up all night

Sometime in 2022, I got really into the Gray Man books. Like, really into them. Eventually, I couldn’t read them in the evening, because I inevitably stayed up well past the time I should have been asleep.

It’s the plots: catapulting from one stressful, violent moment to the next, success grasped at the last minute by the Gray Man’s improbable skill and ingenuity and deep loneliness. *cue implied Psych 101 backstory*

It’s easy to understand why plot keeps us reading: we want to know what happens; there is conflict (confrontation!) at every turn.

But there are other books, books with quiet plots, that have kept me up too late. These rely on tension, a kind of emotional tautness that draws and draws you through the book, until you look up and it is 1 am and the book is done and you are bereft. Perhaps there is very little confrontation in a literal way, but there is the possibility of some destabilizing movement, a movement so powerful it haunts the characters at every turn.

Here are three of those books.

EUPHORIA by Lily King

I almost don’t want to tell you what this book is about, because I picked it up despite the plot blurb. It’s about a love triangle between three anthropologists in the 1930s, in New Guinea. It’s about the nature of observation and otherness, about partnership and independence, about our allegiance to our beliefs about what is (and isn’t) important. I read this all in one swallow, one night well beyond my bedtime, drawn forward by King’s perception and language and the magnetism of the relationships between the characters.

And the sentences! The sentences!

JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND by Molly McGhee

This I read late at night in a tent in Alaska, transported deep into McGhee’s strange and evocative world. Jonathan Abernathy is in hopeless debt when he accepts a job with a mysterious company. His new job involves “tidying” the dreams of other workers — employers have discovered that their employees are more productive when they aren’t “bothered” by the difficulty of dreams. It’s a book about capitalism and what we owe each other and, literally, why dreams are important to our sense of self.

And the punctuation! The use of parentheticals! *chef’s kiss*

WHEN THE ANGELS LEFT THE OLD COUNTRY by Sacha Lamb

Technically, I didn’t stay up late reading this — but only because I spent the entire day immersed, coming up only in the late afternoon, weeping in the best kind of way. It’s about two supernatural creatures — one an angel, one a demon — who are Torah study partners in a small village. When one of the young people from the village, who has gone to America to make her fortune, stops sending letters home, the angel and the demon take a ship to America to discover what happened to her. There’s also a beautiful sapphic story, and labor organizing, and thoughts about immigration and disability, and the whole book felt like a love letter to the messiness of being human (or an angel) and loving one another.

What have been your favorite page-turners that don’t rely on plot to create momentum? What beautiful sentences (and parentheticals) have you read lately?

love,

p