what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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Bird City
(by Ryan Goldberg) I really liked this book about bird watching in NYC, though I am not a birder myself. (I think I’ve been on exactly one bird-watching walk in my life, in Prospect Park circa 2005 or 2006—and while I remember that we definitely saw a golden-crowned kinglet, I don’t remember anything else we…
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On the Calculation of Volume II
(by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara Haveland) In the first volume of this book, Tara Selter, who’s stuck in a time loop where she keeps waking up on November 18, suggested to her husband that maybe they should go to Paris together, since that’s where the time loop started for her and maybe if she…