Waterline, by Aram Mrjoian: All Happy Families Are Different

Tolstoy famously wrote "Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This is, of course, bullshit. Well, the second part is probably right, but the first part makes no sense. What even is a "happy family"? Does a "happy family" require that every member of the family is happy 24/7?  What happens when a happy family suffers a tragedy? Do they immediately become in irredeemably unhappy family? 

Aram Mrjoian's debut novel Waterline is a beautifully rendered portrait of a previously happy family, the Kurkjians, who become an unhappy family when tragedy strikes. 

Brothers Edgar and Karo, live next door to each other with their wives and families in Grosse Ile, Michigan, a small community south of Detroit. When Karo's daughter Mari commits suicide, both families are jolted from their quiet, middle-class lives. 

Mrjoian's portrays each family member's attempt to come to terms with the trauma over the course of a couple months in the immediate aftermath of Mari's death. One goes on a cross-country roadtrip. One finds relief in pot and booze. One, has an affair.  

All the while, the legend of their patriarch Gregor, who escaped the Armenian Genocide and heroically helped save members of his village, casts a contextual shadow over the family's post traumatic resilience. In fact, I'd argue that family legends -- not how families are unhappy -- are what make even happy families unique.

I loved this book -- read it in two days. (I can't help but think I when I read a book so quickly that at some level it must be frustrating to the writer to spend so long writing, polishing, and publishing a novel, only to have it whisked through like a dinner buffet. Sorry, Aram!) Mrjoian writes with subtle humor, deep insight, and sharp wisdom. He's a joy to read, and I can't wait to see what he does next! 

The New Dork Review Best Books of 2025...So Far

I thought it was strange that "best of the year so far" lists started appearing in mid-May this year. What's happening? Way too early! Does Esquire Magazine not know how to count? (Because if you're going to do a mid-year "best of" list, you have to at least wait until the halfway point of the year, right? I know, I know, Old Man Yells at Cloud.) 

But so, now that we ARE past the halfway point of the year, here are my six favorite books of 2025 so . 

Home of the American Circus, by Allison Larkin -- I rather like this quote from my original review of this fantastic novel, so here you go again: "The novel is about how to re-carve out your space in the world when you basically have to start from scratch. It's about choosing your friends and the people you love carefully...and cutting out the people in your life who hurt you, even when they're family. Family is a privilege, not a responsibility."

The Heart of Winter, by Jonathan Evison -- One of the highlights of my year so far is this conversation at Chicago Review of Books with Evison about this novel -- his best yet, in my view. This was the first 2025 book I read, and it'd be a massive upset if this sweet tale of a 70-year marriage doesn't wind up on this same list at the end of the year, too.

So Far Gone, by Jess Walter -- Jess Walter, as you know if you read this post, is one of my all-time favorites, and this book feels like something of a "greatest hits" album for his career. In the best possible way.

The Antidote, by Karen Russell -- This is easily the biggest surprised-that-I-liked-it-so-much book of 2025 so far. A multiple narrator, magical realism, historical fiction...that somehow just works amazingly well. Part of the reason it works amazingly well is that Russell writes sentences that leave you breathless. 

Deep Cuts, by Holly Brickley -- This is the recommended-to-me book of 2025 that now I can't stop recommending to everyone else. A story about the fraught process of collaborative creation, especially when feelings get involved. 

The Savage Noble Death of Babs Dionne, by Ron Currie -- This is the best genre-bending novel of the year so far -- a thriller with the heart of literary fiction. I was so excited to hear Ron Currie was back this year, and even more excited at how great this novel is. 

The Whyte Python World Tour, by Travis Kennedy: Don't Need Nothin' But a Good Time

In John Wray's recent metal novel Gone to the Wolves, there's a scene at a party in late-1980s LA. The characters, who are into death and extreme metal, take in a full room of glammed-out buttrockers and wonder, wouldn't this whole scene just come crashing down if one person were to look around and laugh at them. I mention that now both because that is an absolutely hilarious observation, and because it's a perfect preamble to this review. 

Sure, the 80s glam/buttrock/hair metal scene seems objectively funny in retrospect. But what if there was a method to the hairsprayed, headbanging madness? In Travis Kennedy's hugely fun debut novel The Whyte Python World Tour, we are taken on a wyld ryde with the world's greatest glam rock hair metal band as they quite literally endeavor to change the world. 

Wow, is this book fun...and yeah, a lot silly. 

Our star is one Rikki Thunder, a drummer for a just-hanging-on hair metal band called Qyksand. But Rikki finds his fortunes turn when a beautiful woman named Tawny (if you didn't read her name and, like me, immediately think of this 1987 Whitesnake video, well, I'm sorry your sexual awakening wasn't more fun) enters his life. At first, Tawny seems like a typical 80s metal groupie, prowling the Sunset Strip for her next score. But as Rikki soon learns, Tawny is much more complex. She gets him an audition for the up-and-coming band Whyte Python, which he nails, and the band begins its quick ascent to rock stardom.

But here's the question: Can butt rock really change the world? In the waning days of the Cold War, it just might. Whyte Python whips around the world, playing for rock-starved audiences behind the Iron Curtain, as various intelligence agencies and secret police organizations jockey for control of the band's tour and the hearts and minds of its fans. 

The flap copy for this novel describes it this way: "Crafted on the satirical knife-edge between high suspense and headbanging hilarity." I'd say it very much crosses the line into hilarity -- it's more spoof than satire. But what it does well is make you keep turning the pages to find out what ridiculous goofball scheme these rock stars will get up to next. And of course there's a big twist. 

Unlike Whyte Python's power to change the world, this book may not change your life. But it will leave you with so many good laughs. If you dug the Mark Wahlberg vehicle Rock Star or the more recent Netflix movie Metal Lords, which my brother Geoff and only partly facetiously call "the greatest movie of all time," you'll love this book, too.

