I spent much of the summer elsewhere. After I finished my second year as an MFA candidate in fiction at Ohio State, I taught at a boys’ school in DC for six weeks and then moved on to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. At the start of summer, I embarked on a reading regime of John Updike (the Rabbit tetralogy) and Richard Ford (two–thirds of the Bascombe trilogy) and Edward St. Aubyn (the Melrose novels). I see the theme, in retrospect: books by white men who don’t treat women very well; books full of serious passages of interiority and cultural reflection. Lovely and serious literature. And I had nearly read all of Adam Johnson’s novel The Orphan Master’s Son when I realized that I could not read another torture scene; I had stopped understanding what was literally going on in the book. My brain was broken.

Literature is beautiful and powerful and important. As a fiction editor for The Journal, I look for writing that feels inspired and unique and like a hand reaching out to me, the reader, to say, Let me tell this story.

But dear lord I was tired.

So I turned to mysteries. Those books relegated to their own section of the library, with their titles in large font and shadowy houses on the cover. Those books that come out in hardcover every year or so, then are quickly printed in mass-market paperbacks with gray pages. Books that pose a clear problem at the start—Here’s this dead body!—and end with a solution. Often, the books are fast-paced, with snarky narrators. The writing is often quite good. And most importantly: the books are fun. They are a pleasure to read. I had forgotten books could be like that.

I became enraptured with Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura mysteries, featuring a plucky Japanese-American antiques dealer living in Japan trying to deal with the death that pops up around her all the time. (This is a constant theme in the mysteries, I noticed: if the character is not a Detective Inspector or a private investigator, at some point the author is obligated to reference the lead character’s necessary proximity to death.)

Jon Loomis, a poet, has written three Frank Coffin mysteries, all set in Provincetown. Frank is a detective, hoping for a quieter life in the often kooky and gender-bending town, but—as is necessary—death keeps finding him.

I also spent an inordinate amount of time on Netflix, watching the British mystery series Rosemary & Thyme (about Rosemary Boxer, a professional gardener, and Laura Thyme, a former policewoman, who travel around fixing people’s gardens and solving mysteries; you do get the pun of the title, yes?) and Inspector George Gently, in which a London-based, grizzled DI takes a job in a small town after the death of his wife, only to find his new, young constable challenging. Death, of course, follows George like a shadow.

And then there is Murder She Wrote. Has any show ever so much glamorized the life of a writer? There’s Jessica Fletcher, teacher-turned-writer, working diligently on her mystery novels—it’s meta, as only CBS can do—all while traveling around and solving murders. It’s worth noting that in the world of the show, Jessica is well known and makes quite a bit of money from her books.

I’m sure I’ll plunge back into capital-L Literature soon. Perhaps this is the year I’ll read War and Peace. Or more Turgenev. Or I’ll crack open those collections by Mavis Gallant, VS Pritchett, and Peter Taylor.

But it’s not all bleak. I’ve recently read two collections that are killers. Ben Stroud’s Byzantium is almost too good for words; it’s the sort of collection that reminds me of the silliness of those “the short story is dead” arguments. And my former teacher, Erin Flanagan, has a new collection It’s Not Going to Kill You, which is wise and skilled and beautifully written. But even more than that, stuff actually happens in these stories. Plot stuff—as if Stroud and Flanagan decided to throw caution to the wind and have fun with fiction. It’s wondrous.