I don’t subscribe to New Year’s resolutions, but if I did, reading more would rank high among them—along with eating more and earning less. Did I get that right?

Below are my favorite reads of late, recommended to you, for these long winter nights ahead [potentially] without running water in Richmond.

“Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

In her fourth novel, the author has successfully embedded a secret agent as the first-person narrator in a Rachel Kushner novel, rather than writing a conventional spy thriller. Never a page turner, but that’s not the point; Kushner’s world-building is one of plunging depths over plot. Her frequent detours and deep dives into history, geopolitics, philosophy, psychology and art are reimagined and vital in the service of this novel’s off-kilter femme fatale. Sadie Smith, known to us only by her alias, is an American mercenary sent to a remote region of southwestern France to infiltrate the Le Moulin, a commune of anarchists engaged in subsistence farming, while getting up to no good, no doubt. Holding up her end of the bargain as the Roman noir anti-heroine, she’s a smooth operator: sardonic, bitter and fond of the drink (various and many).

We never meet Sadie’s foil Bruno Lacombe, the activist elder whose mentorship to the Moulinards over email—despite his being anti-civ and living in a certified cave—gets intercepted by our dissimulating narrator. Lacombe’s sage transmissions take a dialectical shape in musings on pre-history, an evolving understanding of evolution, the construct of time itself, and beyond. But these dispatches give “Creation Lake” its most gripping and personal moments through anecdotes from Lacombe’s life; memorably, his youth in occupied France, then as an activist and later, father. Set to a soundtrack of Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” (the song was inescapable in the summer of 2013), we experience Sadie’s mission, in all its abstraction, as close to the bone as you could hope for, from someone gaming everyone around them.

“My Beloved Life” by Amitava Kumar (Knopf)

This sweeping novel is constructed from small, ordinary moments that accumulate and gather speed. Before long, these minor events take on the extraordinary scope of a lifetime’s worth of them. We see how a single life set in relief of all those surrounding it— those which comprise family, country and our collective history—can take on great proportions. In this way, a majority of the novel is committed to the biography of Jadu Kunwar, from his birth in a rural Indian village in the 1930s, to his passing at a ripe age in the COVID-era. Like an unassuming highlight reel, his life is portrayed in epic Forrest Gump-esque fashion. Jadu’s day-to-day journey brings him in contact with historic figures: writers, explorers, poets and politicians. His cohort from the university in Patna, resurface in new capacities and contexts throughout his life, and are formative for Jadu as a microcosm of India’s caste system. It’s fitting he will make his career as a historian, but we’ll know him equally as a husband and father, and always that boy born into a rural Indian village, by way of memory.

In the second of three parts, Jadu’s daughter, Jugnu, takes the reins in her own recount upon learning of her father’s passing. John Berger’s epigraph welcomes Jugnu’s entrance as the narrator: Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one. Although the veracity of her father’s story remains intact, it’s expanded and emboldened by Jugnu’s keenly observed and directly experienced life with her father—she grows up to be a journalist, after all. The third and final part arrives with a surprise entrance, and poignant culmination for this multi-generational, century-spanning epic.

“A Simmering, Serrated Monster!” The Mark Leyner Reader by Mark Leyner (Little Brown)

In an interview from 2021, Leyner says that his “books are just explanations of the titles.” With titles like these: “I Smell Esther Williams” (‘83); “My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist” (‘90); “Et Tu, Babe” (‘92); “Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog” (‘96); “The Tetherballs of Bougainville” (‘98); and “The Sugar Frosted Nutsack” (‘12) accounting for nearly his first-three decades in print, you should know whether you’d care for more of Leyner’s way with words, or not. For prose as ornery and unhinged as Leyner’s maximal bricolage, this new reader is comprehensive and expertly designed to be approachable. A sampling from all of his books to date (as recent as ‘21) are prefaced with introductions by admiring writers and critics for hire, along with his relevant mile markers in a running timeline of the author’s life billed as “The Story So Far.”

