Ron Currie Is Back, Let's Celebrate! (Or, a Peek Inside the Reviewer's Mind)

Ron Currie's 2009 novel Everything Matters! blew me away -- it's a story about a kid who knows the exact moment he's going to die. I was so amazed how Currie made that conceit work through a full, satisfying, and really smart read.

When I sat down to write a review of Currie's new novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, for the Chicago Review of Books, I first went back to my reading journal to remind myself about some of the details of why I'd loved Everything Matters!. That idea of killing a character or foreshadowing a character's death, but keeping a reader engaged was front and center in what I'd written when I'd read it 15 years ago. So that felt like a natural entry point to the review, since Currie basically does that again here! 

But it didn't all go smoothly. I wrote two drafts of the review in which I called the idea of killing your character in the title the "Titanic Trick," a not to how we all sat through that three-hour movie even though we knew the boat was going to sink and Jack was going to die. I couldn't make it work through the whole review, though. Turns out it was too cute by half, and I was struggling with the piece for a solid week before just deciding to kill that darling and start over. Within an hour, I had the whole thing nearly done -- same idea, just not calling it something stupid. Lesson learned. Killing your darlings is important.  

And so, kudos to Currie for making the "Titanic Trick" (haha, resurrected darling!) work not once, but twice in Babs Dionne. It's a truly fantastic novel -- a favorite of 2025 so far for sure. I hope you'll take a second to check out my CHIRB review here:

I've loved everything Currie's written -- he's a writer who just makes sense to me. My brain absorbs his sentences quickly and with very little friction. Some writers you just connect with. He's one for me, and I couldn't have been more excited that he was back after eight years with this novel. 

Definitely check out his other novels, if you haven't read him. After Everything Matters!, 2013's Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (the best all-time novel that refers to a nicotine patch in the title) reads like autofiction but isn't (or is it?), and 2017's The One-Eyed Man, a novel about very troubled times, is likely as relevant today as it was then. (His 2007 debut God Is Dead I realized as I'm writing this I haven't actually read yet. I'll need to fix that soon.) 

More Than Words, by John Warner: Pushing Back Against Our AI Overlords

Like Amazon, avocados, and Colleen Hoover novels, my reflexive reaction to any conversation about generative AI is to wince and turn away. I don't teach writing myself, but I work for a nonprofit literary arts organization whose whole mission is to teach writing (StoryStudio, shout out!), and for that reason I'm terrified of generative AI. I'm also angry at tech bros like Sam Altman who used copyrighted material to train his large language model, ChatGPT. And I'm worried AI is a shortcut for so many youths these days who don't seem to need too much convincing to take shortcuts (old man yells at cloud!).

Because it's so distasteful, I've largely avoided going much deeper than surface-level knowledge about generative AI. The extent of my experience with ChatGPT is the one time I asked it to give me a list of 1990s grunge band names. What it gave me was so hilariously bad (Mudstain! Soggy Flannel! Gravel Gaze!), I've never been back. AI may be stupid, but it's still ubiquitous, and so still very concerning.

So John Warner's new book More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI is a soothing balm; a book that will help demystify AI and gently talk you off the ledge. If you're a Chicago book person, you're probably familiar with Warner. He writes as the Biblioracle in the Sunday Chicago Tribune (as books coverage has dwindled, his column remains a stalwart). He also writes about books and writing in a terrific companion Substack titled The Biblioracle Recommends.

More Than Words truly meets the moment in terms of explaining what AI is, what it is not, and most importantly, how writing can and will still thrive in the age of AI. 

Warner writes: "Writing is thinking. Writing involves both the expression and exploration of an idea, meaning that even as we're trying to capture the idea on the page, the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it. Removing thinking from writing renders an act not writing."

There is a lot to love in this book, but that quote to me is the central takeaway. Though what ChatGPT does *resembles* writing, of course, what ChatGPT does IS NOT writing. What ChatGPT does is placing tokens in syntactically correct order. Writing requires thought. And more thought. And pain. And then some more thought. Despite its name, artificial intelligence does not think. So artificial intelligence does not write. 

