Permanent Objects

A collection of miscellany

Literary Fiction

52 IN 52, Book #4: I Am Agatha by Nancy Foley

Honestly, I was a little surprised by how much I enjoyed this book! It’s a bit outside my usual genre preferences, but I decided to give it a try anyway based on the sapphic and somewhat mysterious angle, and I’m very pleased I did. I Am Agatha is the story of eccentric and somewhat misanthropic artist Agatha Smithson, who in her late sixties/early seventies moves to New Mexico and builds a house on Mesa Portales. There, she strikes up a friendship with Alice, the widow who owns the land where her house sits, and that friendship becomes a relationship that ultimately challenges everything Agatha believes about herself and what it means to move through the world.

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52 IN 52, Book #40: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

I have no idea what I was expecting from this book, but it sure wasn’t that!

I guess a part of me kind of thought that a book by a Nobel prize-winning author would be very serious and heavy. And that’s not to say that this book isn’t serious and heavy in places, but I was really surprised by how genuinely funny it was for most of the time. Janina, the narrator, is a weird as hell old woman living in the remote Polish woods–she studies astrology, translates poetry, cares deeply about animals, and gives largely unflattering nicknames to her neighbors. When a neighbor turns up dead and suspicions start to grow, Janina gets herself involved in the investigation, convinced she knows what’s going on.

There were a lot of parts of this book that made me laugh out loud. In fact, I’m going to quote one of them here because I liked it so much I screenshotted it to save on my phone and send to my dad:

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52 IN 52, Book #31: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Yaa Gyasi’s cover blurb really says it all: “Tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought.” What an absolutely beautiful love letter, what a gorgeous meditation on the challenge and struggle but also the irrepressible beauty and richness of Black culture.

I will say that if you’re looking for a plot-heavy book where A Lot of Things Happen, this might not be the book for you. This is more of a close, intimate exploration of one individual’s mindset and the way they move through the world around them, rather than being a novel that’s driven by plot beats and the forward motion of a story. But if you’re interested in that kind of introspective, deep character exploration, then I would absolutely recommend this book.

Maybe because the book is so short (only 160 pages!), this is a work where it feels like every single sentence is contributing equally to the story. As you read, you get not only an exploration of the artists and thinkers who shaped our narrator’s worldview, but also this incredibly vivid, lush world that’s build around him to the point where you can almost feel the heat of summer or the rain in winter and understand how those things contribute to the emotional state of the characters. 

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