The School for Good Mothers, by Jessamine Chan: I’ve been dying to read my dear friend Jessamine’s novel since it was announced, and that only intensified after another good friend read an advanced copy and couldn’t stop raving about it. She lent it to me so that I could read it while awaiting my “bookshelf” copy to ship in January. I was so absorbed in it that I told my partner I wanted to watch something with him as soon… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Blog
Books of 2021, Part 9
Damnation Spring, by Ash Davidson: I knew there was an environmental contamination element to the plot – unexplained incidences of cancer, possible toxicity – before I started reading it, but that had grown hazy by the time I started, so my point of entry was “man wants to buy and cut down the world’s biggest tree” and the unease crept up on me as the references to “the spray,” miscarriages, mysterious cancers, etc slowly piled up. These are the things… Read more »
Books of 2021, part 8
Red Crosses, by Sasha Filipenko: This is brief, rich, and bracing. In every way but one it does not remind me of Philip Roth, but the framing device is the exception – a first-person narrator is not the main focus of the novel (though this one has a much more devastating backstory than Zuckerman is typically given); rather, he functions as a set of ears – stand-in for the reader – for the story of another character. While I thought… Read more »
Books of 2021, part 7
Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder: Oh boy, this was a wild and fantastic ride. A friend pointed out (when I recommended this book) that there’s an emergent body of literature dealing with domestic drama + a single element of the fantastical, such as children who burst into flames when upset or women turning into rabbits. Transmutation is the thread between them; in this case, a woman’s experience of motherhood and domestic tedium results in her turning into a dog – Nightbitch… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 6
Great Circle, by Maggie Shipstead: Oh man, this is a fucking fantastic book. The writing is incredible on a sentence and imagery level, but the plot and the interwoven storylines are equally good. I occasionally felt that it could be tighter, but that seems like an impossibly petty quibble when I also didn’t want it to end. Maybe it was a feeling similar to but distinct from the feeling you get as a reader when a book is full of… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 5
The End of October, by Lawrence Wright: So I’ve only read one of Lawrence Wright’s numerous nonfiction books (Going Clear, the most comprehensive look at Scientology of our time), but that was enough to know he’s a great nonfiction author. This…is fiction. It’s simultaneously very prescient in that it’s a plague novel that came out in April of 2020 – originally I thought, oh, maybe this was a fun thing he did at the beginning of the pandemic – and… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 4
Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson: Incredible work of research, extremely significant, and additionally a tremendous read. It’s obviously not a “delight” to read, but even given the depressing facts of its subject, it does somehow feel like a “quick” read, one that you can’t stop moving through. Part of it is the structure – while each component of Wilkerson’s overall thesis is treated with depth and nuance, the work is broken up into sections and subsections that provide a strong framework… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 3
The Lightness, by Emily Temple: This isn’t a “closed room” mystery (or, necessarily, a mystery at all, though it is suspenseful) – it takes place on a mountain – but it has that feeling all the same. And I thoroughly loved spending time there. The narrator’s verbal tics cloyed a little (“and etc,” “what have you,” “as they say” and defining words/tracing lineage) – perhaps in part because I recognize them (the linguistic elements, at least, not so much that… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 2
Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas: I find myself very intrigued by how archetypal the narrator of this novel felt, how similar to the protagonists of other books I’ve read recently, and how difficult it is to spell out exactly why she feels that way. I find myself thinking “they’re all the sort of hot messy girl who is detached and doesn’t care” but then recognizing the ways in which half of them actually care deeply about something or everything and… Read more »
Books of 2021, Part 1
There, There, by Tommy Orange: This starts in a hundred little pieces and constellates toward a supernova at its conclusion (forgive my mixed star metaphors). It’s one I’ll reread, both because I did have some trouble keeping track of all of the characters throughout and because although it’s not a mystery or a thriller, it would read much differently once you know the ending. I know I’ve just abused interstellar metaphors, but it’s also like a slow-panning shot that zooms… Read more »
