Seven novels about learning and mastering a new skill

Camille Bordas is a novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two novels in English, The Material (2024) and How to Behave in a Crowd (2017). Her earlier two books, Partie Commune and Les Treize Desserts, were written in her native French.

Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review.

Bordas has been named a Guggenheim Fellow. Born in France, raised in Mexico City and Paris, she currently lives in Chicago.

At Electric Lit the author tagged seven novels about learning and mastering a new skill, including:

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

This contemporary classic might not need introduction, but I’ll go for it anyway: narrated in turn by Sibylla and her young son Ludo (an absolute prodigy capable of reading ancient Greek and doing advanced calculus at age 5), it is perhaps the most fun novel ever written about the nature of intelligence. Sibylla is extremely smart herself, but can’t always keep up with her son, who’s constantly asking her to teach him something new. Yet her lessons are like magic tricks: when Sibylla teaches her son to read ancient Greek, we learn alongside him, and are entertained the whole way through. The book is smart and hilarious (Sibylla is very judgmental) without ever condescending to its reader. It assumes we are as smart as it is.

In its second half, Ludo goes on a quest to find a suitable father for himself, and the volume of lessons drops, but other types of learning come into play. Namely, he starts hearing a lot about games (chess, bridge), and there is this line that I find absolutely gorgeous in its simplicity when it comes to explaining what teaching is, and what its limits might be:

“When you play bridge with beginners—when you try to help them out—you give them some general rule to go by. Then they follow the rule and something goes wrong. But if you’d had their hand you wouldn’t have played the thing you told them to play, because you’d have seen all the reasons the rule did not apply.”

Read about the other titles on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top toxic-wellness fiction titles

At B&N Reads Isabelle McConville tagged seven top "toxic-wellness fiction [titles] to keep you glowing from the inside," including:

Natural Beauty: A Novel by Ling Ling Huang

A musician’s life takes a sharp, devastating turn that leads her to a sales representative job at a luxury beauty and wellness store. Enter the world of creams, lotions, potions and more in Natural Beauty, a story that examines the dark underbelly of what it means to be beautiful and the steep price of aesthetics.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Natural Beauty is among Olivie Blake's five top titles about regretting that cult you joined.

Also see Jamie Lee Sogn's eight top mysteries & thrillers set in the wellness industry.

--Marshal Zeringue

Four top novels of subtle espionage

Flynn Berry is the New York Times bestselling author of Under the Harrow, winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best First Novel; A Double Life, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Northern Spy, a Reese’s Book Club pick that was named one of the ten best thrillers of 2021 by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Northern Spy is being adapted for film by Netflix.

Berry's new novel is Trust Her.

At CrimeReads she tagged four

favorite novels about amateur spies. These characters go undercover, without extensive training, an extraction team, expensive equipment, or any idea of what damage might lie ahead.

One title on the list:

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

Two men sit over cups of tea in Old Anarkali, a district in Lahore. They are, seemingly, strangers. One has the “short-cropped” hair and broad chest “typical of a certain type of American; but then again, sportsmen and soldiers of all nationalities tend to look alike.” The other man, Changez, has returned to Pakistan after studying at Princeton and working as an analyst in New York. Is one of the men a spy, or both? If so, what might they do to each other? I started reading this absorbing, brilliant novel on a train, and then sat on a bench at my station, reading until the last page.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is among Abir Mukherjee's five top thrillers about terrorism, Ryan Lee Wong's ten best novels about Asian American politics, Maris Kreizman's top twenty-three short books, Colleen Kinder's ten books about chance encounters with strangers, Maris Kreizman's nineteen top short books and stories, Ian MacKenzie's ten top books about Americans abroad, Emily Temple's ten top contemporary novels by and about Muslims, Laila Lalami's eight top books about Muslim life for a nation that knows little about Islam, Porochista Khakpour's top ten novels about 9/11, Jimmy So's five best 9/11 novels, and Ahmede Hussain's five top books in recent South Asian literature.

The Page 69 Test: The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that unpack a complicated family inheritance

Joselyn Takacs holds a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her fiction has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Tin House online, Harvard Review, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere. She has published interviews and book reviews in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy. She has taught writing at the University of Southern California and Johns Hopkins University.

Takacs's debut novel, Pearce Oysters, is a family drama set during the 2010 BP Oil Spill. She lived in New Orleans at the time of the spill, and in 2015, she received a grant to record the oral histories of Louisiana oyster farmers in the wake of the environmental disaster. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

At Electric Lit Takacs tagged seven titles "about the ways our family leave their mark on us," including:

Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie

On the heels of a breakup, Kathleen Cheng leaves her psychology PhD program, moves back in with her mom, and takes a job as a professional cuddler. When Kathleen returns home, though, she finds her mother has emerged from a decades-long holding pattern of her own. Her mother transformed her life and is engaged to Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur. After years of grief, longing to return to China, and alcoholism, Kathleen’s mother is now sober, social climbing, and sporting athleisure wear. Kathleen’s cuddling gig begins as an ironic curiosity, but it has an apt emotional resonance in her life. Snuggling safely with strangers seems a natural tendency after a childhood spent caretaking for her mother. This novel delights with humor and heart as it parses the mother-daughter relationship in the run-up to the mother’s wedding day.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue