what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Governesses by Anne SerreTranslated by Mark Hutchinson
The Governesses is short and strange: fable-like, dream-like, with three governesses like maenads and/or like The Three Graces (to whom they are explicitly compared, I think more than once). There is a house and a garden, and another house across the road in which lives an elderly gentleman who likes to watch the governesses through
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Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
In Beautiful World, Where Are You we meet two of the characters, Alice (who’s a novelist) and Felix (who works in a warehouse) as they’re meeting each other, on their first date after having messaged each other on Tinder. Later, we’re introduced to the novel’s two other main characters, Eileen (Alice’s best friend) and Simon
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The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
Happy spooky season! I somehow had never read “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” by Washington Irving and now seemed like the right time to rectify that. Before reading the story I think I could have told you that it included “Ichabod Crane” and a “Headless Horseman” but I think that’s all I knew about it.
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White Magic by Elissa Washuta
I like the three-act structure of White Magic a lot—how Washuta plays with dramatic structure, the idea of beginning/middle/end, the idea of the three parts of a magic trick as described in the movie The Prestige (the pledge, the turn, the prestige). As far as the individual essays, there are some I love, and some
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Washington Square by Henry James
(Spoilers ahead/don’t read if you don’t want to know what happens in this book.) Early in Washington Square we meet Dr. Sloper, who married a wealthy woman but is an eminent medical professional with a solid career of his own. He lives with his daughter, Catherine, and his widowed sister Lavinia: his first child (a
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Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu MiriTranslated by Morgan Giles
Yikes. Tokyo Ueno Station is a beautiful book, but it’s also incredibly sad, much moreso than I was expecting (even though I went into it knowing it’s narrated by the ghost of a man who spent the last years of his life homeless in Tokyo’s Ueno Park). “I had no luck,” the narrator, Kazu, says,
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Black Wave by Michelle Tea
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned previously, it sometimes takes me a while to read books I own, especially when there are shiny new library books available. This book was a Christmas gift from 2019; my now-fiancé saw this pre-wrapped surprise book at Book Culture and got it for me because he knew I liked Maggie
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The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel
In general I tend to really like illustrated/graphic memoirs, and The Secret to Superhuman Strength is no exception. In this one, Alison Bechdel tells some stories from her life, organized by decade, through the lenses of 1) exercise/physical pursuits and 2) ideas about/struggles with self-transcendence. Tied to the latter, there is a lot about Buddhism
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We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby
A lot of the negative reviews of this book on Goodreads seem to be from people who had issues with the amount of swearing, sex (including queer sex), and bathroom emergencies in these twenty essays. Those things are all fine with me, but humor as a genre isn’t always my thing: it’s rare for this
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Temporary by Hilary Leichter
The unnamed narrator of Temporary is a temp, and always has been: in the world of the book, being a temp is something you can be born into, and if you’re a temp, you start young: “My mother arranged for me my very first job, just as her mother did for her,” the narrator says