what I’ve been reading lately:
-
The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas and Jennifer GrahamVintage (Random House), 2014
Last week the Fitbit Charge HR my boyfriend got me for Christmas finally arrived, and I’ve been loving it. It tells me how long I slept and how restless or not I was. If I go for a run, I can see a graph of my heart rate. It tells me how many flights of
-
Oranges by John McPheeFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988 (Originally 1967)
The seven sections of Oranges don’t feel like they necessarily have to be in the order they’re in, which is maybe the only thing I didn’t like about this book: it sometimes felt a little disjointed. Still, this was a really interesting read and I kept telling my boyfriend various things I was learning about
-
Ibid: A Life by Mark DunnMethuen, 2005 (Originally MacAdam/Cage, 2004)
In the acknowledgments at the end of Ibid: A Life (A Novel in Footnotes), Mark Dunn thanks his publisher “for allowing this most recent, brazen attempt at redefining the American novel,” and his readers for “giving [him] the chance to convince [them] that history can be more than dry facts and dates. And that naughty
-
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges PerecTranslated by Marc LowenthalWakefield Press, 2010
In October 1974, Georges Perec spent many hours over the course of three days (a Friday/Saturday/Sunday) sitting in cafés on the place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. This book, which was originally published in French in 1975, is the result. It’s divided into days, and into numbered sections within each day. Each day starts with the date,
-
Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 by Bill WattersonAndrews McMeel Publishing, 2001
My boyfriend checked this book, which is a catalog that accompanied a 2001/2002 Bill Watterson show at The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library, out of the library and thought it’d be fun to read together. I think he was a little surprised that I didn’t have a strong connection to Calvin and Hobbes from
-
Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy FinchUgly Duckling Presse, 2010
I bought a copy of Ten Walks/Two Talks five years ago, after seeing the authors do a reading from it, but hadn’t actually read the whole book until now, despite the fact that I really like walking, New York, art that involves walking, and art that involves constraints, which basically guaranteed I would really like
-
Tono-Bungay by H.G. WellsEveryman, 1994 (Originally Macmillan, 1909)
I read Tono-Bungay for a class in college in 2001, and apparently liked it enough at the time to keep my copy of it, but when I started re-reading it, I didn’t really remember anything about it. As John Hammond says in his introduction to the book, it’s the story of “a pragmatic narrator divided
-
Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey NiffeneggerScribner (Simon and Schuster), 2009
The paragraph-long review of Her Fearful Symmetry in the New Yorker calls it a “gothic story,” and it is, which is why I was willing to forgive some sort of over-the-top plot developments. (I disagree, though, with the last line of that review: I saw a few of the big revelations coming.) But, right: the
-
The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert HellengaDelta, 1995 (Originally SoHo Press, 1994)
I wanted to love this novel, which is set in 1966-1967 and centers on a twenty-nine-year-old book conservator who goes to Florence to restore damaged books after the Arno floods, but either it’s just not the book for me or I wasn’t in the right mood. Maybe my problem is mostly structural: after starting really