Book notes

what I’ve been reading lately:

  • Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

    I wish someone had recommended this book to me when I was a kid, but ah well, better late than never. I had high expectations going into Dealing with Dragons because I’d heard rave reviews from multiple people, and because I love the Sorcery and Cecelia books that Patricia C. Wrede co-wrote with Caroline Stevermer.

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  • Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

    Memory and absence are at the center of this novel: the narrator, Jessa-Lynn, is dealing (or not dealing) with her father’s death, and also with the absence from her life of her first/only love, Brynn (who’d been close with Jessa and her brother, Milo, since they were all kids, and who later ended up marrying

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  • Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith

    I think my favorite poems tend to be about seeing/looking rather than feeling/being, whether the seeing is real or imagined. A lot of the poems in this collection are more on the feeling/being side of things; many of them are about moving through the world in a body that is Black, queer, and HIV-positive, and

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  • Weather by Jenny Offill

    On a companion website for this book, there’s a quote from Thomas Merton’s journals that includes the phrase “I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place,” which I like a lot (I should really read more by Merton one of these days) and which feels very

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  • Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey

    Near the end of Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey describes the desert as “desolate and still and strange, unfamiliar and often grotesque in its forms and colors, inhabited by rare, furtive creatures of incredible hardiness and cunning, sparingly colonized by weird mutants from the plant kingdom, most of them as spiny, thorny, stunted and twisted as

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  • Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire

    One of the rules of Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children (a boarding school for children who have travelled to other worlds but have been forced back to the world they were born in, which is our world) is “No quests” (15). But rules sometimes get broken, and this is definitely a quest narrative. Jack

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  • ‘Zine by Pagan Kennedy

    The eight chapters of this book correspond to the eight issues of a zine that Pagan Kennedy put out between the ages of 25 and 31 (she wrote this book when she was 32), and each chapter consists mostly of b&w reproductions of an issue of the zine itself, preceded by an introductory essay. As

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  • Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride by Lucy Knisley

    I always enjoy Lucy Knisley’s books: I like graphic memoirs in general, and I like Knisley’s style a lot, especially the way that her books combine drawn art and text and photographs (which may have drawn-on embellishments or labels). I got engaged in March, so it seemed like the right time to read this one,

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  • Open City by Teju Cole

    I’d been meaning to read Open City since it came out in 2011; I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to it. Reading this in 2021 was interesting: we’re nearly two decades on from 9/11 now, and lines about disaster and epidemics have a different resonance, after 2020: at one

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  • The Nose by Nikolai GogolTranslated by Ian Dreiblatt

    “The world is suffused with perfect nonsense. Sometimes it is completely implausible.” So says the narrator of The Nose, which is, I think, the first thing I’ve read by Gogol. It’s been a while since I’ve read any of the Melville House “Art of the Novella” series – I used to get them at the

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