what I’ve been reading lately:
-
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
-
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,
-
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,
-
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,
-
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
-
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,
-
The Dark is Rising by Susan CooperCollier Books (Macmillan), 1986 (Originally 1973)
The last time I read The Dark Is Rising was more than ten years ago, in summer, and while I always love this book, there’s an extra magic in reading it during the time of year in which it’s set, in the dark and cold days of midwinter, with the festive pleasures of Christmas all
-
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann WyssTranslated by William H.G. KingstonPuffin Books, 2009
The Swiss Family Robinson was originally published in German in 1812; the English translation I read is from 1814, but (as I learned from a “Did You Know?” section at the back of the book) some of it is based on sections added by the French translator, Baroness Isabelle de Montolieu: one of the most
-
All the Dirty Parts by Daniel HandlerBloomsbury, 2017
All the Dirty Parts was an extremely fast and extremely fun read for me. The day I started it, I was reading it on the elevator en route to work, and a woman who I don’t know/who works elsewhere in the building asked what I was reading and how it was. I think I said