what I’ve been reading lately:
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Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken
I recently acquired a copy of The Stolen Lake, which is the fourth book in Joan Aiken’s “Wolves Chronicles”, and it prompted me to check out this book, which is the third in the series, from the library. Nightbirds on Nantucket is totally bonkers, and totally excellent. It opens on a ship at sea in…
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Riding the New York Subway by Stefan Höhne
This book is definitely an academic text rather than a general history of the subway, and as such I’m not really the intended audience—and the fact that I read this while home sick with covid probably doesn’t help with my retention of the subject matter. But I nevertheless enjoyed this study of “how the daily…
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The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle by Janet Fox
At one point in this middle-grade novel one of the characters remarks on how it’s weird to be living in a “crazy maybe haunted, maybe spy-filled castle in Scotland,” and yeah, this book is quite the mix of things. It’s 1940 and Kat Bateson and her two siblings are sent to a castle somewhere north…
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This Way Out by Tufayel Ahmed
My husband and I moved to a new apartment just over two weeks ago and I feel like there is still so much to do, from updating my address in all the places it needs to be updated to unpacking clothes and books (which we can’t actually do until our new bookcases arrive and storage…
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Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
Last Night at the Telegraph Club was the 1950s sapphic coming of age story I didn’t know I needed, and was such an engrossing read for me. In the prologue we meet Lily, who’s 13 and with her family at a 4th of July celebration/Miss Chinatown pageant in San Francisco; Lily feels “as if she…
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Luster by Raven Leilani
Near the end of Luster the narrator, Edie, is thinking about art and what it does, what it’s for: “A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t.” She’s a painter, and how she finds her way back to painting is maybe the most satisfying…
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Artforum by César AiraTranslated by Katherine Silver
Somehow the back cover blurb for this one had me expecting something more concrete and less philosophical, but I nevertheless enjoyed this novella made of linked vignettes that are mostly “about” the narrator’s passion for Artforum magazine but are also about the human condition: about being a person and having quirks and hobbies and routines…
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Built by Roma Agrawal
In the fourteen sections/chapters of Built, Roma Agrawal explores various aspects of structural engineering and the built environment, sometimes from a personal perspective and sometimes from a more historical one. Early in the book, Agrawal describes her background: she initially went to university to study physics, then fell in love with engineering and became a…
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An I-Novel by Minae MizumuraTranslated by Juliet Winters Carpenter
I heard about An I-Novel thanks to Rebecca Hussey’s Reading Indie email newsletter, in which Rebecca described this as “an autobiographical, autofictional novel that takes place in one day and is thinky, contemplative, and formally innovative” – which a) is a great description of this book and b) really made me want to read it.…
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The Psychology of Time Travel by Kate Mascarenhas
In the first chapter of The Psychology of Time Travel, we’re introduced to “four young scientists” (Margaret, Lucille, Grace, and Barbara) who have been working in an isolated laboratory and who manage, in 1967, to build a working time machine. The technology can’t take people back to any point prior to its own invention, but…