Ben O'Connell Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Ben O'Connell

J. S. Barnes’s The City of Dr. Moreau is an entertaining sequel to Wells’s Victorian sf/horror classic. Told as a series of vignettes, similar to another excellent Wells novel, The Shape of Things to Come, Barnes perfectly captures Wells’s spirit. It’s a great romp. https://t.co/TuiEIrd1k0

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Ben O'Connell

Stephen King’s latest, Billy Summers, has a few tangents and coincidences that could veer into contrivance territory in less capable hands. Only the fictional memoir embedded within the novel fell flat for me—and even it serves a purpose in the end. It’s a decent thriller.

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Ben O'Connell

Middlemarch by George Eliot may be the greatest novel I’ve ever read—it’s vast, perceptive, hilarious, and smart as hell about human relationships of all sorts, especially marriage. I loved it so much that I listened to the audiobook as soon as I finished reading it. https://t.co/WgzSTdCEvd

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Ben O'Connell

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay—An ageless woman gets a gangly misfit into punk rock. And, maybe, more? Tremblay seems to have had a great time playing with narrative voices while writing this, and it’s infectious. https://t.co/FBud6SYszc

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Ben O'Connell

As soon as I hit enter, I couldn’t believe I left out Fools Crow by James Welch. Or Winter in the Blood for one of Welch’s contemporary novels. And then there are James Crumley’s Last Good Kiss and Dashiell Hammer’s Red Harvest, two of the greatest 20th century crime novels.

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Ben O'Connell

@RohanMaitzen @GavinWoltjer I read Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch over the last couple days, and IIRC her experience with Casaubon was exactly the opposite—what sympathy she had as a young reader evaporated in middle age.

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Ben O'Connell

Things We Lost in the Fire is a collection of horror stories by Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell) that mostly take place in Buenos Aires’s poorer neighborhoods. https://t.co/u5RWj6nQnb

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Ben O'Connell

I read a piece about Yukio Mishima years ago in one of the big political magazines—TNR or Weekly Standard seem most likely—and on the to-read list he went. Decades later, I’m finally getting to The Temple of the Golden Pavilion thanks to my school dads book club. https://t.co/xvEwzUGdXl

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Ben O'Connell

@GavinWoltjer If you like Rasputin, I highly recommend Smith’s book The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin. I know his literary translations are all the rage now, but I haven’t read any.

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Ben O'Connell

An English landscape painter and a French linguist spend the summer of 1979 on a remote Irish island in Audrey Magee’s The Colony. I enjoyed it as an intricate exploration of identity and colonialism, but Magee’s POV experimentation occasionally grated. https://t.co/U9MHaizjTG

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