what I’ve been reading lately:

Like Lars Iyers’s Spurious trilogy (which I’ve only read two-thirds of, though I do plan to rectify that), Wittgenstein Jr is a funny book, and by funny I mean amusing and also strange. It’s partly a satire of academia, and partly a coming-of-age story, but saying that doesn’t give a proper sense of Iyers’s distinctive

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I wonder how I would have felt about Green Girl if it had been around for me to read when I was in college, when I was in my late teens or early twenties. I wonder how much Ruth, the main character, would have felt relatable: “I am a mess, mess, mess she thinks,” on

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Wolf in White Van is weird and claustrophobic and alternately beautiful and bleak. Its narrator, Sean Phillips, is the creator of Trace Italian, a text-based game played through the mail. Sean doesn’t go out much: he suffered a disfiguring injury when he was seventeen, in which he almost died but didn’t, and his reconstructed face,

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I don’t think I can write about this book without talking about a significant plot-point that isn’t revealed until partway through it. So if you’re spoiler-averse, you might want to stop reading now. So, right: I was really really enjoying Dept. of Speculation. The beginning of the book is such a delight: interesting form, humor,

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This is the seventh Flavia de Luce mystery, and while I still like this series featuring the young chemistry prodigy/sleuth, this book is not my favorite. I enjoyed it, but Flavia is set adrift in this book, and, as a reader, I felt like I was too. It’s hard to write about this book without

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This was a really good read for a Sunday when I was home sick with a cold/fever: it was good enough that I didn’t even feel too bad about not being able to partake in my usual Sunday evening activity (rock climbing). I think it’s better-written than the previous Veronica Mars book (The Thousand Dollar

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