Top 6 Authors I Miss the Most

Here is a question I like to discuss frequently with my book nerd friends: Which writer, if it were announced that a new book by them was forthcoming, would cause you to freak out and lose several hours of your day searching for details? That is, which writers do you miss the most? 

Until recently, Chad Harbach would've been high on my list. In fact, when RoscoeBooks owner Erika sent me a photo of an ARC of The Brightness she got at booksellers conference earlier this year, not only did I audibly gasp, I couldn't breathe for a few seconds. (I just finished reading The Brightness, and yes, it was worth the wait.)

Part of the equation, but not all of it, is time elapsed since the last book. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, it's true. So I think a writer with a long gap between books becomes much more freak-out-worthy. 

Look, I know writers don't owe us anything. And now, in the midst of trying to write my own novel, I finally fully realize how fucking difficult it is. So don't take this too seriously: It's just a fun question to consider.

Also, while it would be fun to think about the question for dead authors, I'm keeping this to writers who are still alive, and presumably, still working.

So here's my list: 

6. Nicole Krauss -- Krauss's 2005 novel The History of Love is quite literally one of my favorites of all time -- quiet, elegant, and profound. Her last novel was Forest Dark in 2017 (there was a story collection in 2020, too). Okay, so this is fun: In googling to make sure I had the years of her books right, I discovered Krauss DOES have a new novel coming in Sept. 2027. Woohoo! And yes, I freaked out!

5. David Mitchell -- Mitchell's last novel was 2020's Utopia Avenue, and he's usually on about the 6-7 year plan between books. So...aaaaaannnnny minute now? No other writer can be counted on to so thoroughly blow your mind as David Mitchell. 

4. Jonathan Tropper -- I was texting with my friend Doug the other day about Tropper's fantastic 2007 novel How To Talk To a Widower. And it occurred to me not for the first time that he's probably never coming back to fiction. Which made me really sad. His last novel was (the now presciently titled) One Last Thing Before I Go in 2012. Tropper has made it big in TV, creating and writing hit series like Banshee and Your Friends & Neighbors. It's a safe assumption the money's a bit better in TV than in book publishing. But if he were ever to come back to books, boy, would I be ecstatic. 

3. Barack Obama -- Dear Barry, I hope this finds you well. I'm writing just to check back quickly on the overdue second part of your memoir (after 2020's A Promised Land) you promised us around 2023 or so. Let me know how things are looking, and if we can slot your book into our 2027 reading schedule. No worries if not. But we NEED it badly. 

2. Gillian Flynn -- I mean, right?! Gone Girl was 2012.

1. Dexter Palmer -- Bit of a deep cut here, but Palmer's novel 2016 Version Control is one of the more criminally underrated novels of the last decade. He published another little-read novel in 2019, but nothing since. I'd kill for another.

For real now, tell me who is on your list of most-missed authors!

The Insanity and Joy of Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle Series

Recently, my friend Mike sent me an Instagram Reel captioned "POV: your friend who's always reading an insane book" and it's a guy joking about reading Moby Dick at the beach and The Epic of Gilgamesh on a plane and War and Peace to his dog before bed.

I responded: Wait, am I that friend?

Reader, I am that friend. 

But it's only with the perspective granted by a few months' time that I can now see clearly how reading six volumes of autofiction by an irascible Norwegian writer might be seen as insane to many other readers.

Yes, so back in June of this year, after an on-again-off-again two-year odyssey, I finally finished all six novels in Karl Ove Knausgaard's epic 3,000-plus-page My Struggle series.

Why? Why did I do that? Honestly, because I enjoyed the first one, and maybe against all odds, continued to enjoy them. (Maybe that's the most insane part.) I'm being purposefully self-deprecating here, but I'm not alone in my insanity: Enough high-level readers, from Zadie Smith to New Yorker critic James Wood have raved about these, as well. 

When I started this series back in the summer of 2024, I just wanted to know the answer to a simple question: Why do these work? Why do readers like Zadie Smith and James Wood love them? When I got through the first three, I wrote about why I thought they'd been working so far and why I was enjoying them. Basically, despite being a truculent jerk, he's really relatable -- and his mundane, everyday struggles are rendered in such a way that you often go, "Yep, I know what that's like."

