In these last three months of the year, my reading habits did not become any more coherent. But as Emerson writes in a collection of essays I have yet to finish: “The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.”

I am trying to learn to be not loth to disappoint. My inconsistency is my consistency. Life has no coherent pattern, why should I?

I continued my foray back into middle-grade novels this season with Gary Schmidt’s “Jupiter Rising” and Tae Keller’s “When You Trap a Tiger” — both great examples of what’s possible when an author takes the mind of a young person seriously.

Two long novels occupied most of my audio-consumption time this season, and they’re both free on Libby. The audiobook of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Americanah” is read by British actress Adjoa Andoh (who you might recognize as Bridgerton’s Lady Danbury). It would be well worth the listen for Andoh’s performance alone, but it’s also the most intricately structured, uncluttered and witty novel of this length I’ve ever found.

“The Brothers Karamazov,” on the other hand, is nothing if not cluttered. It took me nearly three weeks of commutes to get through it, and if I’m honest I spent the first week just trying to sort out who on earth everyone in the novel was. But at the end of the day it’s one of those high-investment, high-reward books that does pay off. You might spend two weeks really putting in the work to figure out what’s going on, but when it all comes together in those last ten hours you’ll (almost) be wishing the story was longer.

I came away with a new respect for Dosteovsky’s boldness. He has absolutely no qualms about writing the worst of human nature and makes no obvious attempts to give the reader much to like about most of his characters. That’s ballsy. On top of that, he doesn’t hide the themes of the novel, or the points of view for which he wants different characters to stand. I think there’s a taboo today about writing characters that explicitly represent certain viewpoints. But Dosteovsky’s embrace of it lets the novel really run loose at points with ideas, so much so that at points it felt like I was listening to The Republic, not a novel. And yet, there’s something about the prose in even the most dialoguey stretches that plows the story along at a clip. The story does take detours that left me wondering what purpose certain episodes played in the novel (there are a few I’m still wondering about), but it never drags.

I read a lot of poetry this season, but the only collection I managed to finish was a copy of “The Wasteland and Other Poems” purchased at a Barnes and Noble in New York City to gain access to the store’s bathroom code. The Four Quartets remain my favorite Eliot, but “The Wasteland” is undeniably enthralling.

Novels

• Helen Humphreys, “Followed by the Lark”
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Americanah”
• Gary Schmidt, “Jupiter Rising”
• Claire Keegan, “Small Things Like These”
• Tae Keller, “When You Trap a Tiger”
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Brothers Karamazov”

Poetry

• T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland and Other Poems”