what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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Vladivostok Circus
(by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) This probably would have been a better winter read than a summer one, but the fact that it transported me to chilly Russian landscapes in the middle of July in New York City is a testament to how atmospheric this short novel is. Like Winter in…
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Boy of Chaotic Making
(by Charlie N. Holmberg) The Whimbrel House books (of which this is the third) are reliably fun/quick comfort reads for me: the kind of book with a lot of action that I can happily devour over the course of a few days. They’re set in a version of the 1800s where magic is a thing;…
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All Fours
(by Miranda July) The unnamed narrator of All Fours is an artist in her mid-forties who, when the book opens, is about to take a trip to New York – a birthday gift to herself where she’s going to stay at the Carlyle and see friends and do things by herself while her husband, Harris,…