Woodworking, Emily St. James
I stayed up through my entire transatlantic flight to gobble up this fantastic novel about two trans women, a high school teacher and the student who becomes a kind of mentor for her in transition. I don’t know if I would have sobbed as much if I’d been on solid ground, I’m very susceptible to…
Smile, Raina Telgemeier and Everything is Teeth, Evie Wyld
My kid is a big fan of Raina Telgemeier, so I figured I should do my due dilligence, and I’m happy to report that this is just as good as people say — a memoir about getting A LOT of dental work that is also about feeling self-conscious and figuring out the social world of…
Aftermath and No Fault
I was surprised by how much I didn’t like Aftermath. It’s funny, I sort of enjoy Cusk’s unlikable protagonists when they’re fictional, but it turns out that her non-fiction voice is not so different and rather annoying (though I don’t remember this bothering me in her motherhood book, maybe because I found it more relatable?).…
Displacement: a Travelogue, Lucy Knisley
Knisley’s account of going on a cruise with her fairly infirm grandparents — basically a diary of care-taking. It’s perhaps most interesting for what it does not say? There’s very little story, other than the reckoning of time (which is not that minute, either), plus interspersed entries from her grandfather’s wartime diary. Although Knisley describes…
None of the Above, Travis Alabanza
“This is a treatise on trans ambivalence,” proclaims a sentence in the Foreword. As the author explains, part of the work of transphobia is to consistently undermine or outright deny the reality of trans people, requiring that they reply with absolute certainty — but what in human life do we know with absolute certainty?? (Nothing,…
Perfection and The Anthropologists
I had lofty ambitions, like two months ago, of writing a proper essay on these two novels, which are not exactly the same book but they sure are close. Both are novels about a couple in their 20s living in a city in another country — in The Anthropologists, the city and their countries of…
Erupcja
I knew almost nothing about this movie except that it was Charli xcx in Warsaw, which is where I’m from, so obviously I had to go. And right from the jump I was pleasantly surprised to find that the credits were in Polish, as was the voice-over narration, and all of the initial dialogue. It…
On the Calculation of Volume, vl 1, Solvej Balle, tr. Barbara Haveland
People have been recommending this to me for awhile (for years I guess, jeeze) and I finally picked it up. I was a little skeptical — the story of a woman stuck in a strange time loop, reliving a single day, didn’t seem very appealing (and there are 7 volumes of this?!). But I was…
Threads: From the Refugee Crisis, Kate Evans
I read this weeks ago, but it has stayed with me because it feels like a desperate attempt to bear witness; to register what is happening amid rapid changes and the apparently utter indifference of the rest of the world. Evans documented the conditions in refugee camps in Northern France in 2015 and 2016 (they…
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen and Emma Thompson
I guess it was almost two months ago now that we did this absolutely wonderful Zoom bookclub with some IC alumni, reading Sense and Sensibility together. For me it was an especially fantastic experience, because I was leading it with my dear colleague Hugh Egan, and we would meet up beforehand to have our own…
Kasia Reads 