Book notes

what I’ve been reading lately:

  • Life in Five Senses by Gretchen Rubin

    This is the third book by Gretchen Rubin that I’ve read (I read The Happiness Project back in 2010 and Happier at Home in 2015) and my favorite so far. In this one, Rubin talks about how an offhand remark by her eye doctor (she’s there for a case of pinkeye; the doctor mentions that…

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  • The Black Tulip by Alexandre DumasTranslated by Robin Buss

    I started this book knowing very little about 1600s Dutch history, so I was grateful for Robin Buss’s introduction and the background it gave about the real-life characters Cornelius and Johan de Witt, who were killed by an angry mob in 1672 after Cornelius was accused of an assassination plot against William of Orange. In…

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  • Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart

    As the inside cover blurb puts it, this is a novel about “eight friends, one country house, four romances, and six months in isolation.” It’s Boccaccio meets Chekov in the Hudson Valley in 2020, and it’s precise and funny and tragic and I liked it a whole lot. The conceit—which is that a Shteyngart-like writer…

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  • Keeper of Enchanted Rooms by Charlie N. Holmberg

    While the plot is predictable, and the setting (a fictional island in the very real Narragansett Bay, with some excursions to Portsmouth and Boston) didn’t have as much of a strong sense of place as I wanted/expected, and the characters talk like they’re from now, not 1846, I was still charmed by this book, which…

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  • Anastasia, Absolutely by Lois Lowry

    I like the way that Lois Lowry’s middle-grade books about Anastasia Krupnik (who is in eighth grade in this final book in the series) keep the reader’s interest by combining multiple plot threads. In this one: 1) Anastasia has just gotten a dog 2) she’s taking a Values class at school 3) her dad has…

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  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

    I somehow never had to read this book in junior high, high school, or college, so I don’t know if I would have disliked it as much as Tom Perrotta (who wrote the foreword to the edition I read) did when he first read it. Perrotta talks about how he “found the book strange and…

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  • Quiet by Susan Cain

    Susan Cain covers a lot of ground in Quiet (whose subtitle is “The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”). After starting with the idea that “where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum” might be “the single most important aspect of personality,” she goes on to explore what she calls “the Extrovert…

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  • Coal to Diamonds by Beth Ditto with Michelle Tea

    I wasn’t aware of the existence of this book until I found a copy in a little free library near home, and as far as memoirs by musicians go, Carrie Brownstein’s is still my favorite, but I’m glad to have read this too. Beth Ditto talks about her childhood in small-town Arkansas, and growing up…

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  • Austerlitz by W.G. SebaldTranslated by Anthea Bell

    I think I bought this book my senior year of college and started reading it for a class I ended up dropping: I opened the book to find that I’d underlined/taken notes in the margins up to page 29, at which point I found a ticket stub for a student ticket to the ballet ($10!)…

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  • Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski

    I’d been vaguely meaning to read this book since it first came out in 2015, and only recently learned that an updated edition was released in 2021; I figured I might as well finally check it out. This book is maybe more firmly in the self-help genre than I was expecting, and some of the…

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