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 »
Posts Categorized: Blog
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 »
Books of 2020, Part 8
Little Eyes, by Samantha Schweblin: Ooh. This was like a Black Mirror episode in book form, and also reminiscent of Ted Chiang. The hook of the plot is essentially: surveillance furbies. Delightfully, the short sections that jump from narrator to narrator and place to place (most of the characters repeat numerous times, but there are a few one-offs) mimic the technology of the “little eyes” themselves, like hyperlinks into different stories, and every horrifying ending is horrifying in a different… Read more »
Books of 2020, Part 7
Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener: There’s a particular choice the author makes that I suspect is very love-it-or-hate-it: only alluding to, rather than naming, any tech company or piece of software or hardware she describes in her memoir. Facebook is “the social network everyone hated but couldn’t stop logging into,” eg. It’s slightly Greek with longer epithets but it’s also really, really annoying–both when it’s obvious who she’s referring to (like Amazon) and when it’s unclear (like her description of… Read more »
Books of 2020, Part 6
The Illness Lesson, by Clare Beams: The cover is amazing – a string painting of a woman and birds, all hovering from puppet strings. The book is equally striking and sinister. I want to focus on something–not trivial, I don’t think, because it’s a serious skill, but something that’s beyond the most obvious of the author’s talents: the novel is set in the 1860s and the language (dialogue and narration) manages to feel both modern yet faithful to the time…. Read more »