Like a butt rock song itself, it's pure brain candy -- 400 pages of dumb fun. I had no idea this book was in the world until a few weeks ago when the brilliant Liberty Hardy of Book Riot fame posted about a new novel that's an "80s metal band spy adventure." I freaked the f&*k out, honestly -- talk about a book written squarely in my wheelhouse. And it delivered: What great fun! Bret Michaels even makes an appearance. 🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘

The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong: Beauty in the Sorrow

The heavy metal band Trivium isn't your traditional heavy metal band. To accompany the band's crushing guitar riffs, frontman Matt Heafy writes poetic, evocative lyrics based on Greek myths, traumatic events from his childhood, and art, war, and history. I love the stories in the band's songs as much as I love their sound.

When I picked up Ocean Vuong's stunning new novel The Emperor of Gladness, it only took a few pages before Trivium's song "Beauty in the Sorrow" became the theme music for this read. Sure, a heavy metal song and a literary novel may sound like an odd pairing. But odd pairings are very much the point of The Emperor of Gladness. A major theme is that we should look deeper into the disparate, and when we do, we can often find commonalities.

Vuong, of course, is also known for his poetic, evocative prose, and though this is the first time I've read him, I suspect this novel is fairly representative of his style. What surprised me about this book, though, is how readable and accessible it is. Sharply crafted sentences. Images that make your jaw drop. But also, characters who are doing interesting things, have fascinating backstories, and interact with each other such that even if there's not much plot, you still read along quite quickly.

The Emperor of Gladness is set in 2009 amidst the Great Recession in a small, drug-addled, rusty town in Connecticut. It's about two sad (indeed, sorrowful) characters who form an unexpected symbiotic relationship which blooms into a deep friendship. When we first meet 19-year-old Hai, he's about to jump off a bridge and end his short, drug-addicted life. But Grazina, an 82-year-old Lithuanian woman, sees him and talks him down. Grazina, who is descending into dementia, knows she needs help and so invites Hai, who has no where else to go either, to live with her. The story follows the two of them as they lean on each other to navigate this confusing world that is stacked against both of them.

If that doesn't exactly sound like a page-turner, I'm here to tell you this novel will surprise you in so many ways. There's a scene set in a slaughterhouse. One set during an amateur wrestling show at a dive bar. And lots of space dedicated to the day-to-day of a crew of fast food workers. Not your usual fare in hyper-literary novels. How does this possibly work?  

It works because it's all so relatable. The novel is about finding support and friendship in unexpected places. It's about sifting through the myths, lies, and misinformation with which we're constantly pelted to find truth. And it's about finding elegance amidst the chaos and sadness of modern life -- the beauty in the sorrow. 

Look for The Emperor of Gladness on lots of year-end "best of" lists, and don't be surprised if it takes home one of the Big Literary Awards, as well.

Shelf Lives, Vol. 4: A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving

Do you remember the book that turned you into a CAPITAL R Reader? What I mean is, do you remember the book that moved you from a casual fan of the printed page to a person deeply in love with books and willing to spend the rest of your life surrounded by them, immersed in them, thinking about them constantly? 

That book for me was John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Whole buncha John Irving novels on my shelf.

Many readers can probably cite more than one book, and if I'm honest, I could too -- but Owen Meany is the main one. Owen Meany is a book that came to me at exactly the right moment, as these books tend to do. If you're lucky, you only get a handful of books over the course of a lifetime that do that: Come to you at exactly the right moment, and as a result, literally change your life. 

If that sounds too dramatic, or like a too-rosy or apocryphal interpretation of something long in the past, I assure you it is none of those things. Owen Meany is a book that not only made me a lifelong lover of books, it literally altered my trajectory.  

It was December 2001. I'd graduated from college in May of 2000 and had spent the next eight months working for a catering company, trying (but not that hard) to find a "real" job. Amazingly, magazines or newspapers just weren't hiring new Writing Intensive English graduates for staff-level writing jobs. 

When my money ran out, I had to abandon my apartment in Milwaukee and move back home to Ohio with my parents. I was miserable. Missing all my friends. Embarrassed that my life hadn't started yet. Starting to despair that life ever would start. 

Then I read this book. I loved it so much. It was the first book I stayed up all night reading. I wrote in my reading journal the day after finishing: "Well, I finished this novel at 4am last night and I’ve been thinking all day what to write here about it. I still get the chills when I think about how absolutely awesome it was." 

What those lines lack in profundity or craft they make up for in impact. I still get chills, now, when I read those lines, remembering my state of mind after finishing. Just absolutely destroyed, awed, amazed. 

Owen Meany is a beautifully crafted, heartbreaking story about lifelong friendship. It's a novel about finding your destiny, about identifying what it is you are supposed to be doing, which for me I realized at that moment was trying to find more books like it. And if I couldn't find more books like that one, I knew the quest would keep me happy for however long I got to stay on this floating rock in space.

As importantly, reading this book shocked me out of my life-malaise, and helped me understand I needed to turn things around. Within the year, I'd moved out of my parents house and had my own place in Dayton, and within a year of that I finally got my first job writing at a magazine back in Milwaukee. 

Since Owen Meany, I've read more John Irving than just about any other writer. Though his novels lately have been, um, uneven, I still love the warmth of his prose and his unusual casts of characters. He has a new novel out this fall titled Queen Esther, and I see this as an absolute gift. He's 83 years old now, so who knows which of these books will be his last. 

If you've never read John Irving, I can't recommend Owen Meany enough. I can't tell you it'll have the same impact on you as it did on me. But I can tell you it's a beautiful novel, a beautiful piece of art, and truly a book that changed my life.