Over the past five years, I have increasingly sought out books that are interested in exploring the day-to-day, even the mundane. Despite trends toward high-concept plots, magical premises, and narratives that publicists can deem Important and urgent, I find myself most excited about writing that is focused on the concrete facts of daily life. It wasn’t a conscious choice, at first, but this shift in my interests began early in the pandemic, when we were all forced to reassess our routines and then to compress them into tiny bubbles, and then to live them over and over again for many months. While some were desperate for escapism, I found myself eager to engage with the quotidian. Someone else’s routine is still different from mine, after all.
Throughout an era of concurrent crises, both global and domestic, I have done my best to stay informed—often to the detriment of my mental health—and so for me the escape comes from shrinking the story to a manageable size. Of course, even modest stories can have great stakes, and are still inextricably tied to larger social and political issues. In each of the books listed below, the authors use minor incidents, chores, and everyday schedules as a gateway to exploring broader concerns.
In my essay collection It All Felt Impossible, I wrote a short essay for every year of my life. The goal was not to capture every milestone and important event, but rather to offer brief glimpses at distinct moments. By focusing on relatively minor incidents, I hope that I can paint an idiosyncratic but still essentially complete portrait of who I am and have been. I write about walking my dog, for example, because it’s one of my most consistent practices, and there is value in thinking about what that means for me. I live a pretty boring life, as many people do; I believe there is beauty and wonder and tension and pain in that boringness. It’s in the accretion of the minor details that the reader develops an intimate knowledge of the author, of the nature of existence itself.
If you find yourself, like me, wishing for quieter stories, for books that treat the mundane as worthy of serious attention, then this list is for you.
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Though it has a fantastical premise—a woman on vacation in the Austrian Alps wakes one morning and finds that all other people have disappeared and she is cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible wall—this is primarily a book about the daily chores one completes to stay alive. The narrator, accompanied by her trusted canine companion, scours the countryside for supplies, chops wood, plants potatoes, repairs her cabin. She takes in a lost cow and learns how to milk it. Later, the growing family is joined by a pair of stray cats. She is alone with her thoughts for years, left to consider what makes up a life, and how our rituals define us. In every patient scene of potato harvesting and cow milking, the book pays tribute to the small moments that are often overlooked in flashier novels. Danger—of starvation, of treacherous weather, of illness—looms over every page, but The Wall is about what the narrator calls, “The unchanging months of my daily troubles.” A deeply moving book and a criminally overlooked masterpiece, this novel is an extraordinary exploration of what it means to be alive.
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon
In this collection of 100 very short stories, an unnamed narrator relates a series of anecdotes about a small New York town very similar to the author’s hometown of Ithaca. With an eye for the absurd, Lennon writes stories about minor interactions—a miscommunication between a barista and a tourist—and subtle changes—a farm road falling into disuse and being reclaimed by nature—that carry surprising weight. In a deadpan voice, Lennon juxtaposes the bizarre and the ordinary throughout this collection; by the end, the reader truly knows this town, because they have been exposed to it in its quietest moments, when most people don’t even bother to look. These stories draw attention to the beauty and magic and outrages that all converge when you slow down and pay attention to life’s minor dramas.
The Book of Delights by Ross Gay
On his 42nd birthday, Ross Gay challenges himself to write a brief essay every day for the next year, chronicling moments of delight—a praying mantis on an empty pint glass, cracking open freshly fallen pecans, leaving one’s bags unattended on Amtrak—and over the course of the next year, he carries the reader through lots of cafes, trains, libraries, and restaurants. From one “essayette” to the next, Gay often changes location and tone, but the one constant is in his poet’s attention to detail, and his ability to extrapolate larger meanings from the in-between times. When a person he doesn’t recognize waves to him, it transports him to summers with his grandparents in Verndale, Minnesota, and to a reflection on his lineage and his love of this part of the Midwest. Though the tone of the book, as you might guess, is generally optimistic and even joyful, Gay still frequently addresses race, class, gender, and the uses of public space, among other issues.
Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams
Long heralded as a master of the short form, Joy Williams writes with the kind of confidence most writers would kill to have. The pieces in here, some as short as 12 words, are marvels of compression, each depicting subtle and sometimes mysterious emotional movements. Some stories are playful, even silly (one, titled “A Flawed Opinion” is about an op-ed incorrectly describing the Heimlich Maneuver). Some are devastating, such as the story of the retired war correspondent who has been holding on to a cyanide pill for the moment her life has lost meaning, but she cannot find the pill: “After that, you can imagine. Her remaining years were a nightmare to her.” I admit I’m cheating a little bit here—God himself shows up on the page in more than one story, though he’s doing things such as waiting in line for a shingles vaccine or adopting a tortoise. In this book, even the divine are required to complete their to-do list.
Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder
One of the greatest books about suburbia ever written, Abbott Awaits focuses on a father of a toddler trying to navigate the quiet indignities of being a young parent. Written in a series of short vignettes, each with its own pithy title (“Abbott and the Inoperative Traffic Light,” “Abbott and the Wrong Tool,” and “In Which Abbott Fails to Complete a Pretty Basic Task,” to name a few), this novel actively identifies the profound and humorous in the tedium and monotony of daily life. Bachelder writes with admirable precision and insight about the ways a person can find meaning even when ordering fast food or signing an online petition. Bachelder writes, “The following propositions are both true: (A) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life.” This book explores that contradiction at the heart of so many of our lives.
The Incredible Shrinking Woman by Athena Dixon
Dixon’s debut essay collection is described on the jacket as “a quiet retelling of a life in the background.” As with her second collection, The Loneliness Files, Dixon is focused on her introversion and isolation, and the ways in which she feels she has made herself (and been made by others) to be invisible. Though some major life events, including a divorce and the death of a high school sweetheart, are covered, most of the essays center on a single commonplace event, such as getting an MRI or cooking platanos alone in her apartment. More than any others on this list, Dixon’s book deals with life on the internet: lurking on fanfiction forums, streaming music, meeting men over Skype. All the threads in the book come together in the title essay, in which Dixon details the humiliating and enraging ordeal of being a large black woman in a tiny seat on an airplane and knowing how she is being judged by the people around her as she clips on her seatbelt extender.
Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River by Jung Young Moon (translated by Yewon Jung)
A short novel about a Korean author trying to complete his novel while at a residency in Texas, this book is a meandering, recursive, philosophical exploration of what it means to be an author, what it means to write a novel, and what it means to be in Texas. The associative style is heavy on long riffs about historical figures spurred b minute details; early in the book, the narrator is describing the Texan disdain for beans in chili, which leads to a riff on the nature of beans, which leads to Ben Franklin claiming to have discovered tofu, which leads to beans being fed to prisoners and, after several pages, ends on consideration of where Lee Harvey Oswald stood on the chili debate and whether anger over the chili situation played any role in his assassination of JFK. Maybe this doesn’t sound funny to you, but it was all very funny to me. Very little happens, plotwise, in the book, but each encounter with a bit of American culture leads to fascinating and hilarious asides about the nature of storytelling. “The only plots in my life,” the narrator says, “were the plots of day and night, of the weather of the day, and of the four seasons and the climate.”
Silence in the Age of Noise by Erling Kagge (translated by Becky L. Crook)
Early in this book, Kagge (a Norwegian explorer and philosopher) writes that he has been trying, and failing, to convince his daughters, “that the world’s secrets are hidden inside silence.” Kagge once spent 50 days walking solo across Antarctica, so arguably he understands silence at a level deeper than the average person. Although his adventures (and, really, who even knew there was such a job these days as “explorer?”) are the stuff of comic books, his focus is on the power of embracing silence and solitude, becoming more present in your own life. He urges the reader to seek out wonder, which he describes as “one of the purest forms of joy that I can imagine.” Don’t be misled; this is not a self-help or pop psychology book. It is a deeply considered analysis of the ways in which we can find silence in the modern era and rediscover meaning in our routines.
This short novel takes place on a single day on Claude Monet’s Giverny estate. Though there are dramas bubbling in the background—the prolonged grief over a deceased child, Monet’s daughter worried she will not be allowed to marry her true love—the novel is primarily concerned with the movement of the sun across the sky. Attention is lavished upon the minor changes in perspective wrought by changes in light. Figes flexes all her writerly muscle here, capturing every florid detail on the estate, and in the minor changes in social dynamics between the characters. You will never encounter a more beautifully described garden than in this book, not just because of the vivid language, but because of the way Figes connects these visual pleasures to the existential. Monet is in search of the perfect light to begin painting, and all the rest that occurs around him is secondary. When visiting writer Octave Mirbeau is blowing smoke rings, the text lingers on the importance of appreciating simple wonders, praising, “The healthy pursuit of beauty in the arts, as opposed to affectation, decadence, and posing.” Watching the smoke rings dissipate, Mirbeau says, “We live in a luminous cloud of changing light, a sort of envelope. This is what I have to catch.”
Essays After Eighty by Donald Hall
Best known as a poet, Donald Hall (a 2010 recipient of the National Medal of Arts), begins this collection with a mission statement of sorts: “I sit in my blue armchair looking out the window. I teeter when I walk, I no longer drive, I look out the window.” The 14 essays in this collection reflect on the author’s mortality, but they are not maudlin or depressing. There is none of the bitterness or cynicism a reader might expect from an author who knows his body is deteriorating, and who is often treated with pity and condescension by those he meets. Hall writes, “I survive into my eighties, writing, and oddly cheerful, although disabled and largely alone.” It’s the odd cheerfulness that really animates this book. Hall may be in physical decline, but his mind is as incredibly sharp. Through well-observed details, humorous asides, and trenchant riffs on the pleasures of the mundane, Hall paints a portrait of a man at peace, still eager to make the most of the small moments in life.
