what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Secret Fruit of Peter Paddington
(by Brian Francis) I wish I’d read the original Canadian version of this rather than the Americanized one (I mean, geez, readers in the US are not going to be totally confused by a reference to Tim Hortons), but ah well. (I wonder if this would have been Americanized to the same extent if it…
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Greasepaint
(by Hannah Levene) This book is butches in suits and ties, butches playing piano in bars, butches in black jeans and white t-shirts and black leather jackets. It isn’t about plot: as the novel puts it at one point: “And up at the counter something else happens and outside on the street something else happens…
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That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon
(by Kimberly Lemming) I was late on reading this romance book club pick (seems to be a theme for me), but I’m glad I did get to it eventually. This was an entertaining romantasy romp, which was apparently exactly what I was in the mood for. At the start of the book we meet our…
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Cecilia
(by K-Ming Chang) What if you hadn’t seen your childhood friend/crush/obsession for ten years, since you were fourteen, and then you unexpectedly ran into her at your workplace? What if she was waiting for you at the bus stop the next day? What if you rode next to each other until the last stop? That’s…
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Banal Nightmare
(by Halle Butler) Banal Nightmare is a darkly funny novel about midlife millennial midwestern angst, and I simultaneously enjoyed it and found myself having to take breaks from it, because it’s kind of a lot of cynicism and malaise. At the start of the book, one character, Moddie, has recently broken up with her boyfriend…
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How to Solve a Problem
(by Ashima Shiraishi, illustrated by Yao Xiao) As Ashima explains near the start of this sweet picture book, “We climbers call our boulders problems. We also call our problems problems—and to solve them both is sort of the same.” The book is about her ascent of Golden Shadow (V14) in Rocklands, South Africa—an incredible feat…
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Heart: A History
(by Sandeep Jauhar) I don’t normally gravitate to books about medicine/medical history, but someone chose this for nonfiction book club and I enjoyed it. Jauhar walks readers through the history of human understanding of/theories of the heart and circulatory system and various heart-related medical advances, while also telling the story of his own relationship with…
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The Vanderbeekers and the Hidden Garden
(by Karina Yan Glaser) I loved The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street when I read it back in 2022, and I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to the second book in the series, but I’m also glad that I read this summertime story in the midst of summer, rather than…
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Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other
(by Danielle Dutton) In “Writing Advice,” a short piece toward the end of this book that reads like nonfiction until it suddenly doesn’t, one writer tells another to “write something with a real story and get it over two hundred pages” as opposed to “writing little books that nobody reads.” I, for one, quite like…
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New Yorkers
(by Craig Taylor) Near the start of this book, Craig Taylor writes about how he “wanted to craft a book about New York in the twenty-first century, filled with the voices and sounds and places and people of New York, the life of the city right now,” and I think the book definitely succeeds at…