Since my last bookish post, I’ve read:

■ The Invaders (Karolina Waclawiak; 2015. Fiction.)
■ A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy (Sue Klebold; 2016. Non-fiction.)
■ In a Dark, Dark Wood (Ruth Ware; 2015. Fiction.)
■ What She Left Behind (Ellen Marie Wiseman; 2013. Fiction.)
■ Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (Jon Krakauer; 2015. Non-fiction.)
■ Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (Robin Sloan; 2013. Fiction.)
■ Othello (William Shakespeare; 1603. Drama.)
■ The Cold Song (Linn Ullmann; 2014. Fiction.)

Notes: I recently concluded a MOOC centered on Othello, which, in addition to supplementary articles and lectures, provided ample motivation to closely reread the play. Although I look forward to seeing the current Chicago Shakespeare Theater production over spring break, my recent encounter with the text reminded me that the play, while meant to be seen and heard, is remarkable reading. The questions on which I reflected included: Is the conclusion inevitable? Is this really a play about race? What are we to make of the women in this play? Are we the audience complicit in Iago’s machinations?

Othello aside, I think I may (finally) be growing too old for unrelentingly sad and/or disturbing novels about dysfunctional families and their communities (e.g., Waclawiak’s tautly written The Destroyers), but Norwegian author Linn Ullmann pulled off something special with The Cold Song, a family drama masquerading as murder mystery. On page 163:

It wasn’t true what they said, that it would gradually become easier to cope with the loss, that time would work in her favor. It had become something of a sport to tell her this and every time they said it she had wanted to lash out, she had wanted to scream, what the hell did they know about time, they hadn’t lost a child, but she couldn’t end it all, she had one more, she couldn’t….

Speaking of murder, In a Dark, Dark Wood was a pleasant way to spend a Saturday afternoon and a pot of coffee. There was nothing pleasant about Krakauer’s Missoula or Klebold’s A Mother’s Reckoning, however. Difficult and heartbreaking, both. On a happier note, I seek admission to the club for readers who loved Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. What a charming book.

A few notes on the books I’ve been reading:

■ Purge (Sofi Oksanen; 2008. Fiction.)
The sometimes annoying device of toggling time (in this case, the present and the years leading up to during the Soviet occupation of Estonia) and point-of-view is, in this tense novel, effectively employed.

■ The Shawl (Cynthia Ozick; 1990. Fiction.)

“My niece Stella,” Rosa slowly gave out, “says that in America cats have nine lives, but we — we’re less than cats, so we got three.” She saw that Persky did not follow. She said, “The life after is now. The life before is our real life, at home, where we was born.”

“And during?”

“This was Hitler.”

“Poor Lublin,” Persky said.

“You wasn’t there. From the movies you know it.” She recognized that she had shamed him; she had long ago discovered this power to shame. “After, after, that’s all Stella cares. For me there’s one time only; there’s no after.”

Persky speculated. “You want everything the way it was before.”

“No, no, no,” Rosa said. “It can’t be. I don’t believe in Stella’s cats. Before is a dream. After is joke. Only during stays. And to call it a life is a lie.”

■ The Book of Jonas (Stephen Dau; 2012. Fiction.)
Unasked, a bookseller pressed this book on me a few years ago, and for some reason, I had thought it was a “feel-good story” about the relationship a soldier and a young person he rescued during a combat mission. This is not that. At. All. To me, the novel read as a meditation on the nature of otherness, on how alone each of us really is. Yes, it concerns war and its senselessness, but it also explores family and loss and grief and isolation, both social and cultural. Highly recommended.

■ The Bunker, Volume 3 (Joshua Hale Fialkov; 2015. Graphic fiction.)
I have a love-hate relationship with the artwork in this series, but the story has hooked me completely, to the point that I cannot believe I haven’t seen news of its screen, large or small, adaptation.

■ The Squirrel Mother (Megan Kelso; 2006. Graphic fiction.)
Obstinately and, to this reader, pointlessly obscure.

