Category Archives: Uncategorized

If you love books and the book world, read this. It’s a powerfully informative look at the ecosystem of bookselling and publishing, as well as being a very winsome and enjoyable read. And a quick one at that — the perfect bite-size book! Written in the form of an interview, it starts off as aContinueContinue reading “Reading the Room: a Bookseller’s Tale, Paul Yamazaki”

I saw this on the new book shelf in the youth graphic novel section at the library and read it between MarioKart turns (our library has a Nintendo Switch in the kid’s section; a wonderful community resource). It was really great — a charming and clever story about a young woman who applies to beContinueContinue reading “Baba Yaga’s Assistant, Marika McCoola & Emily Carroll”

Lovable feels like the wrong word for this novel, which is about an anxious and rather beset-upon 40-something-year-old woman who is taking driving lessons, and enjoyable isn’t quite it either, because it is mostly a minute recounting of the small humiliations, petty misogynies, and various unpleasantries about being an older woman in the world today.ContinueContinue reading “Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, Dorthe Nors, tr. Misha Hoekstra”

There’s a kind of Sebaldian quality to this book: maybe it’s the interspersing of photographs, and the sense of history as unbearable, along with this aching desire one feels to protect the beautiful faces in the images. Maybe also the feeling that everything seems Very Serious and Important, but you’re not always clear on theContinueContinue reading “Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe”

I did not consciously set out to read an Irish novel on St Patrick’s Day, but I won’t pretend that I wasn’t delighted by the coincidence. All the more so because the novel itself was a delight! It was so warm, and clever, and funny; an utter pleasure to read — I tore right throughContinueContinue reading “The Happy Couple, Naoise Dolan”

This is going to sound strange, but this book is the most warm, touching, funny, and loving grief memoir you could ever hope to read. It’s heartbreaking, but also so joyful — although the narrative mostly recounts the process of illness and mourning, the book is really a celebration of life, and love, and closeness.ContinueContinue reading “Dancing at the Pity Party, Tyler Feder”

I haven’t read any of Coetzee’s books since Elizabeth Costello, but a friend of mine posted to facebook that she was going to be on a panel about The Pole at a conference, and then another friend chimed in and said that she had read it and was excited to discuss, and I love homework,ContinueContinue reading “The Pole, J.M. Coetzee”

I had a sort of half-baked theory for awhile that massively long novels, especially of the difficult, formally experimental variety, produce a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where you kind of have to find them brilliant and worthwhile, because you’ve sunk so much time and effort into them. So I was weirdly, pleasantly surprised to findContinueContinue reading “Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann”

Not so long ago, a dear friend of mine died suddenly and unexpectedly. In the days after, I scrolled through his various social media pages, I guess just wanting to talk to him. He would occasionally post about books he’d read (most of which I’d never heard of — that’s the kind of brilliant andContinueContinue reading “Tuesday or September or the End, Hannah Black”

What blew me away about this collection is how it works as a remarkably coherent whole, an inquiry into an overall topic — ‘dumb luck’ — yet each of the poems can also stand alone as its own beautiful meditation, and they are all quite different from each other. What also emerges gradually, brilliantly, isContinueContinue reading “Dumb Luck & Other Poems, Christine Kitano”