what I’ve been reading lately:

  • 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…

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  • The Wood at Midwinter

    (by Susanna Clarke) This is the second book I’ve read this month that’s a read-in-a-single-sitting wintry kind of book. I read this one while watching snow fall outside and appreciated the book’s setting—which is, go figure, a snowy wood. Victoria Sawdon’s gorgeous illustrations add a lot to the text, which is about a young woman…

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  • Winter Solstice

    (by Nina MacLaughlin) This is a book to read in one day—maybe ideally in one sitting, though I started it on my morning commute and finished it at home in the evening. It’s a book to read on or near the winter solstice, on a day when it gets dark early (sunset here in NYC…

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  • Cathedrals of Industry

    (photographs by Michael L. Horowitz, text by James P. Holtje) Last month my husband and I went to an event at the 92nd Street Y where Michael Horowitz and Jim Holtje talked about this book (and about the larger subject of America’s “industrial past, present, and future”) with Paul Krugman and Esther Fuchs. I should…

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  • Evicted

    (by Matthew Desmond) This book (which was published in 2016 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2017) follows eight families/households in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009. These families/households either have experienced/are experiencing eviction, or are living under threat of it. Some live in Milwaukee’s (mostly Black) North Side; others live in a…

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