what I’ve been reading lately:
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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
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Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid
Annie John is a coming-of-age novella; it tells the story of its narrator’s childhood and adolescence on the island of Antigua, from when she’s ten up to the point where she leaves for England at age seventeen. The changing nature of her relationship to her mother, as she grows older, is a big part of
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Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch
Because Internet is an excellent exploration of how people use language in online interactions, and how the conventions of online language and online social interaction more generally have shifted and are continuing to shift with time. It’s smart and funny and the kind of book where I kept pausing to tell my boyfriend things I’d
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Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Wallace, the protagonist of Real Life, is in a graduate program in biochemistry in an unnamed Midwestern city (it’s Madison). When the book opens, his father has been “dead for several weeks” but that isn’t his main concern: he’s just found that the lab experiment he’s been doing all summer is probably ruined, and he