what I’ve been reading lately:
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They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
(by Hanif Abdurraqib) In her introduction to this essay collection, Eve L. Ewing writes that this “is a book about life and death—in particular, though not exclusively, Black life and Black death.” Many of the essays use music as a through-line or a jumping-off point, but the book isn’t a collection of music criticism per…
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The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found
(by Karina Yan Glaser) I read this book a few weeks after this year’s New York City marathon rather than before it, but the timing still felt apt: the events of the book start on October 20 and culminate on the day of the marathon in early November, and this is a very autumnal book,…
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In Praise of Shadows
(by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker) Some parts of this 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics have definitely not aged well (the parts about race and skin color, the parts about women’s bodies) and some parts are about things that I don’t know enough about to have opinions on (costumes…
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Fear City
(by Kim Phillips-Fein) This was an interesting book to read after having seen the documentary Drop Dead City back in May. The book and the movie cover the same time period/events (the fiscal crisis in 1970s New York City) but each has its own slant, the slant of the book being that the crisis gave…
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Slade House
(by David Mitchell) I first read Slade House back in April 2016, which was probably not the best timing: this is definitely better as a spooky season read than as a springtime read, especially because the action of the book takes place in late October at nine-year intervals, beginning in 1979 and ending in 2015.…
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Karma Doll
(by Jonathan Ames) When this book opens we find our narrator (Happy Doll, an ex-Navy guy, ex-cop, and current “security specialist”) in a doctor’s office in Mexico at 2 am with a bullet in his shoulder. If you read the previous book in this series (this is number three), you’ll probably remember the things that…
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Wizard of Most Wicked Ways
(by Charlie N. Holmberg) This book is the fourth one in the Whimbrel House series and I started reading it because I was on a train and wanted something plot-heavy and engrossing, and I already had it on the Kindle app on my phone. It was definitely the right book at the right moment for…
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Exophony
(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) I found this series of essays about language (and, more specifically, about speaking/writing in a language other than one’s first language) to be really pleasing even though I speak neither Japanese nor German, which are two of the languages that come up most. (Tawada was born in Japan…
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Frostbite
(by Nicola Twilley) There are so many interesting/unexpected/fun facts and anecdotes in this book (subtitle: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves); I definitely could not shut up about all the stuff I was learning while I was reading it. Twilley takes readers on a global tour of the largely-unseen spaces of the…
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Making It
(by Laura Kay) Well this was the sapphic rom-com I didn’t know I needed. I started reading this on vacation because a) it was the pick for Pride book club at work b) I had it on the Kindle app and c) I tried to pack the book for nonfiction book club, but it’s a…