos. Divinity in happenstance. Meaning, meaning, meaning; everywhere I turned as a child, there was meaning salving and saving me, telling me I was correct, telling me I was saved and powerful and protected eternally, so long as I kept believing.”

This was one of my most anticipated reads of 2026, and given that I was so primed to love it, I felt a bit stung by the ways it didn’t quite meet my hopeful expectations. While formally inventive with the flipped halves, I imagined that structure having more immediate bearing on the two narratives than I felt it did. The memoir section, juxtaposing Lacey’s fervent childhood religiosity with the faith she later devoted to an abusive partner as an adult, is compelling but uneven. I’ve been struck by how Lacey writes about faith in her fiction in a more realized, nuanced sort of way (particularly in The Answers and Pew) and so it wasn’t surprising to see that she had her own supercharged history with Christianity.

There was a lot of insight to be gleaned from her musings on spirituality and belief, but they seemed more slippery than substantive here. This largely reads not as a (post)spiritual memoir but a break-up postmortem that employs faith as a framework for thinking of the relationship. And it fell victim to one of my least favorite memoir/autofiction trends in which we meet an endless carousal of “characters” from the writer’s life who are of course deeply important and distinct to them but read as interchangeable and random to the reader.

I read the fiction half second and really enjoyed it as a claustrophobic chamber piece. It may actually be some of my favorite writing from Lacey — expertly dialed in to achieve such a tense tone of looming dread. It also manages to touch on some interesting themes within its relatively short length. As a whole, the quality of the book is still high, but I think my personal disappointment colored the experience quite a bit. It’s one I’d like to revisit in a while and see how it fares with a more neutral starting place. by @lukeshelf

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16 days ago

Although this didn’t reach the heights that BWWAY or NP reached for me, I still really enjoyed my time with it. Rooney expands her scope a bit to primarily write from the perspective of two men and in particular the ways she stylized each of their voices to read so distinctly. It seems like Peter’s more terse, direct, verby stream of conscious has turned a lot of people off but I found it really fitting for his characterization (and the audiobook reader did a great job with it too!). He and Sylvia were my favorites here and I liked reading about them as individual characters and exploring the unique contours of their relationship, one I don’t think I’ve seen depicted before. Peter’s early parentification and eventual alienation and emotional abandonment are shown with heartbreaking success and I loved how Sylvia maintained such a sense of dignity and agency as she navigated her chronic pain.

With that said, for a lot of the book, I couldn’t shake a feeling that we were dwelling on the wrong things and avoiding riper material. Naomi is especially underdeveloped and I never fully grasped the depth of her dynamic with Peter. Similarly, I didn’t entirely understand why Margaret was so smitten with Ivan, especially given the weight of concern she felt about public perceptions of their relationship. Their scenes together felt the most repetitive to me and where I wish things had either been condensed or redirected. Lastly, while I appreciated eventually understanding the root of Peter and Ivan’s conflicted brotherhood, the presenting problem of Peter’s judgmental comment feels relatively petty to ignite such a huge reaction from Ivan that ultimately shapes much of the book. I would’ve appreciated a few more scenes of them actually interacting, either before or during the conflict.

This reads a bit more critical than I actually felt while reading, but I think I get that way when a book feels like it’s just slightly missed the mark, and especially when I know Rooney’s capable of delivering a near-perfect book for me. That said, this may still be her book I’d recommend most broadly and for those considering where to start. by @lukeshelf

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2 months ago

“let us, lords above us & within,
be useful to our neighbors
& tender to their wounds.
be more bandage than blade
unless the blade is needed.”

I would contrast Bluff from the previous collections I’ve read from Smith as more of an open wound than a scar. The poems here have a livewire quality to them: raw, unfiltered, and perhaps a little less dialed in or disciplined than what I’d associate with their previous work. Alongside some excellent entries and a steady stream of Smith’s classic cutting turns of phrase, there are also sprawling poems that feel unshaped and overgrown and some formal experiments that didn’t work for me. “Minneapolis, Saint Paul” and “My Beautiful End of the World” are unique features that read almost as prose essays rather than poems. Many of the poems focus on George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the ensuing protests, riots, and uprisings that unfurled in response. As a native to Minneapolis who writes with a deeply rooted sense of place, these events register especially vividly and viscerally.

And yet, there is a thesis that complicates and arguably undermines the impact of the work. Smith opens with an “anti poetica” that asserts “there is no poem greater than feeding someone [...] no poem to free you” and these denouncements of poetry as a meaningful political act recur throughout Bluff. At one level, I appreciated Smith’s incorporation of dissonance, wrestling with their own role in revolution and implicating readers to do the same. Their dismissal of Obama’s rhetorical hope and the ways Smith was swept up in his unique presidential iconography were especially strong. But I could never quite get past the reality that this was happening within the context of, yes, a poetry collection. It landed a little too “have your cake and eat it” for me in a way that was more distracting than evocative, leaving me to wonder how much here was rage, trauma, and grief and what was political strategy and vision? by @lukeshelf

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3 months ago

This is good, great even, in the way that essentially everything Toni Morrison wrote is. She’s unrivaled in her ability to vividly depict characters so wholly and so succinctly, choosing the perfect vignette that somehow brings their whole history or essence into clarity. Minor characters here like Lily and Prince leap off the page and I thought both of their relationships with the leads offered some dark levity. However, the two leads feel a lot more vacuous than usual for Morrison, lacking the dimensionality I so strongly associate her characters with. Instead they seem to play more functional roles, bringing the plot points to bear. Their dynamic as siblings with a parentified bond is relatable, but goes underexplored for being the core relationship of the book.

