what I’ve been reading lately:
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This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
I read a few sentences of This Is How You Lose the Time War aloud to my boyfriend because I was liking it so much, and he just looked at me and asked if this book was written for me. It really is full of things I’m into: tea and cities and literary allusions and
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Dracula by Bram Stoker
Having never read Dracula before, I didn’t know what kind of reading experience I was in for when I picked it up, in ways good, bad, and funny. The good: I didn’t realize that it was presented as the journal/diary entries and letters of various characters, plus things like newspaper clippings and telegrams, rather than
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The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
As I was reading The Wind in the Willows (which I somehow never read as a kid), I found myself wondering whether I should picture the anthropomorphized animals as human-sized, animal-sized, or somewhere in between. Like, if a toad has a horse, and his friend who is a mole can walk down the road having
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Walking: One Step at a Time by Erling KaggeTranslated by Becky L. Crook
Though Walking is a short book made mostly of brief vignettes, there are several different kinds of things in it. It’s partly about the mental and physical benefits of walking, both anecdotally and backed by research. It’s partly about a certain kind of philosophy of walking as tied to a certain kind of way of
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
I’ve been meaning to read this book for literally a decade, and I’m glad I finally got around to it, even though it didn’t totally click for me. Basically, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a multi-generational family saga, and that is generally not my thing, and this book isn’t really an exception.
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The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
At the start of The Goldfinch I felt slightly annoyed by the narrative voice and writing style—just little things, like the way the narrator says “for I’d left New York in a hurry,” or the way “punch-drunk” is used something like three times in the first hundred pages. But as I kept reading, I was
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The Perineum Technique by Ruppert & MulotTranslated by Jessie Aufiery
The back cover describes The Perineum Technique as “a contemporary meditation on seduction and intimacy in our age of hyperconnectivity”: it’s a graphic novel about an artist, JH, who meets a woman, Sarah, on OKCupid; they proceed to have Skype video chats where they talk about sex and watch each other getting themselves off. He’s
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The Wolves by Sarah DeLappe
It was fun to read The Wolves after the last two books I read, because it felt like there were some commonalities, while all three are also very different works. Each act of The Wolves is set at an indoor soccer field, where we see a team of teenage girls warming up before their weekly
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The New Me by Halle Butler
The short chapters of The New Me are a mix of first-person narration by Millie, who’s thirty and working as a temp in Chicago, and third-person narration about various people whose lives intersect with hers—her supervisor at work, other women at the office, her downstairs neighbor. Nearly all the characters are female: there’s some conversation
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State of the Union by Nick Hornby
I like the premise of State of the Union: A Marriage in Ten Parts a whole lot: in ten short chapters, set over the course of ten weeks, we see a married couple, Louise and Tom, having a drink at a pub before their weekly couples’ therapy appointment. They’re both in their forties; they have