A Reader’s Guide to Literary Page-Turners

I get hooked on a book for all kinds of reasons. Either its plot is a razor, or the writing sucks me into a liminal place where I forget I’m breathing and neither food nor sleep matter all that much. I’m just there, existing, disembodied.

In other words, these are books that have made me forget how to tell time, and they’re mostly short, which has been great as our toddler has mastered running, shouting, and throwing things all at once.

Silencio by Clyo Mendoza
Águeda is mourning the death of her mother, and she thinks her father did it. It’s less a crime novel than an investigation of place and culture. Mendoza experiments with form and imagination in this short, magical-realist novel.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
In a small Irish town, a coal merchant discovers something that forces him to decide what he is willing to overlook. Keegan does a remarkable amount in a very short novel.

In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
A Swedish immigrant wanders across the 19th-century American West searching for his brother. It’s a Western stripped of cowboy mythology: lonely, strange, violent, and vast. If you were to ask me how westerns can push the genre in the 2020s, this would be the answer.

Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette
A mysterious woman arrives in a prosperous French town and begins exploiting the grudges and corruption she finds there. Manchette compresses a crime novel and a satire of bourgeois respectability into a little over a hundred pages.

Fat City by Leonard Gardner
A boxer novel that begot Denis Johnson. In the introduction to the NYRB reissue of Fat City, Johnson wrote, “I taught myself to write in Gardner’s style, though not as well. And now, many years later, it’s still true: Leonard Gardner has something to say in every line I write.”

If for no other reason, that makes Fat City a must in my book. Denis Johnson aside, Fat City is a novel of gray characters and bootstrap living—similar to Angels by Johnson, or Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter.

When I Sing, Mountains Dance by Irene Solà
This is a page-turner for those who love good writing. Not necessarily stunning plots, mind you, because that’s not what Solà is about. Insofar as there is a plot, it’s a family saga, but it’s equally about a place.

Look at this opening paragraph, and you’ll know what I mean:

We arrived with full bellies. Painfully full. Black bellies, burdened with cold, dark water, lightning bolts, and thunderclaps.

We came from the sea and from other mountains, and from unthinkable places, and we’d seen unthinkable things. We scratched at the rock atop the peaks, as if we bore salt, to ensure not even weeds would sprout there. We chose the color of the hills and the fields, and the gleams in rivers, and the glints in upward-glancing eyes. When the wild beasts caught sight of us, they cowered deep in their caves and crimped their necks, lifting their snouts to catch the scent of damp earth approaching. We covered them all like a blanket. The oak and the boxwood and the birch and the fir. Shhhhhhh. And they all went silent, because we were a stern roof and it was up to us to decide who would have the tranquility and joy of a dry soul.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
Speaking of Denis Johnson…The Johnson fans all claim Tree of Smoke or Jesus’ Son is his best stuff, but as a dad, I think Train Dreams is his most distinctly human. It’s also a western, sorta, and I’m a sucker for it.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
It’s a dark, vicious collection of stories set in Buenos Aires. In some aspects, the writing reminds me of Knaussgard, but in others, it’s alien. Magical. Dark. Creepy-crawly. These stories are delightful.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
At the heart of this book is a young woman growing up and her parallel growing relationship with her lover. Ishiguro has no issue writing unflinchingly about relationships, humanity, and sex. In some ways, it’ll make you cringe; in others, you’ll wonder why you spent so much time reading other things.