■ The Silence of Our Friends (Mark Long; 2012. Graphic fiction.)
Long, whose father was a television reporter during the time of Silence‘s events, draws on childhood recollections to describe the civil unrest in Texas in the 1960s. Well-told story and exceptional artwork.

■ Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (Cal Newport; 2016. Non-fiction.)
That Newport’s suggestions (including “Quit social media”) are obvious goes without saying, but his earnest admonitions may prove helpful to those who are re-evaluating their pursuits.

■ When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi; 2016. Non-fiction.)
For me, Breath is a sentimental companion to Being Mortal, which I read late last year. Moving. Worthwhile. Yet… if you have time for only one, choose Being Mortal. The essence of Breath can be found in Kalanithi’s essay “Before I go” (Stanford Medicine, Spring 2015).

■ The Heir Apparent (David Ives; 2011. Drama.)
Although I enjoyed The School for Lies, Ives’ adaptation of Molière’s The Misanthrope, his take on Jean-François Regnard’s Le Légataire universel left me cold. The Heir Apparent, part of the 2015-16 season at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is, as Chris Jones reminds readers, a farce. That it’s a farce that should end in half as much time, however, and with far less potty humor was painfully evident in text; it was particularly harrowing in person (as I mentioned here). I actually considered leaving at intermission, in fact. Only the cast’s brilliance prevented me from doing so.

■ Neighbors (Jan T. Gross; 2001. Non-fiction.)
■ Our Class (Tadeusz Słobodzianek (adaptation by Ryan Craig); 2009. Drama.)
Earlier this month, I visited the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. I pulled Neighbors from my shelves that evening, and Gross’ exploration of the senseless horror that occurred in the Polish village of Jedwabne on July 10, 1941, prompted me to read the play inspired by the National Book Award Finalist. Where Neighbors is brisk, relentless, insightful, and disturbing, however, Our Class, which is enslaved by its framing device, fails the material. In fact, had I not read Neighbors, I would have had no real context for events in the play, which culminate in the murder of 1,600 Jews by their friends, schoolmates, and neighbors.

■ Scored (Lauren McLaughlin; 2011. Fiction.)
A friend mentioned Sesame Credit in our correspondence earlier this month, asking if it didn’t remind me of a YA novel. At the time, I could not locate a conventional news source’s report on China’s “social credit” program, although numerous alarmist links were readily available. I have since read the CNN op-ed “The risks — and benefits — of letting algorithms judge us,” however, and I think she may have been thinking of David Eggers’ The Circle, which is not YA. That said, my search for a related YA title eventually led to Scored, a book that, while competent in its way, yielded few surprises. I did like this, though:

Imani knew that her parents would not have understood. Their grasp of the world was based on an obsolete value system that was probably the root of Imani’s problems. Who else had gifted her with the dusty antique of loyalty, that “disempowering bond”?

■ Ready Player One (Ernest Kline; 2011. Fiction.)
In which eighties references and geekery abound!

■ Arcadia (Tom Stoppard; 1993. Drama.)
In an odd scheduling juxtaposition, I saw Marjorie Prime at the Writers Theatre about an hour after leaving the Illinois Holocaust Museum; hence, emotionally speaking, I received a gut-punch followed by a blow to the jaw. Kate Fry and Mary Ann Thebus, who will almost certainly be nominated Jeff Awards, reduced me to tears with their performances in this thought-provoking and timely play, which runs through March 13. Marjorie Prime may well be the last Writers Theatre production in its Books on Vernon location: The new theater space opens in March with Stoppard’s Arcadia. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is one of my favorite works of literature, but I have read no other Stoppard. How delighted I am to have “found” Arcadia. Brilliant. Just brilliant.

By the way, articles in the playbill for Marjorie Prime are responsible for Brian Christian’s The Most Human Human and Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence moving from my shelves to my nightstand. Other notable titles in my TBR stack include Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo, the Remy Bumppo production of which will also open in March; Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air; and the third volumes of two graphic series, The Bunker and Letter 44.