what I’ve been reading lately:
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Lincoln in the Bardo
(by George Saunders) This is another one of those “I’ve been meaning to read this for ages/I’m glad I finally got around to it” books. In terms of its structure (which includes a chorus of voices of dead people in a cemetery) this reminded me a bit of The Dirty Dust by Máirtín Ó Cadhain…
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Language City
(by Ross Perlin) The multilingual nature of NYC is obvious to anyone who’s been here, but before reading this book I didn’t really grasp the full extent of the city’s linguistic diversity: over seven hundred languages are spoken here (out of an estimated total of about 7000 languages in the whole world), including a number…
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Glyph
(by Ali Smith) This book is about war stories and family stories and ghost stories and memories. It’s about the stories we tell each other, and the stories we tell ourselves, and the details that stick in our minds. It’s about Petra and Patch, who are sisters but have been estranged, but who end up…
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The Baby-sitters Club Fan Edition: Baby-Sitter Summer
(by Ann M. Martin, Becky Albertalli, Coe Booth, Sarah Kuhn, Peter Lerangis, Jahnna N. Malcolm, & Emma Straub) I read a big chunk of this book on a summer Sunday when I was fighting off a cold or something and had a temperature of 100.1 degrees Fahrenheit and couldn’t quite nap all day but also…
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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…