what I’ve been reading lately:
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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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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…