Weekly Readings #209 (02/02/26-02/08/26)

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

Welcome back to Grand Hotel Abyss! The above is a Goodreads review of my recent novel, Major Arcana. If you’d like to read this “postmodern novel with a modernist conscience,” you can order Major Arcana in all formats (print, ebook, audio) here; you can also find it in print wherever books are sold online. You can buy it directly from Anne Trubek’s distinguished Belt Publishing, too—we receive more of a profit that way—or you might also suggest that your local library or independent bookstore acquire a copy. Please also leave a Goodreads, Amazon, or other rating and review. Thanks to all my readers!

Then there’s The Invisible College, my literature podcast for paid subscribers to this Substack. I screenshot Henry Begler above qua satisfied customer, since we just wrapped up Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain this week, with “A Hermetic Story,” an episode about the book’s final chapters, with their vitalists and duels and séances and farewells and Great Wars, and about Mann’s apparent conviction that the Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, is a secularization of hermetic magic and alchemy in its transfiguration of soul.1 Next week, we begin a six-week sequence aimed at answering that classic question: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? We start Anna Karenina on Friday. In last year’s episode on Tolstoy’s short novels, I allowed myself to express my misgivings about the master from Yasnaya Polyana. Can our moralist’s most artistically satisfying novel bring me back to his side? If you’d like to find out, please offer a paid subscription today. You can also peruse the 2026 schedule and consult the ever-expanding two-year archive, with almost 100 two- to three-hour episodes on subjects from Homer to Joyce, and from ancient to contemporary literature. Thanks to all my current and future paid subscribers!

For today, I participate in a little parlor game, just to have some place to attach the footnotes. Please enjoy!

Me Decade: The Fiction of a List

Trying to keep tabs on the week’s controversies,2 I kept running across an exercise where one is supposed to list the greatest novels of each decade3 since the 1950s. I thought it might be fun, so I made my own list.4

• ’50s: Ellison, Invisible Man

• ’60s: Nabokov, Pale Fire

• ’70s: Murdoch, The Sea, the