what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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Suggested in the Stars
(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani) I liked this book, which is the second in a trilogy that started with Scattered All Over the Earth, just as much as I liked the first one—which is to say, quite a bit. This one, like the first one, is made up of chapters that are first-person…
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Ghosts of Greenglass House
(by Kate Milford) I read Greenglass House in February 2021, so it’s taken me a few years to get around to this sequel, but I think I’m OK with that: I thought this would be a good late-December book and it definitely is. It takes place in the days leading up to Christmas, and the…