what I’ve been reading lately:
-
A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames
Noir isn’t generally my genre, but my husband read this and loved it and I’m glad I read it too. The narrator is an ex-cop private investigator who finds himself trying to solve a crime that hits close to home while he’s also high on prescription painkillers and pot; in doing so he makes a…
-
Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth
Savage Gods is a book about writing and a book about being stuck and a book about trying to figure things out. Kingsnorth writes about how he and his wife, Jyoti, bought a house and some land in Ireland because he wanted to feel connected to a place, and because he thought “that the work…
-
Nineteen Reservoirs by Lucy Sante
Before reading Nineteen Reservoirs, I knew a little about the Croton reservoir system that brings some water to New York City—I knew there used to be a reservoir where the New York Public Library at Bryant Park is now, and I’ve walked up the spiraling stairs of the High Bridge Water Tower (and across High…
-
The Divorce by César AiraTranslated by Chris Andrews
In her introduction to the English translation of this book, Patti Smith writes that The Divorce “outlines the process for those wishing to comprehend or to experience the expansive possibilities of a single moment” (viii). That is a perfect description of this book, though it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting when I first picked…
-
Companion Piece by Ali Smith
Companion Piece begins and ends with “hello”, or some variation thereof, and that word, one we use all the time without necessarily thinking about the different ways we use it, comes up a lot in the book, most explicitly in a great section toward the end of the book about its possible etymologies and uses…
-
Meet Us by the Roaring Sea by Akil Kumarasamy
The protagonist of Meet Us By the Roaring Sea lives in Queens in the not-too-distant future: far enough from now that a building built in the early 2000s is described as old, but not so far from now as to be unrecognizable. The protagonist works in AI and technology has advanced—people’s consumption patterns are monitored…
-
Spellmaker by Charlie N. Holmberg
I’m glad I read this right after Spellbreaker because, as previously mentioned, I really wanted to know how things would work out … but alas, I didn’t like this book as much as I liked that one. For me, the balance of magic and intrigue and romance in the first one was just right; this…
-
Spellbreaker by Charlie N. Holmberg
Spellbreaker was an excellent vacation read for me, and I liked it enough that I’m planning to read the sequel right away: this is definitely NOT a standalone novel and I want to know how everything works out. The book opens in England in 1885 with a workhouse on fire and a young girl, Elsie,…
-
Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss
The prologue of this novel sets up what’s to come: it’s 1838 in Gundagai, Australia, and we’re with Wagadhaany, who is four years old, as she listens to her father telling a white settler that he shouldn’t build a house on the land by the river: it’s too flat; there’s a risk of floods. The…
-
The Stolen Lake by Joan Aiken
I went into The Stolen Lake expecting something like Nightbirds on Nantucket: an alternate-history romp with some peril for our heroine Dido Twite, but with humor and an expectation of a happy ending. The Stolen Lake felt much darker, with Dido as resourceful as ever but also sadder and in what felt like greater danger.…