November 2025 Reviews
By Alan Dove
Picking books to read is a bit like Brownian motion for me. A random mention in a newspaper column, a recommendation by a friend, seeing there’s a new book by an author I’ve liked before, or just a title catching my eye somewhere on the internet might put something on my list. One somewhat consistent source is my Sunday morning routine of reading the New York Times Book Review, often with one of the cats vying for space with the paper. Despite Oliver’s recent suggestion that I read a biography of Wittgenstein, though, I don’t think I’m going to get to that one.
Henig, R.M., The Monk in the Garden: This came out in 2000, and I missed it completely then. Recently, though, my friend and fellow TWiV co-host Rich Condit mentioned that he was reading it, so onto my list it went. Science writer Robin Henig set out to write a definitive biography of Gregor Mendel, the 19th century monk who figured out genetics decades before anyone else. The result is a bit thin on details, despite Henig’s obvious diligence. That’s because hardly anyone noticed Mendel’s work while he was alive, and after his death many of his records were burned in what was probably a routine housekeeping process around the monastery.
Despite this handicap, Henig does an excellent job putting Mendel into the context of his time. Her recaps of his central findings were as good as they needed to be, though I may not be the best judge of that because the material is so familiar to me. Some of the side stories about the other major characters in the field felt a bit like filler. Nonetheless, this is an important book that sets straight a lot of misconceptions about the quiet gardener and the nature of his breakthroughs. The eBook was a good choice for reading during my workouts, easy to pick up and put down for reading sessions bound by specific time constraints.
Boyd, D., and Goldenberg, J., Inside the Box: My second workout book for the month came from a recommendation in an author interview I read in the NY Times Book Review. Jeff Kinney, who created the massively popular Diary of a Wimpy Kid graphic novel series, mentioned this 2013 book as an inspiration for some of his recent ideas. There was no regular eBook version available from my library system, so I got the audiobook, a style of reading I don’t normally do. Speeding up the e-reader to 1.5x was about the right pace for me.
The essence of the book’s advice is that “outside the box” brainstorming ideas preached by corporate consultants for decades are largely bullshit. Instead, the authors advocate a systematic approach for analyzing what they call the “closed world” of a problem, and looking for ways to modify or extend existing components within it. While the corporate-oriented writing style is pretty bland, and much of the text consists of long-winded argments about why their approach is better, it has some good suggestions. That said, I found that much of what they advocate as a radical “systematic inventive thinking” method is in fact what I tend to do with problems anyway: try to use what I already have on hand to solve them. It’s also not terribly useful for writers, as far as I can tell, unless you’re already in the rarefied category of someone like Kinney, whose work has become a whole entertainment enterprise extending far beyond any single story.
The cow cat likes to ruminate on epistemology.
Kingfisher, T., A Sorceress Comes to Call: Having loved Kingfisher’s previous dark fairytale, Nettle & Bone, I was looking forward to her 2024 installment (by the way, how does that woman write so fast?). In this story, she reimagines the somewhat obscure Brothers Grimm work “The Goose Girl,” albeit very loosely. Cordelia, the 14-year-old daughter of a powerful sorceress, has lived her entire life in fear of her mother, who leeches a living from wealthy noble men. When they move into the house of her next prospective victim, though, the girl gradually realizes that she might finally be able to escape the abuse she’s endured since birth, if she can figure out who’s really on her side.
Kingfisher is an excellent writer, the characters are well-formed, and the plot pulled me through this moderate-length novel just fine. It didn’t have the same feeling of originality as the previous one, though, and there wasn’t a single beat I didn’t see coming. Though entertaining, it was ultimately a letdown for me.
Russell, K., The Antidote: Set in 1935, and centered on the historic “Black Sunday” dust storm that ravaged hundreds of square miles of American farmland, Russell’s latest literary epic blends historical fact with speculative fiction. It works, mostly. The title character is a “Prairie Witch,” one of a handful of women who can relieve people of memories they don’t want to carry anymore. Working in the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska, her story intersects with those of a corrupt local sheriff, an honest but naïve bachelor farmer, a government photographer sent to document the Dust Bowl, a teenager anxious to take her basketball team to the regional championships, and a couple of other characters, including a scarecrow and a cat.
I liked the way Russell anchored her fantastical elements in real events, the characters were complex and flawed in good ways, and much of the writing is lyrically beautiful. In a few sections, especially late in the book, some of these early-20th century characters start sounding a lot more like sock puppets of an early-21st century progressive liberal author, which broke my immersion in the story. Even though I agree with much of what she has to say, I would’ve preferred a bit more subtlety. Without those bits, though, this is a thoughtful and worthwhile exploration of individual and collective memory, and what it costs us when we choose to forget.
Eleven Puzzles, Unsolved Case and Unboxing the Cryptic Killer: Laura found these games, which are available for iOS, Android, and Steam. They’re cooperative puzzles, requiring two players with working internet connections to play. We really enjoyed the tightly constructed puzzles, comic book-style artwork, and presence of just enough story to hold things together. Though we play while sitting in the same room, we generally avoid showing our screens to each other. The essence of the challenge is communicating.
A typical exchange might involve one of us describing a set of three clocks they’re looking at, and the other asking what the hands on them look like, so they can position some levers in the same way. Each puzzle requires this type of cooperation, with neither player having quite enough information to solve it on their own. We’ve just started the developers’ latest installment, Parallel Experiment, so expect a review of that next month.