what I’ve been reading lately:
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Pure Invention
(by Matt Alt) In the introduction to this book, Alt explains that it’s about how certain Japanese exports had an outsize global impact— or, as he puts it, how these exports “transformed our tastes, our dreams, and eventually our realities as we incorporated them into our lives.” Each chapter is about a different item or…
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Venice
(by Nick Earls) I can’t remember where/when/why I bought this novella but my best guess is that it was when I was on vacation in New Zealand in 2017 (Earls is Australian). This is actually the second in a series of five linked novellas, but it works as a standalone (though I do want to…
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Roman Year
(by André Aciman) I read Alibis a few years ago and really liked it; though that was a series of linked essays and this is more of a straight-up memoir, the vibes are similar: Proustian, readerly, writerly. I love Aciman’s prose: there are sentences in this book that I felt I had to stop and…
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Wild Chocolate
(by Rowan Jacobsen) Given the choice between chocolate and something else (like: chocolate cake or lemon cake; chocolate candy or sour candy), I usually choose the “something else.” But I like chocolate too, and reading this book makes me excited to try some of the single-origin/bean-to-bar chocolates that Jacobsen writes about (and in fact, I…
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Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief
(by Maurice Leblanc, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos) In his introduction to this edition, Michael Sims calls Arsène Lupin “the most entertaining felon in literature,” and I was definitely entertained by the thirteen stories in this volume—though I think I liked the final three “Prince Rénine” stories the most of all. Still, there are…
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Polysecure
(by Jessica Fern) I feel like a few years ago it seemed like everyone was reading books about attachment theory and its application to romantic relationships in adulthood, but I didn’t read any of those because pop-psychology is generally not my thing and also because I am not particularly interested in relationship advice with a…
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Slow Dance
(by Rainbow Rowell) I picked this book up on a Friday night when I was looking for a palate-cleanser of a novel between nonfiction reads, and it definitely delivered. I found it pretty unputdownable—I’m pretty sure I would have finished it on Sunday evening had it not been for the fact that on Sunday evening…
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A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear
(by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling) I hadn’t heard of the Free Town Project before I started reading this book for nonfiction book club, and I also didn’t know a lot about bears in New Hampshire before reading this (though when I was a kid and my mom and I were somewhere near Mount Washington one summer, another…
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Intermezzo
(by Sally Rooney) I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a book about a pair of brothers (who are ten years apart in age and not particularly close to one another) whose father has just died; family dramas are not always my thing. But it’s Sally Rooney, so added to the family drama we have…
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Still Life with Remorse
(by Maira Kalman) I read this aloud to/with my husband over the course of an afternoon and evening, and I think I enjoyed it more this way than I would have if I’d just read it on my own. Reading it aloud with someone else encouraged me to pause after each vignette (there are 39…