Category Archives: Uncategorized

I was looking for an absorbing and fun book to celebrate the end of the semester, so I tore right through this. It’s an odd novel, one that’s weaving together three major strands through the story of one character, a graduate student who is on the verge of getting married and also trying to finishContinueContinue reading “New People, Danzy Senna”

I loved the Wrinkle in Time books when I was a kid, and then as a teenager, I was thrilled to discover that L’Engle had also written books for young adults, and I happily devoured those as well. So when I saw this short story collection in the new books display of my college’s library,ContinueContinue reading “The Moment of Tenderness, Madeleine L’Engle”

This was both more and less interesting than I expected it to be. Coming hot off a widely discussed New Yorker article that also delves into the non-typical living arrangements and relationships of a woman intellectual whom many consider deeply unlikable, I was sort of expecting to think more about “genius” and social conventions, andContinueContinue reading “Sempre Susan, Sigrid Nunez”

There’s a slightly Madlibs-ish quality to these poems, in that various words are utterly incongruous, such that they almost seem like a joke. But (like good Madlibs!), they’re also pretty great. They are often playing with tropes from fairy tales, with a distinctly witchy twist.All of this might make it sound like they’re primarily plotContinueContinue reading “The Nightgown and Other Poems, Taisia Kitaiskaia”

This novel puzzled me in tantalizing ways — it did all kinds of things that I didn’t expect, and that didn’t quite make sense; which I was tempted to say were flaws, but that came to seem essential. The novel has an irregular structure: four parts, the first with two chapters, the next two withContinueContinue reading “Afterlives, Abdulrazak Gurnah”

Not sure why I thought this would be a fun, light, airplane read, but ooof. It kind of destroyed me. It’s a terrific book — and it is fast-paced and absorbing — but it’s also tough, emotionally. It’s a real deep dive into some of the more difficult parts of parenting — particularly the balanceContinueContinue reading “The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan”

I love an unlikely pairing. One of my favorite things is when two seemingly unrelated, utterly different books that I’m reading end up connecting in unexpected ways. Last week, I wrote a little bit about Girlhood, by Melissa Febos, and about some of my frustrations with it, and as the day went on, I realizedContinueContinue reading “Akrasia and Unwanted Sex”

I had very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, the prose is great — it really gets under your skin in a very visceral (and sometimes pleasurable) way — and there are some really interesting observations, and ways of bringing different facets of a topic together. A lot of the essays reallyContinueContinue reading “Girlhood, Melissa Febos”

It’s sort of interesting that this book is not better, because the story has so much promise — a young, fairly naive, Mexican woman goes to Cuba in 1970 to teach ballet — and the author seems to be a skilled writer who knows a lot about Latin American politics (and writes wonderfully, and vividly,ContinueContinue reading “Dancing with Cuba, Alma Guillermoprieto, tr. Esther Allen”

I saw the movie over a week ago, but I’m still thinking about it. It’s a travesty that Sarah Polley didn’t get a Best Director nomination for it. The movie is beautiful — a really moving portrayal of women being in community together. I was just finishing reading Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy when IContinueContinue reading “Women Talking”