what I’ve been reading lately:
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Winter Solstice
(by Nina MacLaughlin) This is a book to read in one day—maybe ideally in one sitting, though I started it on my morning commute and finished it at home in the evening. It’s a book to read on or near the winter solstice, on a day when it gets dark early (sunset here in NYC…
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Cathedrals of Industry
(photographs by Michael L. Horowitz, text by James P. Holtje) Last month my husband and I went to an event at the 92nd Street Y where Michael Horowitz and Jim Holtje talked about this book (and about the larger subject of America’s “industrial past, present, and future”) with Paul Krugman and Esther Fuchs. I should…
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Evicted
(by Matthew Desmond) This book (which was published in 2016 and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2017) follows eight families/households in Milwaukee in 2008 and 2009. These families/households either have experienced/are experiencing eviction, or are living under threat of it. Some live in Milwaukee’s (mostly Black) North Side; others live in a…
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Letters to His Neighbor
(by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis) These 26 letters by Proust to his upstairs neighbors (most are to Mme Williams; a few are to her husband) were a quick and pleasing read. There are photographic reproductions of some of the letters interspersed throughout the text and wow I do not envy anyone trying to…
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Ways of Seeing
(by John Berger) I missed last month’s nonfiction book club meeting because I was in New Orleans to see Taylor Swift, but I’d been vaguely meaning to read this book for literally a decade, so I got it from the library anyway. I had been expecting a “how to look at art” kind of book,…
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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
(by Isabel Wilkerson) I missed this month’s nonfiction book club meeting because my husband and I had tickets to see Ethan Lipton’s “We Are Your Robots” in Brooklyn (which I thoroughly enjoyed), but I read the book anyway because it seemed like something I probably should have read already. This book came out 2020 and…
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Giovanni’s Room
(by James Baldwin) In his introduction to this edition, Kevin Young writes about buying a copy of this book “knowing only it was a book of Paris and exile.” That was more or less my starting point, too – knowing this book was a classic of queer lit, set in Paris, with an American expat…
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The Dallergut Dream Department Store
(by Miye Lee, Translated by Sandy Joosun Lee) What if dreams didn’t just come from your mind, but were things you could buy at a store? What if you could only go to that store while you were asleep, and you would have no memory of it when you woke up? That’s the premise of…
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The Secret Fruit of Peter Paddington
(by Brian Francis) I wish I’d read the original Canadian version of this rather than the Americanized one (I mean, geez, readers in the US are not going to be totally confused by a reference to Tim Hortons), but ah well. (I wonder if this would have been Americanized to the same extent if it…
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Greasepaint
(by Hannah Levene) This book is butches in suits and ties, butches playing piano in bars, butches in black jeans and white t-shirts and black leather jackets. It isn’t about plot: as the novel puts it at one point: “And up at the counter something else happens and outside on the street something else happens…