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Katalin Street
Magda Szabó
Fragmented and a bit confusing while meeting all the characters, Katalin Street spans key moments before, during, and after the German occupation of Budapest for three intertwined families in Budapest. Before the war, they have an idyllic life as neighbors in three row houses on Katalin Street, and the novel portrays the effects of...more
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Life in Code
Ellen Ullman
After reading Ellen Ullman’s novel By Blood, I’ve been meaning to get to her memoir Close to the Machine, but before I could get around to that, she published another book centered around her experiences as a programmer, from before and during the early years of the internet. These...more
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Forest Dark
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love has been a standby favorite I recommend to people often — something I’ve noted while writing about every subsequent book of hers that I’ve read. Realizing now that it’s been nearly ten years since I’ve read it makes me think it’s time for a re-read, especially...more
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The Chronology of Water
Lidia Yuknavitch
I thought I would love this, based on recommendations. But I did have one friend say she wasn’t as entranced as she expected, and I found my reaction much the same. A memoir told in vignettes that roughly progresses chronologically, Lidia Yuknavitch grew up in an abusive, neglectful household, and her one escape was swimming. At the end...more
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Under Wildwood
Colin Meloy & Carson Ellis
When I read the first book in this trilogy, I made a comment about reading this second part “at my earliest convenience,” which turned out to be about five years later. This volume explores more areas of the fantastical land of Wildwood, where people and anthropomorphized animals coexist. It is a...more
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Devotion
Patti Smith
Compared to Just Kids or M Train, this little book feels so slight and incomplete. But as a small continuation of the themes of creation and artistic drive, it’s a pleasure. Devotion is an expansion of a talk she gave at the 2016 Windham-...more
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I’ll Never Write My Memoirs
Grace Jones
As celebrity memoirs go, this one is fully par for the course. Rock writer Paul Morley has shaped Grace Jones’s life stories into somewhat of a narrative, but it still has a tendency to ramble back and forth over time, likely from hours and hours of conversation that did just that. Her stories are fascinating, no doubt, even more so if...more
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My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter
Aja Monet
…
she is an archipelago of shanty towns, she is invention and
necessity. found scraps, a bouquet of bloody music in her
hands. cane of sugar, leaves of tobacco, a cluster or bananas,
coffee
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The First Rule of Punk
Celia C. Pérez
I am 100% biased with this book, as Celia is a longtime friend. But while it could be possible that I loved this solely from seeing Celia’s heart and humor within the narrative, she has been getting so much amazing feedback (including...more
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We Gon’ Be Alright
Jeff Chang
Essays on race arguing that inequality impacts everyone. Jeff Chang whittles big concepts down into a manageable book — it’s a petite volume, but I marked it up a lot. I’m gonna be lazy and just share a bunch of excerpts here since I took so long to get around to writing something up, and his words are more succinct than mine...more
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Pond
Claire-Louise Bennett
Everybody knows deep down that life is as much about the things that do not happen as the things that do and that’s not something that ought to be glossed over or denied because without frustration there would hardly be any need to daydream. And daydreams return me to my original sense of things and I luxuriate in these fervid primary visions until I am entirely my unalloyed self again…
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Too Much and Not the Mood
Durga Chew-Bose
The title of this book comes from an entry in Virginia Woolf’s diary, where she wrote about being tired of the “cramming in and cutting out” to please readers. I wanted to really love this book, expected it even, from the context of the title and the blurb that references Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Lydia Davis’s short...more
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A Safe Girl to Love
Casey Plett
Epigraphs rarely feel undeniably necessary to me; they are interesting, but I assume they mean more to the author than the reader in most cases. Casey Plett’s epigraph for her debut collection of short stories (an excerpt from Michelle Tea’s The Chelsea Whistle) so perfectly sets the tone for the book and provides the...more
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Enigma Variations
André Aciman
A novel that takes its name from an Edward Elgar orchestral piece, the variations here are different romances from fragmented eras of the narrator Paul’s life. Though the novel progresses linearly, each chapter really exists as its own story with only passing references...more
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Float
Anne Carson
First, this is an intriguing object: a clear box filled with twenty-two chapbooks. Each cover is printed in a similar texture in shades that to me represent the range of hues of bodies of water at different times of day and in various types of weather: blues, deep blues, grays, greens. Inside the text has similar variance whether...more
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The Idiot
Elif Batuman
Essentially a novel in two parts, the first comprises Selin’s first year at Harvard in the year 1995, as Selin chooses to study linguistics and Russian, meets a Hungarian mathematician, Ivan, begins emailing Ivan, and develops a crush on him through their correspondence. They have an awkward flirtation, being painfully...more
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Transit
Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk’s previous novel Outline was an unexpected pleasure, so it was also a nice surprise to find out the book was the first in a trilogy — Transit is the second installment. This book follows a similar structure, where each chapter is centered around a conversation between...more
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White Tears
Hari Kunzru
Hari Kunzru is a British-born writer and has only lived in the US since 2008, yet he weaves a tale about the roots of appropriation in our culture in this stunning literary thriller. Two college friends, both white, bond over a shared obsession with old blues music. Carter is from a rich, well-connected family with the...more
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4 3 2 1
Paul Auster
After establishing the parental background and birth of Archie Ferguson, 4 3 2 1 promptly splits off into four directions, four possible paths of this one person. While certain aspects of each life are constant — all four Archies have an interest in writing and most are attracted to same woman — there’s a fair amount of...more
