Medical Apartheid, by Harriet A. Washington: A highly important book whose subject matter was extremely compelling, but whose writing veered didactic and dissertation-like. The Writing Retreat, by Julia Bartz: This was…very silly. Normal Family, by Chrysta Bilton: Totally wild – a story by a prolific sperm donor’s first child, whose relationship with him was a cross between parent-child and donor-child and whose mother seems to have known half of Hollywood and politics in the 1980s. Don’t Think, Dear, by Alice… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Blog
Books of 2023, Part 4
I’m Glad My Mom Died, by Jennette McCurdy: I’ve never seen iCarly, but of course I’ve been hearing about this memoir for months while having it on hold at the library. I felt so terrible for McCurdy, and the book is completely compelling. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis: What a delight – somehow this managed to be both absurdist-silly and deeply profound in its story of an academic transported back in time to the era of the Black Death. There… Read more »
Books of 2023, Part 3
Spectacle, by Pamela Newkirk: This story of Ota Benga, a Mbuti “pygmy” man who was captured by a white American man and exhibited (yes, exhibited) for some time at the Bronx Zoo in the 1900s, was extremely sad and well-researched. As important as the story is, and as skillful as the author’s writing, it felt lacking through no fault of its own – only because there was so much history missing/never recorded. The Push, by Ashley Audrain: I read this… Read more »
Books of 2023, Part 2
The Housekeeper and the Professor, by Yoko Ogawa: I was a few pages into this when I realized it wasn’t my first Ogawa novel (I read The Memory Police a few years back). It’s a quiet book, maybe a little mundane for me, but enjoyable in its way. The Fervor, by Alma Katsu: Much more satisfying than The Deep; maybe not quite the magic of The Hunger. Eerily timely with the weather balloons being shot down over the US, as… Read more »
Books of 2023, Part 1
The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan: Overall, I loved this. The constellation of characters was much more compelling to me than it was in A Visit From the Goon Squad, although the writing was so excellent that I may need to revisit Goon Squad. There were a few chapters whose format felt gimmicky, while others worked as experimentations with form. I’ll read it again, especially because there are so many characters that I know there are more connections to be… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 14
Cabin Fever, by Jonathan Franklin and Michael Smith: I suppose I may get tired of reading about COVID at some point, but I doubt it…this nonfiction book benefits from its focus on a limited set of people in a singular location – the occupants of the Zaandam cruise ship. The authors focus on crew, officers, and passengers; it’s harrowing to see the pressure the crew feels to continue to “perform” for the passengers, and the severity of the situation is… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 13
Dark Summit, by Nick Heil: I’m always reaching for the high that was reading Into Thin Air for the first time (in Kathmandu), and falling short (OF THE SUMMIT haha?). This was definitely readable and good, but it seems like it’s Krakauer rather than Everest itself – or at least the alchemy between the two – that makes Into Thin Air so hard to compete with. Still, I enjoyed this because it focused on someone I’d already watched on the… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 12
Trust, by Hernan Diaz: In the Distance is one of the most sublime books I’ve ever read – also one of the only books I’ve ever read that I would describe as sublime rather than some other merit – so I was both desperate for and wary of his second book. Very similar, actually, to waiting to read Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel (perhaps mainly in the wariness about subject matter – finance world – of the subsequent… Read more »
Books of 2022, Part 11
Five Days at Memorial, by Sheri Fink: I’m not sure whether this crossed my radar because there’s a current TV series based on it or if I just saw it recommended somewhere – focused on the week of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, this was published in 2013. I’m curious if there’s any sort of follow-up or update nine years later. Though – unavoidably, because of the number of people involved – it was sometimes difficult to keep track of all… Read more »
Books of 2022, part 10
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk: I knew very little about this before reading, other than that it’s set in Poland and won the Pulitzer Prize. I think that was an ideal way to go into it; I had no preconceptions about the “sort” of story it would be, and for the first third of the book I felt totally content to follow the main character through her routines without really caring if anything… Read more »
