How We Write Now, Jennifer Nash
I have always struggled, in my writing, with a tendency to think in terms of questions (as a friend lovingly put it once in comments on a draft: “By now you should have some answers!”), so I really really loved that Jennifer Nash also has lots of questions, and a willingness to leave many of…
The Last Starry Night, Jamison Odone
This is a very sweet and surprisingly moving account of the end of Van Gogh’s life. Very humanizing. It of course lauds his creativity, but unlike many portraits of genius, it emphasizes his relationships with other people. I really appreciated it.
White Kids, Margaret Hagerman
Is it possible to raise privileged children at the individual level in a way that maps on to ideals of equality at the structural level? The (fascinating) subject of this book is the formation of racial consciousness among affluent white children — how their beliefs about race and inequality emerge. The core takeaway is probably…
Triage, Claudia Rankine
I waited until I was finished reading Triage to read Sarah Dowling’s review (which was the right choice — it has spoilers) and as I expected, it was tremendously helpful in thinking through what the novel does. It’s an odd novel (I still think it’s more of a prose poem, but I recognize it’s a…
Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman
This book came to me in the exact moment that I most needed it, and spoke directly to my soul. It’s a book about time management, but not in the way many such books are. This one is really more of an anti-productivity, anti-time-management book, at least in the way those concepts are commonly understood.…
Questions 27 & 28, Karen Tei Yamashita
I have been trying to figure out how to talk about this book, because I think it’s an incredible, deeply important novel, and I fear that its difficulty will prevent it from getting the attention it deserves. Among the group I was reading it with, we joked that it was an amazing novel that we…
The Wind that Lays Waste, Selva Almada, tr. Chris Andrews
Sometimes you pick a book because you’re in the mood for a specific vibe, and if the vibe you’re looking for is idealistic priest and his angry teenaged daughter are traveling across Argentina when car troubles lead them to an encounter with a gruff mechanic named Gringo and the boy he has taken in —…
We Do Not Part, Han Kang, tr. E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
This was devastating, crushingly so. But also amazing — fascinating in the dreamy, surreal way the story unfolded, gradually drawing you closer to the horror. And this aspect is especially interesting in relation to her other books, and this meta-story of an author and a filmmaker. Very curious to see what her next book will…
The Witch, Marie Ndiaye, tr. Jordan Stump
What I appreciate about Ndiaye’s books is that it feels like literally anything could happen — her novels teeter fascinatingly between real, surreal, magical in this kind of liminal zone that scrambles your mode of reading. How are you meant to approach this thing — as symbolic? fantastical? I think this is what makes her…
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, Omar El Akkad
“What purer expression of power than to say: I know. I know but will do nothing so long as it benefits me. Only later when it ceases to benefit me will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the…
