Book notes

what I’ve been reading lately:

  • Heidi by Johanna Spyri

    Heidi felt to me like one of those books I should have read in childhood but never did, and I was a little hesitant to read it as an adult because I was worried I would find it too sappy. In fact, I found it totally charming, despite its many references to God and despite…

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  • Le Club des baby-sitters: Tome 1 by Ann M. Martin

    One night recently I was looking at New York Public Library’s ebook app and noticed a section for books in French. I read a Tintin book in French years ago but had been intimidated to try anything without pictures, despite my 1000-day Duolingo streak … until I saw that one of the French ebooks available…

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  • Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

    I’m glad I read the Melville House “Art of the Novella” edition of this book: the “Illuminations” at the end of the book added some much-needed context, as it’s been a while since I studied transcendentalism in school. Having both “The Transcendentalist” and “Civil Disobedience” included with Bartleby the Scrivener felt really useful in terms…

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  • These Happy Golden Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder

    Did I read this one as a kid? I can’t remember but I suspect not: I’m sure I read Little House in the Big Woods but I think I was pretty young at the time and I don’t know if I got this far in the series; I think I would have been bored by…

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  • The Checklist by Addie Woolridge

    I don’t usually read “chick-lit” or “women’s fiction” or “romance” or “romantic comedy” or whatever you want to call this, but I got this ebook for free via Amazon First Reads last May and figured I’d give it a try. In the first chapter we’re introduced to Dylan Delacroix, a corporate productivity consultant in Houston:…

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  • The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

    The Fire Next Time consists of two essays, one short and the other longer, both a mix of the personal and the more general, both about being Black in America. I’d read part of the longer piece in The New Yorker, and it made me want to read the whole thing. The first piece (the…

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  • King of the Wind by Marguerite Henry

    I was a kid who took riding lessons, went to horse-centric summer camps, and spent recess in 5th and 6th grades pretending to be a horse with my similarly horse-obsessed friends. Not surprisingly, I read a bunch of horse books, including some by Marguerite Henry—but I don’t think I ever read King of the Wind,…

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  • The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

    I think I knew I was going to love this book from Macfarlane’s description of it in his author’s note, in which he says the book is about “people and place” and the “relationship between paths, walking and the imagination” and “the subtle ways in which we are shaped by the landscapes through which we…

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  • The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

    Early in The Book of Form and Emptiness. we learn about the sudden accidental death of Kenji Oh, a jazz clarinetist who was born in Japan and had been living in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, Annabelle, and their kid, Benny. The book is mostly Benny’s story—it’s about how he starts hearing voices after…

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  • Isolarion by James Attlee

    I read and really liked James Attlee’s book on moonlight, Nocturne, back in 2010, and I think it was after that when I spotted this book in a secondhand shop in either Cambridge or London and decided I needed to buy it. I’ve never been to Oxford, but I nevertheless thoroughly enjoyed this exploration of…

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