Further, what ChatGPT does is DEFINITELY not creating art. Art requires feeling. And obviously, AI has none. "What I want to say about writing is that it is a fully embodied experience," Warner writes. "When we do it, we are thinking and feeling. We are bringing our unique intelligence to the table and attempting to demonstrate them to the world, even when our intelligences don't seem too intelligent." 

How to teach writing in the age of AI, how to pushback (resist?!) against the most nefarious uses of AI, and maybe even some positive use cases for AI (if we're careful) related to writing are all discussed in this book, as well. 

I needed this book badly and I can't recommend it more highly to you if you care about books and writing, as well. 

Halfway Through the Knausgaard-verse

Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard brings with it a heightened level of nose-crinkling cringe when I tell some of my much younger colleagues what I'm reading. I find it hilarious, but never has my book taste been more sus to them than when I tell them I'm reading an old white Norwegian dude whose books have no plot. 

Last week, after I finished the third book in the six-volume My Struggle series, I found a way to put these terrific books in their terms: These books are to middle-aged (sometimes pretentious) white dudes what Ali Hazelwood and Emily Henry are to them: Pure reading enjoyment! You don't have to completely understand it. It is what it is. And the heart wants what the heart wants. They're not tempted to rush out and buy copies of Knausgaard's books, but at least they get it a little bit now. 

And but so, I started this 3,600-page series with a whole bunch of  questions in mind: What makes these books so popular? Why are writers from Zadie Smith to Jonathan Lethem besotted with these novels? How do readers pull themselves through these long books with no ostensible plot? What is so "compulsively readable" (as many of the blurbs breathlessly point out), exactly, about an irascible middle-aged Norwegian writer telling us about his kid's birthday party or traveling to see his grandparents or so much else that's so mundane any writing teacher would tell the writer to cut it?

I think part of the answer to all these questions is that against all odds, Knausgaard is relatable. He struggles with every day life. He struggles with trying to be a good person when it's so much easier not to be. He struggles simply being a person in the world populated with other people with whom he has trouble connecting, getting along with, or even tolerating. 

You can still like people and like these books, but having at least a streak of curmudgeon in you may enhance your enjoyment of these books. Despite my outward sunny disposition and consistent optimism (LOL), you may be surprised to learn that sometimes People (not individual persons, but People collectively) get under my skin. 

And that brings me to Philip Roth, perhaps the most famous curmudgeonly writer of them all. One thing that drew me to these books is how much I love Philip Roth's novels. Roth's writing is as detailed, insightful, and profound as anything I've ever read. Roth and Knausgaard are similar this way. Even when nothing is happening, and nothing is happening frequently in Knausgaard, reading them is still a delight. 

But to reiterate, don't read Knausgaard if you need plot. There ain't none. Each book has an overarching theme (death, love, boyhood) and each book includes frequent long scenes that feel like plot (the 50-plus-page birthday party that kicks off the second book, for instance), but the only real overarching action is Knausgaard continuously ramming his skull into the brick wall of life.

These aren't books I read 100 pages at a time. I dip in and out slowly and read until I get tired. I think that's the only way. But yes, here at the halfway point of the Knausgaard-verse, I'm encouraged and excited to keep going. Who's with me? 😅

My Friends, by Hisham Matar: On the Loneliness of Exile

Hisham Matar's 2024 National Book Award-finalist novel My Friends is about making your way in the world when you can't go home again. It's about the loneliness of exile, the importance of friendship, and the horrors of authoritarianism.

Imagine your life being on pause for more than 25 years. You exist in limbo, away from your country, apart from your family, even having to lie to them, knowing your infrequent correspondence and even more infrequent conversations are monitored. Such is the fate of our narrator, Khaled, a Libyan national who arrives in Edinburgh in 1984 on a university scholarship. Young and idealistic, but also naive, Khaled becomes swept up in political currents much stronger than his ability to deal with him.

