what I’ve been reading lately:
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Everywhere I Look by Helen GarnerText Publishing, 2016
I picked up Everywhere I Look at the library on the strength of its really lovely/well-designed cover: the author’s name in bold black sans serif, the title beneath in the same font but smaller and red, and then a color photo that spans the front, spine, and back: the author in the center, looking at
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Startup by Doree ShafrirLittle, Brown and Company, 2017
I’m not sure I would have enjoyed Startup as much as I did if I didn’t a) live in NYC and b) know people who work in tech, but I found it to be a very fun, funny, and quick read, even though none of the characters are particularly sympathetic. There’s Mack McAllister, the 28-year-old
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Made for Love by Alissa NuttingEcco (HarperCollins), 2017
I saw Alissa Nutting read from Made for Love at Brooklyn Bridge Park over the summer: the scene she read is a hilarious bit where the protagonist, Hazel, who has moved in with her septuagenarian father after leaving her evil-tech-genius-billionaire husband, gets her arm stuck in the mouth of her dad’s new purchase, a highly
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Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara ShopsinMCD (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2017
I loved Tamara Shopsin’s Mumbai New York Scranton when I read it a few years ago, so I was super-excited when I learned she had a new book out this year, and Arbitrary Stupid Goal did not disappoint. It’s an illustrated memoir that’s more a series of vignettes, but with some unifying elements; a lot
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I Hate Everyone But You by Gaby Dunn and Allison RaskinWednesday Books, 2017
I Hate Everyone But You is an epistolary novel that takes the form of emails and text messages between two best friends, Ava and Gen. It’s their first semester of college and they’re across the country from one another: Ava’s in film school at USC (they grew up in LA); Gen’s studying journalism at Emerson.
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Ruin of Angels by Max GladstoneTor.com/Tom Doherty Associates, 2017
I think Max Gladstone’s Craft books are the only series I’m fully on top of these days, the only series where, when I hear there’s a new book out, I place a hold on it at the library immediately and drop everything when it arrives. I’m currently a few issues behind on the New Yorker,
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The First Rule of Punk by Celia C. PérezViking (Penguin Random House), 2017
I basically devoured The First Rule of Punk over the course of two days, and aw, it’s such a great middle-grade novel. Our narrator Malú is twelve, almost thirteen, and at the start of the book she’s sad about having to move from Gainesville to Chicago for two years because of her mom’s new temporary
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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. TaylorDial Books for Young Readers, 2016 (Originally 1976)
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is one of those very famous kids’ books (it won the Newbery Medal in 1977) that I somehow never read as a child: I’m curious as to how it would have affected me, and I wish I had been exposed to more diverse books when I was younger, but,
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Dragon’s Green by Scarlett ThomasSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2017
I’ve read and quite liked four of Scarlett Thomas’s novels for grown-ups, so when I found out she was writing a middle-grade fantasy novel, I knew I was going to want to read it, and I’m glad I did. Dragon’s Green gets off to something of a slow start (world-building and getting our characters into
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More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory by Franklin Veaux and Eve RickertThorntree Press, 2014
More Than Two is, as its subtitle says, “a practical guide”: there’s a lot in this book about navigating particular kinds of relationship circumstances/scenarios/difficulties specific to polyamorous relationships, a lot of which didn’t feel super-applicable to me (like: being polyamorous and having kids, or coming out to your family as non-monogamous when you’ve historically been