Book notes

what I’ve been reading lately:

  • 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

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  • 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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