Category Archives: Uncategorized

I told myself before that the brief little blurbs that I write when I share my book thoughts on fb were fine for a blog post, but then each blog post ended up becoming longer and more involved, and so I quickly started feeling like those blurbs weren’t good enough, which if course led toContinueContinue reading “Dreams of a Common Language, Adrienne Rich”

This is a real stunner. Yes, I know, surprise, Nobel-Prize-winning author writes terrific books, but still: this one grabbed me and held me in its thrall. I didn’t read it quickly — I’ve actually been working my way through it over the last three months — but I nonetheless read it rapaciously, with absolute absorption.ContinueContinue reading “Admiring Silence, Abdulrazak Gurnah”

This is great, in that it’s about a feisty group of 50+ year old women and their friendships, love lives, and struggles with their kids and jobs, but it’s also tough to read, because… it’s tough to be a 50+ year old woman dealing with trash men, be they lovers or employers or deadbeat kids.ContinueContinue reading “Moms, Yeong-shin Ma, tr. Janet Hong”

I generally try to know as little as possible about a movie before I go to see it, but one look at the poster for The Northman had me pretty confident that I was certainly not going to watch it, so I gleefully read Glen Weldon’s review and chuckled, especially, at this bit: “Like Hamlet,ContinueContinue reading “The Northman”

Not predictions, because I’m terrible at them (as my attempts last year will show), just some quick thoughts because I did once again scramble to try to see many of the Oscar-nominated movies before the ceremony this year. Though I haven’t seen what I’m fairly confident is the best movie of all the ones nominated,ContinueContinue reading “Oscars 2022 roundup”

Much like their more well-known graphic novel, This One Summer, Skim is an unflinching look at the realities of being a teenager; an open acknowledgment of just how cruel and nasty a lot of it is. But melancholy though it is, there’s also a wonderful sense of tenderness and even nostalgia. I hated being aContinueContinue reading “Skim, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki”

This was actually exactly what I expected it to be. The kind of fragmentary, essayistic effort to understand — in both an intellectual but also a very affective way — a person from the past, that melds with meditations on the self, excavations of illicit memories and ancestral trauma. But the French version, so, aContinueContinue reading “Exposition, Nathalie Léger, tr. Amanda de Marco”

I managed to get my hands on the UK edition of this book last year, but people in the US will soon be able to get the American edition thanks to Deep Vellum Press! I actually finished reading it a few weeks ago, and hadn’t gotten a chance to write about it, and then RussiaContinueContinue reading “Grey Bees, Andrey Kurkov, tr. Boris Dralyuk”

I didn’t read Beowulf until graduate school, when I was teaching it (the Heaney translation) in a humanities core course on the epic.* And I loved it. It’s like an anti-epic — a world-weary, melancholic story of about how heroic values are a thing of the past, gone forever, but perhaps also somewhat ruinous evenContinueContinue reading “The Mere Wife, Maria Dahvana Headley”

I was lucky enough to get an advance readers copy of this book from Feminist Press — I follow them on Instagram (their feed is awesome) and they asked if any reviewers or booksellers or bookstagrammers wanted one, and I asked and they sent me one! I was so excited!! I read it immediately, whichContinueContinue reading “Enjoy me among my ruins, Juniper Fitzgerald”