My biggest critique by far is the ending which simply comes too soon and after an oddly straightforward, underwhelming climax. With that said, the fragmented work she does with traumatic memories here is really compelling and offers a satisfying reveal towards the end. Once I found my bearings within the constellation of characters, I was able to get swept up into the story and Morrison’s gorgeous prose, but couldn’t help but feel like this as an abridged draft of a fuller story when it ended. by @lukeshelf

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4 months ago

“The enormity of our task, to turn the world around. It feels like turning my life around, inside out. If I can look directly at my life and my death without flinching, I know there is nothing they can ever do to me again. I must be content to see how little I can really do and still do it with an open heart. I can never accept this, like I can’t accept that turning my life around is so hard, eating differently, sleeping differently, moving differently, being differently.”

This is such a vulnerable gift to offer, granting a seemingly quite uncensored account of Lorde’s experience with breast cancer and coinciding mastectomy. As a palliative care chaplain, there is a gold mine of insight around existentialist reckonings with mortality and meaning-making, reflections on the alienation of a hospitalization, and vivid accounts of physical pain.

These are parallel with her more overtly political writing, and all of this content is intermingled with the quotidian accounts of day to day life as you’d expect from anyone’s journal entry, even Audre Lorde’s. The latter offer some unexpectedly comedic moments here — her wishing the woman assigned to support her post-op was a lesbian and her outrage at the implants that are pushed upon her. The latter point ultimately becomes a central image of the journals, however, as Lorde advocates for an embrace of the sort of confrontational exposure inherent to a visible mastectomy as something that ought not be hidden. The final chapter is especially strong as Lorde articulates the systemic contributions to cancer that are fundamentally political and therefore demand political solutions. by @lukeshelf

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4 months ago

“The feeling of grieving something that isn’t yet gone, and whose disappearance isn’t fully certain, nor can its timeline be predicted, is an eerie, off-putting one. How do we mourn the abstracted casualties of the future? Grief can feel like a physical mass. Where to put it?”

My experience of reading Immemorial was to, at least for a time, find a place to put it. Markham’s vulnerable, elegiac text was impactful far beyond its slender length led me to expect. I recognize that, as a millennial, the climate anxiety and grief and urgency I feel is not unique to me, but there was something so grounding to essentially have so many of my thoughts and feelings reflected back to me here in Markham’s insightful writing. She manages to articulate so many of the paradoxes at hand: how to mourn what may be, the warring tensions between immobilizing grief and active hope, the simultaneous sense of culpability and powerlessness. And, notably, this is not a book seeking solutions to the crisis but instead focuses on how to steward, navigate, and honor all the interior experiences we have in light of it. For Markham, one way forward is through memorials.

I loved the dives she makes here into the history of Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Memorial and then her later work constructing a ghost forest in NYC as well as the NRA Children’s Museum, a “caravan of ghosts” in empty school busses stationed outside Ted Cruz’s office following the Uvalde shooting. There is also an intriguing throughline focusing on the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, a small org that helps people define and create new language and supports Markham’s attempts to find a word for her amorphous feelings. It’s easy to judge this endeavor and larger project as solipsistic, but in my experience there’s profound need to genuinely acknowledge and articulate our emotions in order to integrate and transcend them. The book’s tender, subtle gestures towards hopefulness and dedication towards the future feel earned and achieved through the effort that preceded it. by @lukeshelf

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4 months ago

Orringer holds no punches in this pretty devastating collection of stories about girls coming of age. What I found most striking is how attentive these stories were to the more subtle moments that are often the most impactful despite their quietude. In general I think these are the experiences that were made for short story storytelling, and this is a prime example. With that said, these are not accounts of the mundane. There’s a sense of real danger throughout, either looming ahead (mother’s with late-stage cancer, lecherous older men) or already past (fatal car accidents, cruel bullying), and it’s noteworthy that Orringer for the most part allows her young characters to be vulnerable, uncertain, and afraid. So often writers are tempted to showcase a plucky, precocious heroine who is preternaturally resilient and even stoic in the face of real threats. This collection is all the more powerful in its quiet contrast, evoking a strong sense of what it felt like to be a young child perceiving something was dangerous without fully having the language or wherewithal to articulate how or why.

The first story, “Pilgrim,” is the most clear example of this dynamic and probably the strongest of the book. “The Isabel Fish” is another strong one that depicts the extremely fraught dynamic between a sister and her older brother, both grieving his girlfriend’s death in clashing ways. “The Smoothest Way Is Fully of Stones” and “Stations of the Cross” both earned points from me for their religious explorations, and the former was especially interesting as it considered tensions between orthodox and reformed Judaism. “What We Save” is also great, restructuring a somewhat cliched story about star-crossed regret effectively through the eyes of its child narrator. The ones I didn’t mention didn’t make quite as big an impact on me but were still strong features of a truly excellent collection. by @lukeshelf

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4 months ago

the part of my brain that reviews books is on strike this year but I did get to go to NYC recently and procured some very exciting books there. I had extremely limited luggage space so the criteria was that they had to be slim. by @lukeshelf

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5 months ago