what I’ve been reading lately:
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Slade House
(by David Mitchell) I first read Slade House back in April 2016, which was probably not the best timing: this is definitely better as a spooky season read than as a springtime read, especially because the action of the book takes place in late October at nine-year intervals, beginning in 1979 and ending in 2015.…
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Karma Doll
(by Jonathan Ames) When this book opens we find our narrator (Happy Doll, an ex-Navy guy, ex-cop, and current “security specialist”) in a doctor’s office in Mexico at 2 am with a bullet in his shoulder. If you read the previous book in this series (this is number three), you’ll probably remember the things that…
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Wizard of Most Wicked Ways
(by Charlie N. Holmberg) This book is the fourth one in the Whimbrel House series and I started reading it because I was on a train and wanted something plot-heavy and engrossing, and I already had it on the Kindle app on my phone. It was definitely the right book at the right moment for…
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Exophony
(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) I found this series of essays about language (and, more specifically, about speaking/writing in a language other than one’s first language) to be really pleasing even though I speak neither Japanese nor German, which are two of the languages that come up most. (Tawada was born in Japan…
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Frostbite
(by Nicola Twilley) There are so many interesting/unexpected/fun facts and anecdotes in this book (subtitle: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves); I definitely could not shut up about all the stuff I was learning while I was reading it. Twilley takes readers on a global tour of the largely-unseen spaces of the…
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Making It
(by Laura Kay) Well this was the sapphic rom-com I didn’t know I needed. I started reading this on vacation because a) it was the pick for Pride book club at work b) I had it on the Kindle app and c) I tried to pack the book for nonfiction book club, but it’s a…
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The Midnight Library
(by Matt Haig) I’d kind of been meaning to read this for ages, but I wasn’t sure if it would be good or overly trite/sentimental. As it turns out, I ended up feeling like it was both of those things at different points. It isn’t a spoiler to say that Nora, this book’s protagonist, tries…
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King of a Hundred Horsemen
(by Marie Étienne, translated by Marilyn Hacker) I found this book challenging/opaque, but I appreciated the opportunity to try to read the poems in the original French before I looked at Marilyn Hacker’s translations on the facing pages. I bought this on a whim at Dog-Eared Books in San Francisco circa 2012, knowing nothing about…
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The Vanderbeekers to the Rescue
(by Karina Yan Glaser) The plot of this third book in the Vanderbeekers series leans pretty hard on some coincidences/events that felt unlikely to me, but the book as a whole is so charming that I was mostly willing to overlook that. In this one the kids (now aged 6 to 13) are on spring…
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The Summer Book
(by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal) I’d been vaguely meaning to read this book since 2011 (!), when my then-boyfriend read it. More recently, Nina MacLaughlin’s mention of it in Summer Solstice (which I read this June) finally prompted me to get it from the library, and my interest was further piqued when someone…