He rues the day he didn't listen more closely to his university friend, who told him when he arrived in Edinburgh: "I have resigned myself to the fact that I live in a world of unreasonable men and the only reasonable thing to do in this situation is, best we can, avoid their schemes."

So for reasons I won't spoil, Khaled becomes stuck in the UK. He can't return home because if he does, he likely won't be allowed to leave Libya again. Being trapped in an authoritarian state, though, might be the best case scenario. In a worst case scenario, he'd be murdered by the regime, as so many before him had.

So he stays in London, building a life with his friend, Mustafa, and later, a writer named Hosam Zawa, who'd been one of the inspirations for him to go to university and study literature in the first place.

When the revolution breaks out in the spring of 2011, each of these men must again weigh his priorities. Each man must take an accounting of his courage. 

The pace of this novel is deliberate and contemplative, and the tone is sober and earnest. The story is told in 108 short chapters, which gives the effect of pulling you along a little more quickly than you might read otherwise. But to me this still felt a little like homework. Yes, it's a VERY GOOD NOVEL. The reviews are universally exceptional and it's won tons of literary awards. But it felt more like something I *should* be reading, like a long New Yorker expose, than something I'd read strictly for pleasure. That said, I'm still really glad I read it. It's a stunning piece of literary fiction, and provides fascinating context and a new perspective on events on which I'd only known a little about.  

Shelf Lives, Vol. 1: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Today I'm excited to introduce a new feature at the New Dork Review of Books: Shelf Lives.

Here's the story behind Shelf Lives: My bookshelf is a trip into my past. Every book there has a story about how I came to it, when/where I bought/read it, and what was going on in my life at the time I bought/read it. Many, probably most, of these stories are pretty mundane. Some are not, and these are the stories I want to tell. Why does a book make me feel a certain kind of way when I catch a glimpse of it sitting on my shelf? What specific memories does it evoke? What connections does my brain immediately begin making to music, food, time/place, and other books? 

Over the years, I've had to purge hundreds of books from my shelves to avoid being buried, so the ones that remain are truly special. Getting older makes you nostalgic, and so I decided I wanted to spend a post or two each month writing about some of the stories behind my most beloved books. It's entirely possible these stories are only interesting to me. But I do hope you enjoy them too. I also hope these stories give you occasion to think about the stories behind your own most-loved books.

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Volume 1: Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

It's Labor Day weekend, 2013, and my then-fiancée-now-wife's mother is in town to help her shop for wedding dresses. So I decide to make myself scarce and head out on an epic road trip. My plan is to drive around the Midwest to new-to-me bookstores, including Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, and Subterranean Books and Left Bank Books in St. Louis, among others. 

I wrote a blow-by-blow account of this pretty epic adventure here. (Amazingly, the links to the photos on Flickr still work! Also, I still have the trusty blue Honda Civic. 😅) Writing about that trip was nearly as much as the trip itself. Rereading that post now makes me laugh. 

So of course I came back from that trip with a huge stack of new books. But of all the books I bought on that trip, by far the most enduring, most important, and my favorite is Adichie's Americanah. I've written a lot about how much I love this book (here is my original raving review), and I've been thinking about it a lot lately as I'm about to read her new novel, Dream Count (out March 4) -- her first novel since Americanah. 

Americanah is such a terrific examination of American foibles (especially related to race) and so it remains a perfect match in my mind for that road trip, in which I also discovered my share of Americana and American foibles -- the dude who draped his jeans and underwear over the bed of his truck (presumably to dry after he'd washed them in his room? I hope?) in the parking lot of a motel, for instance. 

Even though I didn't actually read the novel until two months after this road trip, Americanah and that adventure are inextricably linked in my mind. This was also the first time I'd read Adichie, and I've since read every word she's written -- easily one of my top 5 favorite writers.

Because I loved the book so much, and think about it often, the book also gives me an excuse to think back fondly on that trip. Maybe it's time to do that again. I never re-read books, but maybe it's time to give Americanah another look, too.