what I’ve been reading lately:
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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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Letters to His Neighbor
(by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis) These 26 letters by Proust to his upstairs neighbors (most are to Mme Williams; a few are to her husband) were a quick and pleasing read. There are photographic reproductions of some of the letters interspersed throughout the text and wow I do not envy anyone trying to…
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Ways of Seeing
(by John Berger) I missed last month’s nonfiction book club meeting because I was in New Orleans to see Taylor Swift, but I’d been vaguely meaning to read this book for literally a decade, so I got it from the library anyway. I had been expecting a “how to look at art” kind of book,…
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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
(by Isabel Wilkerson) I missed this month’s nonfiction book club meeting because my husband and I had tickets to see Ethan Lipton’s “We Are Your Robots” in Brooklyn (which I thoroughly enjoyed), but I read the book anyway because it seemed like something I probably should have read already. This book came out 2020 and…
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Giovanni’s Room
(by James Baldwin) In his introduction to this edition, Kevin Young writes about buying a copy of this book “knowing only it was a book of Paris and exile.” That was more or less my starting point, too – knowing this book was a classic of queer lit, set in Paris, with an American expat…
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The Dallergut Dream Department Store
(by Miye Lee, Translated by Sandy Joosun Lee) What if dreams didn’t just come from your mind, but were things you could buy at a store? What if you could only go to that store while you were asleep, and you would have no memory of it when you woke up? That’s the premise of…
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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…