Monthly Archives: December 2024

I love Best Of lists, and when they start coming out in December I feel a strong compulsion to go read a bunch of the things listed to decide if it belongs on my list. In the past, I’ve managed this stress by making a Top 10 Books that I am looking forward to readingContinueContinue reading “Best of 2024”

I loved the mass and heft of this book — square, fat, heavy, thick paper densely covered in swirls of black ink. It feels like the labor of love that it clearly is — a memoir, a family history, and an often arduous effort to understand and connect to a complicated past. Tessa Hulls’ grandmotherContinueContinue reading “Feeding Ghosts, Tessa Hulls”

I love the strangeness of Téa Obreht’s work; her play with genre; the way she surprises you at every turn. Right when you think you have a sense of what the novel is doing, it wriggles away into some totally unexpected direction. The Morningside might be the strangest of her books, and maybe the leastContinueContinue reading “The Morningside, Téa Obreht”

I listened to this on audiobook, which is a great way to do it, because you get the wonderful texture of the accent, and bits of Welsh, and most importantly — you get to actually hear the snippets of songs, which are incredible. I don’t know if you, like me, have occasional geographically specific readingContinueContinue reading “Whale Fall, Elizabeth O’Connor”

It’s been a minute since I read a motherhood memoir (when I first became a mother, I devoured them), but this one truly exemplifies all the best qualities of the genre. It demonstrates so beautifully how the experience of parenting, though it so often feels tremendously isolating, also seems to connect you, intellectually, to theContinueContinue reading “I Cannot Control Everything Forever, Emily Bloom”

I read Nuking Alaska today while giving a final exam — it’s quite good. Very upsetting, as you might imagine, being all about how the process of testing nuclear weapons in Alaska happened against the wishes of, and indifferent to the potential harms to, the inhabitants (both human and animal), facilitated by brazen lies andContinueContinue reading “Nuking Alaska, Peter Dunlap Shohl, and Unretouchable, by Sofia Szamosi”

This was a slow burn. I really wasn’t sure how much I liked it, and then the final third pulled everything together in such glorious, moving ways, it was really a wonder. The first two sections were engaging, but also dwelt quite a bit in varieties of self-destructive misery, all the more painful because itContinueContinue reading “Family Meal, Bryan Washington”

This might be Sally Rooney’s strongest novel yet. At least, it seems the most confident, like she knows exactly what she wants to do and is doing it, and isn’t getting sidetracked, indulging in tangents. Or maybe it’s that she’s not spending as much time on the stuff that *I* find less compelling, heh heh.ContinueContinue reading “Intermezzo, Sally Rooney”

This might be showing my bias, but I think it does this novel a disservice that the audiobook is read by Tom Hanks, precisely because it seems like such a Tom Hanks-y kind of book. And look, I recognize that Tom Hanks doesn’t always play aw shucks kinds of guys in Forrest Gump kinds ofContinueContinue reading “The Dutch House, Ann Patchett”

Jacqueline Woodson is the rare author who writes books for people of all ages — not in the sense of one book that everyone can enjoy, like Winnie the Pooh, but separate books for various age levels. I have long loved her novels for adults, and my 7yo really enjoys her picture books. And latelyContinueContinue reading “Before the Ever After, Jacqueline Woodson”