what I’ve been reading lately:
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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
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The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion by Meghan DaumFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013
In her introduction to this book of ten essays, Meghan Daum writes that when she was working on this book, she told people that it was “a book about sentimentality” whose pieces, she hoped, would “add up to a larger discussion about the way human experiences too often come with preassigned emotional responses” (4). She
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Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst by Lois LowryHoughton Mifflin, 1984
This is the fourth Anastasia Krupnik book, and, like the third one, I’m pretty sure it’s one that I read as a kid, though there was a lot I didn’t remember very well. Anastasia is now thirteen and in seventh grade: the book starts in October, so we don’t actually see any back-to-school/making friends stuff,
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Of Walking in Ice by Werner HerzogTranslated by Martje Herzog and Alan GreenbergUniversity of Minnesota Press, 2015
This book, which was originally published in German in 1978 (the first English translation was published in 1980) is Werner Herzog’s diary of his three-week walk from Munich to Paris in November and December 1974, which he undertook after hearing that his close friend, the film critic Lotte Eisner, was seriously ill. “I set off
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Disgruntled by Asali SolomonFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015
I read about Disgruntled earlier this summer, when both Jenny at Reading the End and Jenna at Lower East Side Librarian posted about it, and I’m glad I read their posts and then checked this out of the library. It’s got a back cover blurb by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, the start of which I think
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The Little World of Liz Climo by Liz ClimoRunning Press, 2014
I don’t remember how I found out about Liz Climo’s Tumblr, and I don’t remember how long I’ve been reading it, but I seriously love it, so I was very excited about this book, which is a mix of comics from her Tumblr and new ones. As the back cover puts it, this is a
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Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London by Matthew BeaumontVerso, 2015
I wanted to love this book, but found the experience of reading it to be sort of a slog. I think part of the problem is that Beaumont is trying to do a whole lot here: he’s looking at the history of walking at night, mostly but not exclusively in London, from the early modern
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Last First Snow by Max GladstoneTor, 2015
Last First Snow is the fourth book in Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence in publication order, but the first chronologically: it’s set in Dresediel Lex, the desert city of fourteen million where Two Serpents Rise (which was the second book, both in publication order and chronologically) also takes place. I wouldn’t recommend starting the series here,