what I’ve been reading lately:
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Azadi
(by Arundhati Roy) The 9 chapters in this book are a mix of essays and lectures, and some of them can be repetitive: some lectures cover the same ground and discuss the same facts, sometimes using the same phrases. I thought chapters 6 and 7 (“Intimations of an Ending” and “The Graveyard Talks Back”) were…
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The Bottom of the Harbor
(by Joseph Mitchell) The six pieces in this book were originally published in The New Yorker between 1944 and 1959, and all of them have something to do with various maritime industries in and around New York. As Lucy Sante notes in her foreword, these pieces were published at a time when “the harbor and…
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Georgia O’Keeffe
(by Lisa Mintz Messinger) I read this book because a) I didn’t know a whole lot about Georgia O’Keeffe’s art and b) my husband has been friends with the author’s son since 7th grade, and when we went to the author’s memorial service back in December, someone read a passage from this aloud and it…
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On the Calculation of Volume IV
(by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell) I’m still really liking this series, though as more and more characters are introduced it feels harder to get a sense of the personalities/particularities of any of them—though I guess maybe this is partly because there isn’t an omniscient narrator, just Tara Selter narrating…
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The Silver Book
(by Olivia Laing) At the start of this novel we meet Nicholas, a 22-year-old art-school grad who is leaving London in a hurry for reasons that become clear only later. He goes to Venice thinking of beauty and anonymity: “He can look at churches and paintings, dip himself into the blue and gold waters of…
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Who Is Government?
(edited by Michael Lewis) This collection of eight essays (most of which were originally published in The Washington Post in 2024 and were later collected in book form) was a book club pick, and I liked it but am not sure how much I’ll ultimately retain from it—though that might be a me problem. Almost…
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The City We Became
(by N.K. Jemisin) I like the premise of this one a lot: at a certain point in their development, cities in our world become living entities, but a creepy af Lovecraftian city from another dimension would prefer for that not to happen, because those living cities in our world get in the way of that…
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Cherry Baby
(by Rainbow Rowell) I was totally charmed by the first 100 pages or so of this book, and I ultimately didn’t hate it, but it turned out to be a different kind of second chance romance than I was expecting, which somewhat lessened my enjoyment of it. When the book opens we meet Cherry, who’s…
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On the Calculation of Volume III
(by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell) When this book opens, Tara Selter has been stuck in the eighteenth of November for more than three years, and she feels like she might always be stuck in it. But something’s different: at the end of the last volume, she met someone else…
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What We Can Know
(by Ian McEwan) For much of Part One of What We Can Know, I wondered if maybe I would rather be re-reading Possession by A.S. Byatt instead—my memories of that one are dim but I remember it having a similar set-up, in that both this book and that one are novels whose protagonists are academics…