I’ve been alive for as long as Leyner’s been publishing, and reading books for pleasure for at least half that time, but never clocked his work until now, despite his public persona and high profile magazine and film work (Google Leyner: Conan, Letterman, or Rose). More than other writers, his work gets compared to other mediums entirely, from skimming a radio dial to channel surfing, and now scrolling. It’s a barrage of raw language. David Berman once described his approach to poetry as an effort to write what would be the best line of another poem, in every line of his poem. At its best, Leyner’s work reminds me of that all-killer, no-filler approach but on a sentence level, where every few words are the best line from a poem, all their own. With less effort and precision this would make a nice word salad. But what you get here isn’t hokum, because humor, tragedy and heart are all intact. In fact, Leyner’s most recent novel, “Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit” lovingly grapples with a father-daughter relationship. Sales departments must drool over his working titles.

“Six Sermons for Bob Dylan” by Lucy Sante (Tenement Press)

First he went electric, later he’d tout underwear in a spot for Victoria’s Secret; another time, between these surprise turns, Bob Dylan got religion. A trilogy of evangelical Christian albums followed before he moved on from gospel music and sermonizing in concert.

In 2016, Dylan hired Lucy Sante to write six sermons to be performed by an actor and cut together with previously unreleased footage from his gospel era, as supplemental material for the deluxe edition of his “Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13—1979-1981.” Sante’s sermons on hypocrisy, virtue, gluttony, temperance, justice and prudence were written and later performed by [actor] Michael Shannon. And that’s a wrap.

Now, thank heavens, Tenement Press saw fit to print Sante’s unabridged text. In an insightful introduction, she shares her approach to the commission and the eventual inspiration she found in the recordings of Black preachers from the 1920s and ‘30s. She cites Rev J.M. Gates in particular, who released over 200 sides for labels like Bluebird, Okeh and Victor, including the memorable sermon, “Death Might Be Your Santa Claus”. With original source material to guide her, Sante pivoted away from the fire and brimstone that marked Dylan’s onstage spiels—the tone Shannon later ran with, distorting what’s on the page in his performance (a mismatch of casting as much as direction; Shannon exudes hellfire at an atomic level). By contrast, Sante’s sermons are joyful and generous—a treatment we could all benefit from in our current condition. It wouldn’t be a Sante book without a generous helping of exceptional photographic images and ephemera; a beautiful bookend to this unlikely project, in a banner year for the author, whose memoir, “I Heard Her Call My Name,” topped many-a-year-end list.

“Rejection” by Tony Tulathimutte (Morrow) 

After reading this novel-in-stories, it’s natural to draw the conclusion that its author is one sick puppy. Or rather, that the characters conceived by the author of this novel-in-stories, are all sick puppies. True to its word, “Rejection” covers that subject thoroughly, brutally, and hilariously, too. Often taken to extremes, this sendup on the torment and traumas of modern life is told through ultra-revealing realism that hinges on characters’ own bias and insecurities, unreliable testimonials, group chats, dating apps, solicitations, business proposals, and online screeds. Characters reappear throughout the stories and each other’s lives in just barely tweaked new lights. Nobody emerges favorably, only to varying degrees of despondency, depravity, or doom.

The opening story, “The Feminist,” was widely read when it first appeared in N+1 and captured a heightened awareness of white male fragility and violence. Memorably, its titular character faces a lifetime of rejection, in his own estimation, due to narrow shoulders. From there, Tulathimutte weaves a web of intricately tethered characters from various backgrounds and identities, who all experience rejection from one side or the other, be it romantic, sexual, social, professional or self-induced. But it wouldn’t have the markings of the postmodern classic it is, if Tulathimutte didn’t appear as himself: first as the subject of a conspiracy theory rejecting the online identity of a story’s trolling narrator, followed by a rejection letter for Tulathimutte’s new novel from a publisher with a lot to say on the matter. Like it or not, nobody is spared in “Rejection,” or its wake. Deal with it.