what I’ve been reading lately:
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Heated Rivalry
(by Rachel Reid) OK, this one was more my speed than Game Changer was. And I mean, I liked Game Changer, but I feel like Scott and Kip both have such golden retriever energy. Like, so earnest and eager and wholesome. And that’s fun and all, but the Shane/Ilya dynamic of rivals who hook up
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Game Changer
(by Rachel Reid) I haven’t watched the Heated Rivalry show at all, but I was looking for a fun February read and this definitely delivered. At the start of the book we meet Kip, who’s working at a juice bar making smoothies (though he’d rather be doing something that actually uses his history degree). One
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Netherland
(by Joseph O’Neill) Very close to the start of this book, the narrator gets a phone call in which he learns that someone he was friends with when he lived in New York is dead: and not just dead, but a murder victim. This is 2006, and the narrator, Hans, is back in London and
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Rosamond Lehmann in Vegas
(by Nick Hornby) Nick Hornby writes a column for The Believer called “Stuff I’ve Been Reading,” and periodically those columns are collected and released in book form. This is the second of these books that I’ve read, and it definitely makes want to go back to the beginning and read the ones that I missed.
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The Third Policeman
(by Flann O’Brien) At the very start of this book we learn that the narrator is a murderer: he tells us in the first line how he “killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with [a] spade.” We then learn a bit more about the events in his life that preceded this crime: a
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Sea People
(by Christina Thompson) This book isn’t just about the settlement of the Polynesian Triangle—it’s also about history and anthropology and archaeology and epistemology: it’s about what non-Polynesian people have known (or not known, or guessed, or tried to figure out) about Polynesia and how (and when) it might have been settled, and how sources of
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Archipelago of the Sun
(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani) The first book I read in 2025 was Suggested in the Stars, which is the second book in a trilogy by Tawada (I’d read the first book back in 2022), so it feels fitting that I closed the year out with this one, which is the third of
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The Ocean Is Everyone’s But It Is Not Yours
(by Dave Eggers) At the start of this novella we meet Aurora, who’s been in charge of her dad’s whale watching business for the past two years, since his retirement. Business isn’t booming, but it’s steady, both for Aurora and for her friend Declan, whose “looser and boozier” tours leave from the same pier. There
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The Other Girl
(by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer) There are family secrets and then there are family secrets: when she was ten, Annie Ernaux heard her mother telling someone about having had “another daughter who died of diphtheria at age six.” She described this child as having “died like a little saint,” and having been
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Lessons in Magic and Disaster
(by Charlie Jane Anders) I think the three storylines of this novel and the way the narrative switches between them made it a slow start for me, but once I was about halfway into the book I was fully invested. In one storyline we have Jamie, who’s working on her PhD dissertation and also trying