what I’ve been reading lately:
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Heft by Liz MooreW.W. Norton & Company, 2012
Full disclosure: my boyfriend met Liz Moore at a film screening a few years ago, and his ongoing acquaintanceship with her (which included the three of us having lunch together one day this summer) is what prompted me to check this book out from the library—I’m not sure I would ever have found it otherwise.
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You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia DayTouchstone (Simon & Schuster), 2015
I don’t read very many memoirs in this style (by which I mean, I guess, more conversational than literary), but this one was fun, particularly because my boyfriend recently introduced me to The Guild, which we’ve been watching on Netflix and which I’ve been liking a lot so far. Felicia Day (you may know her
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Anastasia on Her Own by Lois LowryHoughton Mifflin, 1985
This is the fifth of Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik novels, and I found it as delightful and funny as the others. The book opens at dinnertime, with Anastasia’s mom being distressed that she forgot to defrost any meat for dinner, again. “I just can’t get my act together when it comes to making dinner,” she
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Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen ChoAce Books (Penguin Random House), 2015
Jenny over at Reading the End started her post about this book by noting that someone on Twitter described it as a “postcolonial Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell,” which was enough to pique my interest. I like books that are set in England at the time of the Napoleonic wars, but with magic (Jonathan Strange
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Every Day by David LevithanEmber (Random House) 2013 (Originally Knopf, 2012)
(Note: throughout this post I’m going to use they/them/their as a singular gender-neutral pronoun. I known some people hate it, but I find it less clunky than “he/she” and “his/her” (which also implies a gender binary in a way I don’t necessarily think is appropriate here) and also less clunky than ze/hir.) I like David
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Carry On by Rainbow RowellSt. Martin’s Griffin, 2015
Earlier this month, I read Fangirl, a Rainbow Rowell novel in which the protagonist is majorly into the (fictional) Simon Snow series, which is a Harry-Potter-esque series featuring a magical Chosen One and a magical world at a moment of crisis. Carry On is not the fanfic novel that Fangirl‘s protagonist is writing, but it
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Fangirl by Rainbow RowellSt. Martin’s Griffin, 2013
Fangirl follows Cath Avery through her first year of college, and it’s totally charming in that way that Rainbow Rowell’s novels tend to be. It opens on move-in day, with Cath and her identical twin sister Wren both arriving at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. They’re not roommates—Wren’s choice, not Cath’s—and Cath is anxious about being on
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Oreo by Fran RossNew Directions, 2015 (Originally Greyfalcon House, 1974)
In the foreword to the edition of Oreo that I read, Danzy Senna calls the book a “hilarious badass novel,” and yeah, that sums it up pretty nicely (xi). Oreo is a satirical picaresque quest-narrative, with the protagonist (a half-black/half-Jewish precocious teenage girl called Oreo) playing the part of Theseus. It’s a very smart book
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Photobooth: A Biography by Meags FitzgeraldConundrum Press, 2014
Near the start of Photobooth: A Biography, Meags Fitzgerald talks about taking photobooth pictures with a friend in 2003 to celebrate the last day of classes of tenth grade, and how, after that day, she got very into photobooths: taking photobooth pictures, learning about the history of the booths themselves, and collecting photobooth pictures taken
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Speak by Louisa Hallecco (HarperCollins), 2015
Speak starts with a prologue narrated by a doll that’s been “banned and marked for disposal” for being “excessively lifelike” (2). “I review stored information,” the doll says (3). It tells us it’s been “programmed to select which of [its] voices responds to the situation at hand: moving west in the desert, waiting for the