Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’m sort of meh on historical fiction much of the time, so it’s not as damning as it seems when I say that this was fine, even quite enjoyable. After discussing it with a book club for two hours, I came to appreciate a lot more things about it: the complex ways it ponders theContinueContinue reading “Loot, Tania James”

I have very little interest in watching actual fights, but boy do I love reading about them. The recounting of a boxing match is akin to an act of ekphrasis, translating something into words that is fundamentally non-linguistic. The physicality of it, the bodily knowledge, but also the peculiar intimacy between the two fighters —ContinueContinue reading “The Longshot, Katie Kitamura”

A friend of mine said to me recently that she had just finished this book and was dying to talk to someone about it. Pretty irresistible, especially when she added that it is quite short. I bought it immediately. It’s the story of an alien who, while passing as human, records her observations of lifeContinueContinue reading “Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino”

Obviously, I knew that it would be very different to teach this book in September 2024 than it was in September 2023. But I didn’t exactly know how. What I hadn’t fully understood, a year ago, was how utterly foreign the Israel-Palestine conflicts was to my students. Most of them knew that there was someContinueContinue reading “Palestine, Joe Sacco (a year later)”

This book hooked me so hard that I found myself picking it up at every free moment — like, I’d be in the kitchen making dinner and would jump in for a page or two while the water was coming to a boil. It was a combination of the incredible sense of closeness with theContinueContinue reading “The Bee Sting, Paul Murray”

Picked this up randomly at the library (the pleasures of the browse! Libraries are magic!), and it was such a cool, strange, eerie book. A surreal road trip adventure story of two queer women, one adolescent and one middle-aged, working through their grief and sorting out who they want to be. Ominous and tender inContinueContinue reading “Are You Listening? Tillie Walden”

I started reading this with a bookclub of wine and cider makers — people who know a lot more than I do about how things grow, in other words, and who are not academics. It was awesome, because it gave me such a different angle on the book. As we joked, whereas they tolerated theContinueContinue reading “The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing”

I had meant to read around in a bunch of graphic novels this summer to make some changes to my class syllabus, but in typical fashion, it was just after I finalized the readings and set up the canvas course and everything that I started tearing through piles of graphic novels. A friend introduced meContinueContinue reading “The Lucky Poor, by Mazie Lovie”

I’m a big fan of Kevin Kwan. He basically writes 18th-century fiction adapted to 21st-century sensibilities, but only just barely. It delights me. Like, Lies and Weddings has a plot that could almost be transplanted wholesale into a Burney novel (if you made everyone white). It’s especially satisfying, too, because it indulges in a deliciousContinueContinue reading “Lies and Weddings, Kevin Kwan”

This is an earthy, engrossing tale, full of surprises, bizarre but frequently moving. Though sprawling in scope, it also seems tightly controlled and skillfully constructed. It reminded me of Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound (though I read that book many years ago, so maybe they’re actually quite different…) — both have elements of magicContinueContinue reading “Whale, by Myeong-kwan Cheon, tr. Chi-Young Kim”