But was that relatability really enough to draw me through 3,000 pages? It was. But just barely. Book 6 is 1,200 pages and contains a nearly 500-page section that's a close read of a German poem, a long look at Hitler's biography, and a bunch of other literary theory that is, not going to lie, eye-crossingly dull. This last book in the series was like running a marathon, and suddenly the only hill on the entire course is at mile 25. But I made it.

Speaking of marathons, another reason I'm glad I read these is the same reason why people enjoying doing hard things: When you finish a hard thing, you get a sense of accomplishment. Readers read for a variety of reasons. Among them for me is that I like a project. And this was certainly that. When I finished these novels, in addition to mostly enjoying the reading experience, reading these felt like doing something productive with my reading time, like I'd set a goal and completed it. Does that sound insane? Maybe it sounds insane. 

But relatability and accomplishment aside, there is much to be learned here is well -- another important reason to read. These novels are about a writer's life -- that is, how he sees the world and translates it from head to paper. In that sense, these books were inspiring and helpful to my own modest writerly aspirations.

Finally, one last reason I read: Dude is an absolute trainwreck. He makes terrible choices. He drinks a lot. He fights with everyone he loves. He constantly shoots himself in the foot (figuratively). And he's completely honest and forthright about everything bad he's done, knowing full well you're judging him harshly as you read. All that is incredibly entertaining.

Look, I know these books probably have limited appeal. I'm certainly not trying to talk you into reading them if they don't sound interesting to you. I'm just telling you why I read them: Because they brought me joy. I looked forward to reading the next one when I was between books. And I'm sad they're over. Hey, the people who are the most insane are often the happiest, too.

(Hey, have you heard about William T. Vollman's new thing? A Table for Fortune is a four-volume, 3,000 page box set publishing Oct. 6. Who's with me?! 😅)

A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan: What Is It Like to Be Human?

Dan Brown’s latest novel The Secret of Secrets is all about an intriguing concept called noetic consciousness. When I read the book last year, I was like “Huh. Fascinating. I wonder if that’s actually a prevailing theory. Or is it just sort of a Brownian crackpot theory of consciousness, like the Da Vinci Code stuff?”

So to learn the answer to that question is the main reason I picked up Michael Pollan's new book, A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness. Hey, there are lots dumber reasons to read nonfiction, right? 😅

It turns out, Brown's plot device is as good a theory as anything else going right now. We actually know very little about consciousness — and Pollan admits he knows less after finishing writing the book than he did when he started.

Consciousness, like cosmology, has the problem that there is no way to study it from the outside. We can't leave the universe to observe it externally. And similarly, your consciousness is what allows you to think about being conscious. And that just blows it. By observing it, you're changing it.

Pollan takes us through the prevailing scientific and philosophical views of consciousness, starting, interestingly with a question of whether plants are sentient, conscious, or something else. That discussion gives us a baseline way to think about consciousness in animals and us. 

There's no agreed upon definition of consciousness even, but the most commonly used phrase to describe consciousness is "what it is like to be" something. If you can tell, say, what it is like to be a bat, then that bat is conscious. But what is it like to be a tree? Harder question. 

Speaking of hard problems, Pollan devotes much ink to the "hard problem" of consciousness — pinning a specific biological part of the brain (or in the case of plants, something else) or chemical function to “Aha, that’s consciousness.” So far, we can’t do it. Which makes the "tuning" theory of consciousness, that are brains are just tuned to an external collective consciousness and we're receiving signals like a radio antenna (incredibly simplified), intriguing to some (me included) for now.

There's a discussion of consciousness in artificial intelligence -- not just whether it's possible, but whether it's already happened. Probably not, to that latter question. Pollan details the case of the Google engineer who got fired for going public after claiming a chatbot was sentient. Pollan subtly makes fun of the guy and guys (they're always guys) like him: Maybe they're just really lonely. Of course, it's more detailed than that, but that's the tenor. 

There’s even a foray into psychedelics — a way, like meditation, of expanding consciousness. Even some leading scientists are beginning to think that there is something to studying psychedelics from the standpoint of how they alter our consciousness and divorce us from the Self.

Even if reading the book leads to more questions than answers, what it does is give you the framework of knowledge to be able to consider those questions. And that's why I liked it. Pollan does tend to insert himself into the discussion maybe a little too frequently for my taste, but he's an affable intruder. And we don't mind so much that he's there. Glad I read this. My brain hurts a little, though. Can someone pass the magic mushrooms?

