a grab bag of recent reads

+ a dispatch from Kosovo

Hello, my dear readers! Now that I am in the second half of my Fulbright, I feel like time is flying by — slipping sand through the hourglass of months I have left in Europe.

Last week, I visited Paul’s family in Kosovo, a tiny Balkan nation that happens to be Europe’s youngest country! The scars of its recent war with Serbia are still very visible, but the blend of unique architecture, delicious food (think Turkish plus more veggies and sauces), and welcoming people had me warm to the country instantly.

Dua Lipa, who is Albanian and briefly lived in Pristina, is something of a national hero. She and Rita Ora are all over the place here!

While more than 90% of the country is ethnically Albanian and Muslim, Kosovars are fiercely proud of their history of religious pluralism. An array of mosques, Catholic cathedrals, and Serbian Orthodox temples dot the landscape, alongside government buildings and Yugoslav memorials. Fun fact: this building, The National Library of Kosovo, has been voted the ugliest in the world! I personally loved it:

The "Pjetër Bogdani" in Kosovo

Right now, my friend Grace is visiting from Chicago, and she is sitting next to me as I am furiously packing to meet Paul in Porto, Portugal to begin a four-day walking trip on the Camino de Santiago. Lots going on, clearly!

For that reason, this week I leave y’all with a short update on the three latest books I’ve read — an extremely random assortment, even by my standards! What should I read on the plane? Let me know in the comments 💌

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

I was not expecting to like this book (I am decidedly not a sci fi girlie), but I gave it a chance for two reasons. For one, a few months ago, I took a chance on another science fiction novel, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and it frankly blew my mind. And secondly, I was intrigued by the author’s sudden surge in popularity. Harpman, who is originally from Belgium but fled to Casablanca during the Holocaust, actually published this slim novel decades ago to little acclaim. Only recently has it found a cult following.

Emily Gould explains why in her excellent newsletter Book Gossip:

Since its re-release in 2022, and especially since the election, countless TikTok reviewers have recommended I Who Have Never Known Men as a “book that will change your life.” It has more than 138,000 ratings on Goodreads — with an average of four stars, while many literary novels are lucky to eke out three — it sold 100,000 copies in the U.S. last year.

No one quite knows how it happened. A few years after it was originally published in Belgium, a U.K. publishing house called Harvill commissioned an English translation of the book and titled it The Mistress of Silence; 20 years on, it was only available as a print-on-demand title, selling one to three copies per year. In 2018, an employee at Vintage U.K., which had subsumed Harvill, dusted off an old copy they’d found on a shelf in the office and brought it to the attention of the editors. Donald Trump was two years into his first presidency, The Handmaid’s Tale was back on best-seller lists, and the idea of a dystopian book about women seemed like a fairly safe bet…

A year later, monthly sales began to pick up, starting at 2,000 that June, then doubling or tripling from month to month until it sold 100,000 copies in 2024. By way of comparison, the press’s most popular titles — mostly high literary fiction in translation — tend to sell in the low thousands.

I don’t want to give too much away about this phenomenal book, but in the broadest strokes, I Who Have Never Known Men is told from the perspective of a nameless young girl who is raised with 39 other women trapped in an underground bunker. No one knows why they are in this cage, and when they escape, they still have no understanding why they are there or even if they are still on Earth.

I know this is super vague and weird, but please, please, please give this a read. It’s only 160 pages, and I was absolutely hooked from the jump.

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

I have a half-formed memory of secretly watching the film adaptation of this novel over my parent’s shoulder as a kid, but I wasn’t prepared for the palm-sweating, pit-in-my-stomach feeling this book induced.

This book, published soon after Columbine, is about a fictional school massacre. Although published twenty years ago, its themes remain sadly relevant — and it easily could be a true story.

The book is told from the point of view of the assassin’s mother Eva Khatchadourian, a highly intelligent travel writer who is suspicious of her son from the moment he is born.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a sharp psychological study of marital gaslighting and the day-to-day drudgery of suburbia and motherhood, even if you don’t have a son who is a killer. This book really goes there, reckoning with the taboo theme of a mother disliking her own child. And Shriver doesn’t hold back from exploring Eva’s own accountability in Kevin’s murderous spree — leaving us wondering if her ambivalence towards motherhood possibly led to this act of ultimate evil.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Again, Birnam Wood is not normally the kind of book that would call to me. I don’t usually vibe with ecoterrorism/environmental thrillers, but it was a “Skip the Line” loan on Libby, and I remember it from Barack Obama’s book list a few years ago.

Eleanor Catton, who became the youngest-ever Booker prize winner in 2013 for The Luminaries, has a uniquely strong voice and writes such eccentric characters (full of flaws, but also sympathy-arousing), and by the end, I was hooked.

The book is about members of guerilla gardening collective in New Zealand cheekily called Birnam Wood. When they undertake a new project on abandoned farmland, the group finds an unexpected benefactor in a zillionaire tech tycoon (eerily similar to a certain rich man currently dabbling in politics…). Things get hairy rather quickly when a former Birnam Wood member seeks to investigate this involvement, and you’ll learn an awful lot about infrared drones and enriched mineral wars. Weird book overall, but highly entertaining and super relevant to 2025. Dwight Garner put it well in his review.

📚 On my shelf

• I absolutely LOVED White Fur by Jardine Libaire, a modern-day Romeo & Juliet about an upper-crust Yalie and a biracial girl “from the wrong side of New Haven.” I don’t usually like romantic books, but this one is dark and weird and full of longing. I really recommend, especially if you like books set in NYC in the ‘80’s.

• I just downloaded Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins, the second prequel novel to the original Hunger Games trilogy. While I wasn’t an obsessive fan as a kid (although I loved the first two), I really enjoyed Songbird and Snakes and am stoked to be back in this world.

• My Libby deadline is about to expire for Health and Safety: A Breakdown by Emily Witt… Need to get on that, stat!

📚 Links and things

• How to clean your books from Wirecutter (helpful!)

• Curtis Sittenfeld on why friendships deepen in middle age 🩷

• I started We Own This City, a 2022 miniseries that’s considered the spiritual nephew of my all-time favorite scripted series The Wire. So far, the acting, particularly John Bernthal as a crooked cop, has been tremendous. I will warn you that it is extremely dark, though, and not an easy watch.

Happy reading! 💛

XOX

Alli