what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Westing Game by Ellen RaskinPuffin Books, 1997 (Originally E.P. Dutton, 1978)
The Westing Game (which I read and loved as a kid) opens with an intriguing set-up: there’s a new five-story apartment building on Lake Michigan, and its 6 apartments (and 3 business/retail spots) are rented to a list of pre-selected tenants. The building has a view of a mansion, the Westing house, which is said
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Beneath the Sugar Sky by Seanan McGuireTor.com/Tom Doherty Associates, 2018
I like the worlds and characters of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series a whole lot, and I like McGuire’s writing style: I mean, at one point in this book she describes how a skeleton “floated like a bath toy for the world’s most morbid child” (78). That said, this book was my least favorite of
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Draft No. 4 by John McPheeFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017
The eight essays in Draft No. 4 were all originally published in The New Yorker (albeit in slightly different form), so I think I’ve read them all before. I remembered some of them more vividly than others, though, and they were all satisfying to read in book form. They’re all, as the book’s subtitle puts
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Secret Brooklyn by Michelle Young and Augustin PasquetJonglez Publishing, 2017
Though Secret Brooklyn is a guidebook (separated into sections by neighborhood, with color photos and page-long listings about various places/attractions), I think it’d be useful only to very intrepid tourists. I think it’s a better book for NYC/Brooklyn residents who are interested in the weird/quirky/overlooked: there are some things in this book I would go
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Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York by Roz ChastBloomsbury USA, 2017
Despite loving Roz Chast’s work whenever I see it in the New Yorker (speaking of which: her recent cover is amazing), I hadn’t known she had written a book about NYC until Jenny from Reading the End mentioned it in a comment here last year. I immediately put a hold on it at the library,
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Winter by Ali SmithPantheon Books, 2018 (Originally Hamish Hamilton, 2017)
Winter is the second novel in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, and I initially found it less approachable than Autumn, though I think that’s absolutely by design. This is a story about a family, and about family memories and secrets and dysfunctions, and its characters aren’t as instantly likable as those in Autumn, but it’s also,
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Malacqua by Nicola PuglieseTranslated by Shaun WhitesideAnd Other Stories, 2017
Malacqua is about what its subtitle says it’s about—”Four Days of Rain in the City of Naples, Waiting for the Occurrence of an Extraordinary Event”—but that only partly captures the mood and feel of this atmospheric novel. Malacqua is about four days of rain, yes, but it’s also about how things work or don’t work,
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Standard Deviation by Katherine HeinyAlfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House), 2017
Standard Deviation is a novel about married life and parenting, but also about life in general: it’s full of “all that stuff you do every day that sometimes seems pleasurable and sometimes seems pointless but never seems to end” (259). Those everyday moments, particularly the ones that are on the edge of ridiculous, are a
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Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis SacharHarperTrophy, 2003 (Originally published in 1978)
I know I read and liked at least the first two of Louis Sachar’s “Wayside School” books when I was a kid, but I hadn’t thought of them in ages. Then I read this piece by Jia Tolentino on the New Yorker website, in which she describes the first one, Sideways Stories from Wayside School,