what I’ve been reading lately:
-
Sea People
(by Christina Thompson) This book isn’t just about the settlement of the Polynesian Triangle—it’s also about history and anthropology and archaeology and epistemology: it’s about what non-Polynesian people have known (or not known, or guessed, or tried to figure out) about Polynesia and how (and when) it might have been settled, and how sources of
-
Archipelago of the Sun
(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani) The first book I read in 2025 was Suggested in the Stars, which is the second book in a trilogy by Tawada (I’d read the first book back in 2022), so it feels fitting that I closed the year out with this one, which is the third of
-
The Ocean Is Everyone’s But It Is Not Yours
(by Dave Eggers) At the start of this novella we meet Aurora, who’s been in charge of her dad’s whale watching business for the past two years, since his retirement. Business isn’t booming, but it’s steady, both for Aurora and for her friend Declan, whose “looser and boozier” tours leave from the same pier. There
-
The Other Girl
(by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer) There are family secrets and then there are family secrets: when she was ten, Annie Ernaux heard her mother telling someone about having had “another daughter who died of diphtheria at age six.” She described this child as having “died like a little saint,” and having been
-
Lessons in Magic and Disaster
(by Charlie Jane Anders) I think the three storylines of this novel and the way the narrative switches between them made it a slow start for me, but once I was about halfway into the book I was fully invested. In one storyline we have Jamie, who’s working on her PhD dissertation and also trying
-
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
(by Elizabeth Smart) I’ve been meaning to read this since, um, 2015, and I’m not sure what took me so long. I’m also not sure how I ultimately feel about this one: some of it felt like a slog—too vague, too much mythologizing. But at a sentence/paragraph level there is a lot I like, and
-
Nymph
(by Stephanie LaCava) You could say this novel follows its narrator, Bathory (Bath for short, pronounced Bat) from her childhood in the Boston area to her college and post-college years in New York, and it does, but that might imply something a lot more straightforward than this book. This book is elliptical, slippery, operating with
-
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
(by Hanif Abdurraqib) In her introduction to this essay collection, Eve L. Ewing writes that this “is a book about life and death—in particular, though not exclusively, Black life and Black death.” Many of the essays use music as a through-line or a jumping-off point, but the book isn’t a collection of music criticism per
-
The Vanderbeekers Lost and Found
(by Karina Yan Glaser) I read this book a few weeks after this year’s New York City marathon rather than before it, but the timing still felt apt: the events of the book start on October 20 and culminate on the day of the marathon in early November, and this is a very autumnal book,
-
In Praise of Shadows
(by Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker) Some parts of this 1933 essay on Japanese aesthetics have definitely not aged well (the parts about race and skin color, the parts about women’s bodies) and some parts are about things that I don’t know enough about to have opinions on (costumes