Author Archives: Kasia Bartoszynska

This took me a long time to get through because it’s so incredibly grim. It’s also one of those graphic novels where I’m like, wait, you’ve tricked me into reading dense overviews of factual information by putting them in speech bubbles next to a drawing of a guy talking!! But it is also more generallyContinueContinue reading “Climate Changed, Philippe Squarzoni, tr. Ivanka Hahnenberger”

This is a great book to read on your own if you’re a literary studies person experiencing some existential angst, but it’s a really great book to read and discuss with a bunch of your colleagues in the humanities. I asked our Center for Faculty Excellence if we could have a reading group for itContinueContinue reading “Reasons & Feelings, Sarah Mesle”

I really love The Book of Margery Kempe, so I had to go through a bit of a process to recognize that this wasn’t that book, and wasn’t meant to be. It’s tricky, though, because part of the project here IS retelling Margery’s story, and so part of me bristled, and just wanted to goContinueContinue reading “Margery Kempe, Robert Glück”

I had a 10 hour drive yesterday, so I launched into this audiobook that a friend recommended — and I was absolutely enraptured. It’s so great. First, very important, it’s funny. Funny books are weirdly rare! But second, it’s that magical combination of being very easy to read, like, feels like guilty pleasure kind ofContinueContinue reading “The Husbands, Holly Gramazio”

It feels churlish to say so, but this was so exactly what I expected it to be that it felt borderline satirical. A bleak, austere story of a woman coming to a community of nuns and reckoning with horrors of the past both personal and collective. Punctuated with startlingly grotesque stuff about mice (that, IContinueContinue reading “Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood”

I wasn’t going to see it even though I adore Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal because I really hated the book and I knew what the movie was going to be. But then I saw a clip of an interview with Chloe Zhao where she was talking about how she and the (Polish) director ofContinueContinue reading “Hamnet”

I’m an obnoxious pedant about my Best of the Year list (I do so much more reading and watching at the end of December! Some of it is really good stuff! You just have to WAIT) but I am also a merciful god (ha ha) who understands that people like to use Best Of listsContinueContinue reading “Holiday Gift recommendations”

I have an annual tradition of canceling all plans on the first big snow day and reading a book cover to cover. As we were chatting about the forecast last night I was telling friends that I didn’t think I’d be able to do it this time because there’s just too much to do atContinueContinue reading “The Singularity, Dino Buzzati, tr. Anne Milano Appel”

This was fun, though maybe a touch longer than it needed to be. It’s about a college student trying to write an essay for class, and it does brilliantly capture the peculiarities of student life; being isolated and slightly outside of time and absorbed in various emotional dramas. Wanting to be a genius. How theContinueContinue reading “Practice, Rosalind Brown”

I’m currently reading Sarah Mesle’s awesome book Reasons and Feelings with a bunch of colleagues (you know me, I love a book club) and one of the (many) cool things about it is that it makes you think about the different styles and modalities of sharing ideas, and their varying durations and speeds. Lectures areContinueContinue reading “Azadi, Arundhati Roy”