what I’ve been reading lately:
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How to Murder Your Life by Cat MarnellSimon & Schuster, 2017
When I started reading How to Murder Your Life, Cat Marnell’s addiction memoir, I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it: her style is heavy on exclamation points and felt, at first, a bit dumbed-down. But as I kept reading, I found myself liking it a whole lot: the (dark) humor and vividness of…
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All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarrySt. Martin’s Griffin, 2013
All Our Pretty Songs is a lush YA retelling of the Orpheus myth (but different), set in the Pacific Northwest, written in a way that is pleasantly reminiscent of Francesca Lia Block. It starts with our unnamed narrator on summer vacation before her senior year of high school, introducing us to herself and her best…
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Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle TeaMcSweeney’s McMullens, 2013
In his blurb for Mermaid in Chelsea Creek, Daniel Handler says it has “the grit and the wit and the girls in trouble loving each other fierce and true” of Michelle Tea’s work in general (which totally makes me want to read more by Michelle Tea) and also “all the juice of a terrific fantasy…
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Down Among the Sticks and Bones by Seanan McGuireTor/Tom Doherty Associates, 2017
Gothic/horror is not my usual genre, but so far I’m enjoying Seanan McGuire’s “Wayward Children” series, of which this is the second, though it also could work as a standalone because time-wise, it’s a prequel to the first book, Every Heart a Doorway. The dark-fairy-tale tone of this book is similar to the first, though…
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An Arrangement of Skin by Anna JourneyCounterpoint, 2017
The fact that An Arrangement of Skin has cover blurbs from Mark Doty and Maggie Nelson, both of whom I really like, probably helped convince me to check this book out from the library, even though I wasn’t actually sure I was in the mood for a book of essays. As it turns out, I…
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Hag-Seed by Margaret AtwoodHogarth (Penguin Random House), 2016
I decided to read this book, which is Margaret Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest for the Hogarth Shakespeare series, after reading Teresa’s post about it over on Shelf Love, and I’m really glad I did. As Teresa says, this book is fun—lots of fun. Before I picked this up, the last five books I read…
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The Surrender by Toni BentleyRegan Books (HarperCollins), 2004
The Surrender is Toni Bentley’s “erotic memoir” about transcendence/anal sex/submission, and despite the fact that there were things in the book that bugged me, I quite liked it overall. To start with the things that bothered me: I could have done with a lot less Freudian psychologizing, though at the same time, it feels somewhat…
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The Black Notebook by Patrick ModianoTranslated by Mark PolizzottiMariner Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2016
The Black Notebook, which was originally published in French in 2012, caught my eye at the library after I’d seen this post on Instagram: I like the cover a lot, how layered and atmospheric it is, the way the different urban images are juxtaposed. I’d never read anything by Modiano, and I’m not sure if…
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Fish in Exile by Vi Khi NaoCoffee House Press, 2016
I heard about Fish in Exile via Sarah McCarry’s post about it on her old blog, and re-reading that post now I would agree with her assessment that this book “is addictive, but for quite some time you have no idea what it’s even about.” The day I started it, I tried to explain it…
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Future Sex by Emily WittFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016
I didn’t enjoy all nine chapters of Future Sex equally, but I did really enjoy this book, which is part personal narrative and part cultural commentary about sex and dating now, with a lot about what sex and dating now is like for a straight woman in her 30s. Maybe I partly liked it so…