what I’ve been reading lately:
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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
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Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d by Alan Bradley
If my Goodreads shelving is accurate, it’s been three years since I last read a mystery, or at least, three years since I read a mystery that wasn’t middle-grade or YA—which sort of surprises me and sort of doesn’t. Sometimes mysteries are totally my thing; sometimes they feel too plot-driven. And I didn’t love the
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Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
This was the first Woolf I ever read, and it’s still a pleasure to re-read. I’d remembered some of the prose but forgotten some of the story and structure, the way that the narrative jumps from one character to another as their paths cross on a single day in London in June, 1923. I remembered
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The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.
In general, I would say I’m drawn to novels that are tightly focused on a single character; when a story is described as “sprawling” I feel like it’s probably not going to be the book for me. I also don’t read a lot of historical fiction (and when I do, it’s more likely to be
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Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
I’m probably not the target audience for this book—I’m not particularly looking for encouragement in creative pursuits—but my fiancé got a copy as a gift and I ended up picking it up from the shelf while waiting for a library hold on a different book to come in. Gilbert’s tone is conversational and engaging, and
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Daisy Miller by Henry James
In her introduction to the edition I read, Elizabeth Hardwick describes Daisy Miller as “an intramural battle between middle-aged, deracinated American women long abroad and a young, provincial American girl whose naturalness and friendliness are more suitable to hometown streets than to the mysteries of European society.” Hardwick also talks about “the banal social proprieties
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Macbeth by William Shakespeare
I’m not sure how I never had to read Macbeth in its entirety when I was in school, but I didn’t, and despite feeling like I knew many little pieces of it via cultural osmosis/Drunk Shakespeare/Sleep No More/Hamilton song lyrics/having to learn Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking speech in junior high English class, when I told my
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The Outermost House by Henry Beston
In the ten chapters of The Outermost House, Henry Beston writes about the year he spent living in a two-room cottage on the Atlantic-facing beach on Cape Cod in the 1920s. Many of the people on Goodreads who don’t like this book seem to wish it had more of a “plot,” but it isn’t that