Book notes

what I’ve been reading lately:

  • Watermark: An Essay on Venice by Joseph Brodsky

    I bought this book at the gift shop of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and read most of it on a train from Venice to Florence; I’d thought, after reading Two Cities by Cynthia Zarin, that I should read something by Joseph Brodsky, and when I saw this in the gift shop it seemed the obvious…

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  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

    I read a lot of this book on an airplane a few weeks ago and it was excellent plane reading for me: the plot speeds along and I was pretty engrossed. The premise: Evelyn Hugo is a major movie star who hasn’t given an interview in years, but who, when the book opens, has just…

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  • Two Cities by Cynthia Zarin

    This book is part of the ekphrasis series put out by David Zwirner Books, and that word always makes me think of my freshman year of college, about a classroom with an instructor talking about Homer. I remember the instructor asking, rhetorically, what ekphrasis does and then I remember him answering: “it fucking interrupts the…

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  • The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin

    I vividly remember the cover of the 1989 Puffin paperback edition of this book, which I suspect I checked out of the library multiple times. I’m not sure what made me think of it recently, but I decided it might be fun to re-read, and it was: I remembered parts of the story but had…

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  • The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery

    I’d been meaning to read this book since it came out in 2015, so when I found out that someone I know from work had chosen this for the first read of the new nonfiction book club he’s starting, I immediately put a hold on it at the library. (I love book clubs for either…

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  • Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis

    I found Dykette an extremely cringe-inducing read, which I think is intentional. So do I think the book is successful as a novel? Yes. Did I enjoy reading it? Sometimes. Would I recommend it? I guess it depends on your feelings about gross-out performance art and “High-Femme Camp Antics.” (Personally, I think my tolerance for…

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  • Pitch Dark by Renata Adler

    The last two books I read before Pitch Dark were both narratively-straightforward romances—very different in style and from very different times, but they were both the kind of book where the central couple gets a happily-ever-after ending and the reader gets warm and fuzzy feelings. Pitch Dark is not that kind of book at all.…

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  • The Nanny by Lana Ferguson

    This was a book club read for me, and I wasn’t necessarily expecting to like it as much as I did. I mean – bonking the nanny is such a stereotypical trope, and even with the twist (this nanny used to perform on OnlyFans, and her new employer turns out to have been someone she…

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  • The Blue Castle by L.M. Montgomery

    At the start of The Blue Castle we meet Valancy Stirling, who’s 29 and single, in a time and place “where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man.” Her family looks down on her because of her timid nature and her “hopeless old maidenhood” and her lack of conventional good…

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  • The Red and the Black by StendhalTranslated by Roger Gard

    Roger Gard’s introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Red and the Black describes the book as “a thrilling double love story” and also as “satirical and sharp,” a “picture of corruption, grossness, illiberality and deceit in municipality, Church and state” and of “a tottering reactionary monarchy.” All of which I maybe would have…

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