Monthly Archives: February 2024

Not so long ago, a dear friend of mine died suddenly and unexpectedly. In the days after, I scrolled through his various social media pages, I guess just wanting to talk to him. He would occasionally post about books he’d read (most of which I’d never heard of — that’s the kind of brilliant andContinueContinue reading “Tuesday or September or the End, Hannah Black”

What blew me away about this collection is how it works as a remarkably coherent whole, an inquiry into an overall topic — ‘dumb luck’ — yet each of the poems can also stand alone as its own beautiful meditation, and they are all quite different from each other. What also emerges gradually, brilliantly, isContinueContinue reading “Dumb Luck & Other Poems, Christine Kitano”

Continuing my aforementioned project of writing unintelligently about poetry — this book made me think about what marks a poet’s specific style, what makes it identifiable as theirs, and where the line is between that and a gimmick (no, I haven’t read Sianne Ngai on the gimmick yet; I will, I will). I thought aboutContinueContinue reading “Cain Named the Animal, Shane McCrae”

Ok, so I saw this on display at a bookstore, and I knew it was a big hit in South Korea, and the title is winsome, and it’s quite short, and it’s translated by Anton Hur, who also did Cursed Bunny (which is great) and is very charming on Twitter, so why not, I checkedContinueContinue reading “I Want to Die, But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, Baek Sehee, tr. Anton Hur”

I declared this one of my best reads of 2023, even though I hadn’t quite finished it on December 31. But when I finally did a month later, I had no regrets about the choice. It’s a really phenomenal book — a brilliant examination of contemporary culture, but also a really impressively balanced blend ofContinueContinue reading “Doppelganger, Naomi Klein”

I’m not entirely sure if this is the best or the worst thing to read if you’re feeling depressed, but it is a remarkable book. If you’ve ever had that feeling, when looking out on airplane window, or from the top of a very very tall building, or a mountain, of a simultaneous detachment andContinueContinue reading “Orbital, Samantha Harvey”

I went through a phase where I read a lot of grief memoirs. I think it started because I had seen Sonyali Deraniyagala’s Wave recommended as one of the best books of the year, and picked it up without knowing anything about it. I read it in less than 24 hours, so gripping did IContinueContinue reading “Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”