Book notes

what I’ve been reading lately:

  • Greenglass House by Kate Milford

    Greenglass House is a really charming middle-grade mystery that I’m glad to have read in winter: there are so many mentions of snow and ice and wind, and also of hot chocolate and indoor coziness, and it was satisfying to read all that wintry prose while curled up on the couch with my own mug

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  • Inventing Japan by Ian Buruma

    I don’t remember when, where, or why I acquired a copy of this book, but I decided it might be interesting to read after having read A Tale for the Time Being earlier this month, since that novel and this book cover some of the same years in Japan’s history. I did recognize some of

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  • Little Scratch by Rebecca Watson

    I got this book from the library because the New Yorker described it as an “extraordinary début novel” that “records a young woman’s thoughts as she moves through a single day,” and further said this: “By arranging text in unconventional ways, Watson conveys the shapes and the rhythms of thought, and coheres scraps of consciousness

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  • Anastasia at This Address by Lois Lowry

    Lois Lowry’s “Anastasia” books are always solidly fun for me to read (or re-read): humorous realistic middle-grade fiction with some moments of nostalgia for late-twentieth-century New England. (In this one, Anastasia and her friends drink milkshakes at Friendly’s, and Anastasia gets her ears pierced at Jordan Marsh.) Anyway: this is also the one where Anastasia

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  • A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

    A Tale for the Time Being is about lots of things: stories, and families, and memory, and history, and secrets, and time, and moments (zen and otherwise). It’s sometimes very heavy, but often very beautiful. Part of the novel is the diary of Nao, a teenage girl in Japan whose family lived in California when

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  • 2020 Reading

    Despite 2020 being a dumpster fire of a year, in general, it was not a bad reading year for me. I worked from home from mid-March onward, which meant I no longer had my normal subway commute as reading time. But I had time at home to read, and when libraries in NYC were closed

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  • King of Shadows by Susan Cooper

    When King of Shadows opens, it’s 1999 and we’re introduced to Nat Field, who’s in a company of all-male actors, ages 11-18, who are preparing to travel from the US to the UK to perform two Shakespeare plays in the newly-rebuilt Globe theatre. “We were going into a kind of time warp,” Nat thinks (6).

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  • Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

    The reading/event for this book that Allie Brosh did with Powell’s Books on Zoom was one of the best things that happened in September, but it took me until now to actually read the copy of the book that I’d purchased—I think I was saving it for Christmas vacation reading? Anyway: I am delighted to

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  • Hard Times by Charles Dickens

    Hard Times is about what happens when, as one character puts it, a person (or a society, for that matter) thinks that “the wisdom of the Head” is “all-sufficient” and doesn’t think at all about “the wisdom of the Heart” (222). The lesson—that trying to live by rational self-interest alone is not the best path

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  • Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell by Charles Simic

    Continuing with the theme of “books I bought while traveling but hadn’t read yet”: when I opened my copy of Dime-Store Alchemy, I found the receipt and was reminded that I bought this at Dog Eared Books in San Francisco in December 2012. Nearly eight years after having bought it, I can say that I

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