what I’ve been reading lately:

  • Treacle Walker

    (by Alan Garner) Treacle Walker is the first book by Alan Garner that I’ve read, but it’s unlikely to be my last. I’ve been meaning to read something by him for years, and was reminded of that fact when I saw the UK edition of this one at the excellent Shakespeare & Sons bookstore in…

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  • What Fresh Hell Is This?

    (by Heather Corinna) I am not really a fan of surprises. So when I realized that I felt like I was missing some basic info about what to expect in the coming years in terms of perimenopause and menopause, I figured I should probably try to learn some things. Hence this book, whose subtitle is…

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  • Get a Life, Chloe Brown

    (by Talia Hibbert) I’ve been meaning to read this one since it came out in 2019, so I’m glad it was the February pick for the romance book club I’m in. This one’s sweet but also steamy, and I liked it a bunch—aside from the third act conflict, which I found too stressful, even though…

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  • Kitchen Confidential

    (by Anthony Bourdain) I’m grateful to nonfiction book club for choosing this as our February read: although I definitely like food (by which I mean: I like cooking and baking; I like going out to eat; I like trying new-to-me restaurants and new-to-me dishes), I haven’t read many food-related memoirs, and this one was definitely…

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  • OKPsyche

    (by Anya Johanna DeNiro) If you need a mythology refresher (which I did, before I started reading this): per Apuleius’s Metamorphoses, Psyche was a) the goddess of the soul, b) Cupid’s wife and c) a great beauty who was transformed from being a mortal woman to being immortal after a series of trials. This all…

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  • The Rediscovery of America

    (by Ned Blackhawk) This book (whose subtitle is “Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History”) covers a lot of ground chronologically and geographically, and sometimes jumps around a bit rather than proceeding solely by chronology. It’s written in an academic but readable style (by which I mean: this is not a pop history kind…

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  • Nipponia Nippon

    (by Kazushige Abe, translated by Kerim Yasar) Nipponia Nippon was a random library find for me: whenever I return or pick up a book, I also look at the “New books” shelves to see what catches my eye, and the first line of this Japanese novella (written in 2001, but only translated into English in…

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  • Loving Venice

    (by Petr Král, translated by Christopher Moncrieff) At the office holiday party in December, I found myself talking to a colleague about how much we both like Venice; later in the month, he stopped by my desk to lend me his copy of this book, which I read over the course of two days in…

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  • 2023 Reading Highlights

    I read 37 books in 2023, four of which were re-reads and the rest of which were new to me. I didn’t read quite as many books in translation as I meant to (I read 7; I was aiming for 10) and I definitely did not succeed at reading books from outside the US, UK,…

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  • Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

    The narrator of this book (whose gender is never specified) is blindsided by love, then blindsided by loss. We get glimpses of their past relationships—boyfriends, girlfriends, affairs with married women—but mostly we get the story of their relationship with Louise, which is a story of bliss followed by absence. “Why is the measure of love…

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