Category: Fiction

Attachments is not my favorite Rainbow Rowell novel, but it was a quick read, and I was in the mood for something light, and it was fun enough that I was willing to overlook its flaws. The books starts with an email exchange between two women who are best friends and work at a newspaper:…

Despite it coming highly recommended from a close friend, I found myself feeling sort of resistant to this book of 19 short stories at first. I think partly it was that I’d just read another collection of stories (Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith) and had very much enjoyed their mostly-first-person narratives, and…

When I finished reading Public Library and Other Stories by Ali Smith, I immediately went back to the beginning and started it again, which is something I’ve done before with books of poems but not so much with collections of short stories, but for some reason with this one I felt like I should, and…

When I was about thirty pages into this book, I told my boyfriend I felt like it was going to be an unsubtle comedy, and I think it pretty much was, but that was totally what I was in the mood for. I wanted a fast-paced and plot-driven book that I was going to be…

The Bone People is another book that was recommended to me as pre-New-Zealand reading, and I spent the past week finding it pretty hard to put down, to the point (well, actually, this isn’t so unusual for me) where I was reading it while walking down the hallway between the elevator and the door to…

I don’t generally read romance novels (semi-exception: I did have fun with Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate books, though after the first one they didn’t feel that romance-y) and when I started this one I wasn’t sure I was going to be into it. And I do sort of think that if I were to want…

Empty Streets, which was originally published in Czech in 2004, is the third of Michal Ajvaz’s novels to be published in English translation by Dalkey Archive Press, and the third that I’ve read and enjoyed. This one is set in Prague in the summer of 1999: when it opens we meet our unnamed narrator, a…

The Seed Collectors is the sort of book that starts with a family tree, which signals that it’s probably going to be a sprawling family drama, which is not generally my favorite kind of book. And it is a sprawling family drama, sort of, with emphasis on the drama and a darkly satirical mood, but…

Today Will Be Different was not quite, for me, the complete delight that Where’d You Go, Bernadette was, but that’s setting the bar pretty high: I still liked this a whole lot. It starts off really funny (the day I started reading it, I kept interrupting my boyfriend to read him passages I found hilarious)…

As this New Yorker blog post by Lucy Ives points out, Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton is not exactly “conventional” historical fiction: it’s not full of “period intrigue,” to use Ives’s phrase, and it’s not particularly plot-driven or even, necessarily, character-driven, though the book does have a pretty tight focus on its title character,…