what I’ve been reading lately:
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Exodus by Lars IyerMelville House, 2012
I mostly read Exodus because I’m a completist—it was bugging me that I’d read the first two books of this trilogy about, as the back cover puts it, “the two preposterous philosophical anti-heroes,” Lars and W., but hadn’t read the third. This third book is more of the same, which is mostly a good thing,…
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Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale by Marina WarnerOxford University Press, 2014
The subtitle is no joke: this book is short, just 201 pages including the index and an extensive list of books for further reading, and its length was part of what made me pick it up, but may also have kept me from totally loving it. The thing is, Warner isn’t writing primarily about the…
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We Are Pirates by Daniel HandlerBloomsbury, 2015
“Where does trouble come from? How do you get into it?” (9). For fourteen-year-old Gwen Needle, the trouble, and also the adventure, starts on Memorial Day, when she’s caught shoplifting at a drugstore. She also has a falling out with her mean-girl best friend, quits the synchronized swimming team she’s been on (partly because of…
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The First Bad Man by Miranda JulyScribner (Simon & Schuster), 2015
I was worried, at first, that The First Bad Man was going to be weird for the sake of weirdness, and awkward/uncomfortable without any sort of payoff for it. But while the book is plenty weird and awkward and uncomfortable, it’s also funny and readable and sometimes surprisingly sweet. The narrator is Cheryl Glickman, who…
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The Penderwicks in Spring by Jeanne BirdsallKnopf, 2015
The Penderwicks in Spring might be my favorite book so far in this series, and not just because it centers on Batty, who’s been my favorite of the Penderwick siblings from the first book, when she was a sweet and shy four-year-old wearing butterfly wings. When this book opens she’s ten, almost eleven, and still…
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The Penderwicks at Point Mouette by Jeanne BirdsallYearling, 2012 (Originally Knopf, 2011)
I recently re-read The Penderwicks, and enjoyed it, though I don’t feel like I have anything to say that I didn’t already say when I wrote about it in 2008, except that this time around one chapter totally made me teary-eyed on the subway. And then I re-read the sequel, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street,…
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Wittgenstein Jr by Lars IyerMelville House, 2014
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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Green Girl by Kate ZambrenoHarper Perennial, 2014 (Originally Emergency Press, 2011)
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 by John DarnielleFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
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,…