what I’ve been reading lately:
-
We Were Liars by E. LockhartDelacorte Press, 2014
At the start of We Were Liars, the narrator, Cadence Sinclair Eastman, describes her family, the “beautiful Sinclair family,” like this: “The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive” (3). But it’s clear from the start that appearances aren’t the…
-
Dryland by Sara JaffeTin House Books, 2015
Dryland is an atmospheric coming-of-age novel with an interesting narrator and tone. This review by Megan Milks on Goodreads points out the way that the novel “defies expectations of coming of age narratives,” and I think that’s right on, and is one of the satisfying things about the story. The narrator, Julie Winter (who’s a…
-
Pondlife: A Swimmer’s Journal by Al AlvarezBloomsbury, 2015 (Originally 2013)
Pondlife is a book made of journal entries that Al Alvarez wrote between 2002 and 2011, a period of time covering much of his seventies and reaching into his eighties. It’s about swimming (which Alvarez was doing year-round, outdoors, mostly in the ponds at Hampstead Heath) and also about aging (increasingly so as the book…
-
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison BechdelMariner Books, 2007 (Originally Houghton Mifflin, 2006)
I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to reading Fun Home, given that I tend to like graphic memoirs, but I’m pleased that my boyfriend had it checked out of the library and finished it before it was due, which gave me time to read it, too. It’s an engrossing…
-
The Deep Zoo by Rikki DucornetCoffee House Press, 2015
I liked this collection of fifteen short essays, but probably would have liked it more if I were more familiar with some of the subjects Ducornet is writing about. (I haven’t seen any David Lynch films, for example, and while I appreciated the language and images of “Witchcraft by a Picture,” I also felt a…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…