what I’ve been reading lately:
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Exophony
(by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) I found this series of essays about language (and, more specifically, about speaking/writing in a language other than one’s first language) to be really pleasing even though I speak neither Japanese nor German, which are two of the languages that come up most. (Tawada was born in Japan
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Frostbite
(by Nicola Twilley) There are so many interesting/unexpected/fun facts and anecdotes in this book (subtitle: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves); I definitely could not shut up about all the stuff I was learning while I was reading it. Twilley takes readers on a global tour of the largely-unseen spaces of the
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Making It
(by Laura Kay) Well this was the sapphic rom-com I didn’t know I needed. I started reading this on vacation because a) it was the pick for Pride book club at work b) I had it on the Kindle app and c) I tried to pack the book for nonfiction book club, but it’s a
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The Midnight Library
(by Matt Haig) I’d kind of been meaning to read this for ages, but I wasn’t sure if it would be good or overly trite/sentimental. As it turns out, I ended up feeling like it was both of those things at different points. It isn’t a spoiler to say that Nora, this book’s protagonist, tries
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King of a Hundred Horsemen
(by Marie Étienne, translated by Marilyn Hacker) I found this book challenging/opaque, but I appreciated the opportunity to try to read the poems in the original French before I looked at Marilyn Hacker’s translations on the facing pages. I bought this on a whim at Dog-Eared Books in San Francisco circa 2012, knowing nothing about
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The Vanderbeekers to the Rescue
(by Karina Yan Glaser) The plot of this third book in the Vanderbeekers series leans pretty hard on some coincidences/events that felt unlikely to me, but the book as a whole is so charming that I was mostly willing to overlook that. In this one the kids (now aged 6 to 13) are on spring
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The Summer Book
(by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal) I’d been vaguely meaning to read this book since 2011 (!), when my then-boyfriend read it. More recently, Nina MacLaughlin’s mention of it in Summer Solstice (which I read this June) finally prompted me to get it from the library, and my interest was further piqued when someone
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Into Thin Air
(by Jon Krakauer) Disaster/survival nonfiction is not generally my genre—in fact, I think this book may be the only one of its sort that I’ve ever read. This is an account of a 1996 guided expedition to climb Mount Everest that the author was on that ended in tragedy, with multiple people dying on the
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The New York Trilogy
(by Paul Auster) Detective stories are generally about a protagonist figuring something out: a detective solving a crime, catching a criminal, figuring out the “how” or “why” of some mysterious event. But the three novellas in The New York Trilogy aren’t that kind of detective story: indeed, only one of them features a protagonist who
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The Details
(by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson) Each of the four sections of this novel is a memory piece, the story of the narrator’s relationship with someone who was once in her life but isn’t anymore (two lovers, a friend, her now-dead mother). Based on the story’s timeline, it’s clear that the virus the narrator