Diving into fiction nourishes the heart and mind while giving your screen-tired eyes a break. For three of the writers here, I experienced their work most vividly through the author’s own voice on audiobook.

David Sedaris

I stumbled on David Sedaris by accident. I had the wrong name in my head — I was looking for Sam Lipsyte — but the discovery was happy nonetheless. Like Lipsyte, Sedaris is an American humorist who traffics in satirical self-exposure: his books present him as a character, a writer who imagines himself retired and comfortably adrift in France, England, or on a small island off the American East Coast. What makes his work irresistible to me is his willingness to strip himself bare. He offers judgments that are often politically incorrect, sometimes absurd, and always, somehow, deeply human; you can't help but grin.

Worth rereading? Absolutely — especially as audiobooks, read by Sedaris himself.

Titles I've read in 2025: "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" (2008); "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls" (2013); "Calypso" (2018); "Happy-Go-Lucky" (2022)

Sam Lipsyte — The Ask (2010)

Lipsyte teaches fiction at Columbia University in New York City. The Ask follows the bungled career of a socially inept man who works in the major-donations office at a second-tier university in New York.

The novel’s protagonist is a genuine antihero: a man who, from the first page, reveals himself as something of a mess. The book holds your attention through the cringe-comic details of his life and the absurd, oddly tender relationship he has with his son, Bernie.

Worth rereading? Certainly.

Jonathan Ames — Karma Doll (2025)

I am an unabashed fan of Jonathan Ames. I love his characters: flawed, often pitiable men who, nevertheless, possess flashes of brilliance.

"Karma Doll", read on audiobook by Ames himself, reads like a thriller that subverts expectations for those familiar with his New York-set work. Still, it carries the psychological depth characteristic of Ames’s best characters. It is a surprising turn for a longtime reader — and a welcome one.

Worth rereading? Maybe.

William Gibson — Count Zero (1986)

The second novel in the cultish Sprawl Trilogy.

If you enjoyed "Neuromancer", "Count Zero" is a natural next step. It is not a direct sequel: it introduces different characters and a fresh plot, though it unfolds within the same Sprawl universe — a sprawling megalopolis stretching the Eastern Seaboard from Atlanta to Boston, with scenes that extend into space and to satellite communities.

I confess I reread "Neuromancer" before diving back in. That refresher helped me re-enter the particular state of mind the books require: a willingness to accept, at least for a while, that you may not fully understand everything that happens — a bit like life, when we only grasp fragments of the whole.

Gibson’s work rewards rereading. Ahead of his time, he dramatizes the shifting role of humans in an AI-saturated future, prompting reflection on how power consolidates into quasi-dynasties, how work fragments and becomes precarious, and how new hierarchies are established.

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu — Trois-Pistoles et les Basques: Le Pays de mon père (1997)

Presented as a coffee-table book, VLB’s account of his father’s slow decline reads like a borderland between documentary and interior reverie. The narrative moves from a Montreal suburb's town to Trois-Pistoles village passing by an Indigenous reserve, tracing a return to the land of his childhood.

I borrowed the book from the library while planning a trip to the canadian Basque Country. My initial intention was to leaf through the photographs and mark places to visit. Instead I started reading the text—and could not stop until the end.

There are echoes of James Joyce in VLB’s prose: he invites the reader into an imagination that is, at times, unsettling and yet fundamentally sound.

The study of the Alzheimer’s disease representation in Mordecai Richler’s « Barney’s Version », Victor-Lévy Beaulieu’s « Trois-Pistoles et les Basques ». Le pays de mon père and Annie Ernaux’s « Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit » allows us to outline the disease’s literary specifics, beyond the theme of the memory lapse.

To think the Alzheimer’s disease in terms of cognitive degeneration is to evacuate its dimension as a literature material which influences the structure of a text as well as its style. The analysis of three contemporary stories contributes to the identification of rhetorical methods as well as narrative and style strategies which help us to delimit the Alzheimer’s disease literary mark.

We will see that when a third party takes charge of the story, it explains the filiation theme which helps to see the disease from the inside as well as from the outside.It also shows an archiving work.

Marie-France Rooney's Master thesis "Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease in Three Contemporary Narratives"

Hubert Aquin — Next Episode (1965)

Since the Autumn protests of 2012 I have tried, on and off, to finish Hubert Aquin’s "Next Episode". I bought it out of curiosity while I was a student at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), often passing the building that bears his name on my way to seminars or meetings with my thesis advisor.

I probably won’t reread this one. I’d prefer to explore another work by this important Québécois writer.

translated from french by GPT-5 mini --- and it took some liberty to improve my writing ;)

sources

• Marie-France Rooney (2014), Représentations de la maladie d’Alzheimer dans trois récits contemporains