what I’ve been reading lately:
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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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The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
At the start of The Enchanted April it’s a rainy day in London (the kind of day where you look out the window and see “extremely horrible sooty rain falling steadily on the hurrying umbrellas and splashing omnibuses”), and Lotty Wilkins, who is not looking forward to finishing her shopping and going home to have
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Horror Stories: A Memoir by Liz Phair
In this book’s prologue, Liz Phair explains that the book is about “the small indignities we all suffer daily, the silent insults to our system, the callous gestures we make toward one another” (4). These are everyday horror stories, for some definition of “everyday”: affairs, relationship troubles, performance mishaps, brushes with danger. As others have
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Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
Philadelphia Fire isn’t so much about the 1985 bombing (by the police) of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue (though that did happen, and does figure in the plot) as it is about struggles and failures and failings, and maybe especially failed ideals. The book’s epigraph is a quote from William Penn saying that each