Famous Men, by Julie Buntin: Should Art, and Ourselves, Be Separated from Artist?

In Claire Dederer's whip-smart book, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma, she ponders the difficult question about what we as consumers of art should do about the art created by terrible men. Should we always separate art from artist? Sometimes? When? How? If we do separate art from artist and consume the art of terrible men, can we still enjoy the art of these men with "biographical stains"? The answers are not universal and every person must carefully examine these questions for themselves -- often for each individual case (Roman Polanski? Woody Allen? Norman Mailer? Philip Roth? Etc, etc, etc -- there is no shortage of terrible famous men who made/make great art). 

In Julie Buntin's new novel Famous Men, she asks us to go even further; to ponder not just whether we should separate art from artist but whether we should separate ourselves from artists with whom we might have a personal relationship when we know they do deplorable things. 

Famous Men is a novel about nuance -- about sexual power dynamics, #Metoo, and mutually beneficial, symbiotic (transactional?) relationships that maybe aren't as anchored to equal ground as they might seem on the surface. And it's a novel about writing and art and learning to find your way on your own in a brutal world. 

Wilhelmina (Will, to her friends) grows up, fatherless (a key detail), in the small town of Greening, Michigan. The otherwise forgettable town's claim to fame is that it's the birthplace of famous writer Nathaniel Fellow. Will's mother works in the cafeteria of a fancy boarding school Nathaniel attended, and when teenage Will discovers the poetry Nathaniel wrote as a student at the school and evidence of an encounter between her mother and Nathaniel as young people, she becomes deeply interested in learning more. She moves to NYC and she writes and she manages to insinuate herself into Nathaniel's trust and spends the next decades of her life hunting truth -- about her life, about poetry and literature, about friendship. 

It's almost wearisome at this point to complain about the lost art of considering nuance in this hot-take culture. But this novel is a smack-in-the-face wake up call to remember there's always a story, context, and more than meets the eye behind what appears to be a simple issue. 

And my goodness, Julie Buntin is a magnetic writer! This is my first time reading her (her debut Marlena was a bookstore favorite a few years ago, but I never got to it) and I'm mesmerized by her detail and description. But she keeps us quickly moving, too.  

I really, really loved this novel. I picked this up on a whim based on this fantastic interview at the Chicago Review of Books. And it turns out to be a favorite of the year. But I need you to read this too and tell me what you think. I highly recommend you do! 

On Reading Dungeon Crawler Carl and Letting Your Geek Flag Fly

I am likely one of the nerdiest readers you know. I love long and stupidly complicated and sometimes really obscure (sometimes in public, even -- ugh, so performative😅) literary novels. So believe me when I tell you I'm in no position to turn my nose up in haughty dismissal at any book trend. 

But when the Dungeon Crawler Carl series became ubiquitous this summer, I thought, nah, not for me. No way would I, a person who has never played Dungeons & Dragons and hasn't touched a non-Mario Kart video game since grade school, possibly enjoy these books. I didn't even know what LitRPG meant. It sounded like a new club drug.

But...One way to talk yourself into reading the book du jour when you're not sure you'll like it but want to read for cultural literacy's sake is to plan to write about it. Motivation! 

So I recruited my bookseller colleague Adi Alsaid to do a Critics in Conversation piece with me at the Chicago Review of Books. In the piece, we discuss how we -- both of us primarily literary fiction readers -- talked ourselves into reading this book that's far outside both our comfort zones, Adi's experience with the audiobook, and whether Dungeon Crawler Carl is the beginning of a LitRPG trend. 

You can read that conversation by clicking this button.

But here's the spoiler: Yes, Dungeon Crawler Carl actually IS a good time. It's really goofy and a lot silly, but it moves as quickly as a book like this must. It is literally like reading a video game. I will say, even through about the first 200 pages, I still wasn't sure what the hype was about and WAS sure this wasn't for me. But by the second half of this first novel in a planned 10-novel series, the actual plot starts to take shape (as opposed to the somewhat repetitiveness of fighting monsters and collecting prizes and learning about the rules), the stakes are raised (beyond just dude and his talking cat need to survive), and I got swept up in the story. 

So yes, to distill it to its essence, Dungeon Crawler Carl is just a lot of fun. A sugary and geeky piece of brain candy. And no, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.