what I’ve been reading lately:
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Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating by Moira WeigelFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016
In Labor of Love (subtitle: The Invention of Dating), Moira Weigel explores current and past states of dating in the US, from the turn of the 20th century onward. She does so in ten chapters, each with a snappy one-word title like “Plans” or “Likes,” plus an introduction and an afterword. The book is organized
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Known and Strange Things by Teju ColeRandom House, 2016
The 55 essays that follow this book’s preface are divided into three sections, “Reading Things,” “Seeing Things,” and “Being There” (plus an epilogue). The essays in the first section are literary criticism, mostly; the essays in the second section are about art (mostly, but not only, photography); the essays in the last section are sometimes
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Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Résumé, Ages 0 to 22 by MariNaomiHarper Perennial, 2011
In Kiss & Tell, after telling the story of her parents’ meeting, courtship, and marriage (her mom was 16 when they met; her dad was 25; they married when her mom was 19), MariNaomi recounts all of her romantic/sexual encounters from childhood to age 22—from the boy who kissed her on the cheek in kindergarten
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Hilda and the Midnight Giant by Luke PearsonNobrow Press, 2012 (Originally 2011)
I liked this second “Hilda” book more than the first: the art is as whimsical and gorgeous as it was in the first book, and there’s a bit more of a story. Just after the book opens, Hilda and her mom hear a knock on their door: but when Hilda opens it, no one’s there.
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Four Roads Cross by Max GladstoneTor Books, 2016
I’ve been quite liking Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence since reading the first-published one, Three Parts Dead, two years ago. I like the world of this series (which features gods and demons and magic that looks like lawyering), and the way the different stories in the different books intertwine, and the way each book basically centers
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How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell (audiobook)
How to Train Your Dragon wasn’t really on my list of books I was curious about until I saw the mention of the audiobook (narrated by David Tennant!) in this post over at Shelf Love. I had never actually listened to an audiobook before this, and a kids’ book with a talented actor as narrator
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Wonderstruck by Brian SelznickScholastic, 2011
Wonderstruck alternates between two (intertwining) stories, one told in words and the other told in pictures, and it totally worked for me—it’s dreamy and beautiful and very satisfyingly full of excellent New York City scenes/moments. The book starts with Ben, a twelve-year-old kid in northeastern Minnesota in 1977. His mom died in a car accident
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Turning Japanese by MariNaomi2dcloud, 2016
In general, I tend to enjoy graphic memoirs, so when I saw this on the New Books shelf at the library, I clearly had to check it out. Turning Japanese is about being young and adrift—between cities, between jobs, between cultures, and in various personal situations, family-wise and relationship-wise. It’s set in 1995, when MariNaomi
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The Uncommercial Traveller by Charles Dickens, edited by Daniel TylerOxford University Press, 2015
The 37 pieces in this book were written in the 1860s, published in a weekly magazine/journal that Dickens ran, and later collected and printed in book form. They range fairly widely in theme and tone, but as Daniel Tyler argues in his introduction to the edition I read, they can be seen to make up
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We Love You, Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn GreenidgeAlgonquin Books, 2016
At the start of We Love You, Charlie Freeman, the Freemans (Laurel, Charles, and their daughters—Charlotte, who’s 14, and Callie, who’s 9) are in a shiny new car, driving from Dorchester to the Berkshires, where they’re going to be living at the Toneybee Institute and participating in a research experiment. The Toneybee Institute studies apes,