The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill. A slim, creepy, and evocative novella about the tolls that art and love can take--on the ones that make them and the people around them. I got interested in the crane wife story back when CJ Hauser's wonderful essay was going viral: the appeal, in the folktale, cranes are… Continue reading Reading Roundup: August 2024
Category: Fiction
Reading Roundup: July 2024
Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Sometime, I missed reading this in high school or college. I mostly knew Thoreau as the butt of a joke: the man who went to live in the woods but still had his mother nearby to send him food and do his laundry. But I learned more recently that Thoreau's… Continue reading Reading Roundup: July 2024
Reading Roundup: June 2024
How Much of These Hills is Gold, Ship Fever, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, Closer. And In the Dream House, again.
Reading Roundup: May 2024
I've been wanting to reread Middlemarch by George Eliot since I read The Marriage Question back in February, and the month of my birthday seemed like a great time to revisit this book for grown-up people. I believe it is my third read of this 785-page saga, so I suppose it's not surprising that I'd… Continue reading Reading Roundup: May 2024
Reading roundup: April 2024
Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach. This short book, published in 1975, imagines a future world in which the Pacific Northwest and northern California have seceded from the United States. It is written in the form of a journalist's reported articles and private notes as he visits the relatively new country,… Continue reading Reading roundup: April 2024
Reading Roundup: March 2024
Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer. This book is constructed of short, thoughtful essays that each look at a handful of "art monsters" from film, music, and literature, connecting them to a few different themes: what it means to love art made by terrible men, why we grapple with the biographies of artists and… Continue reading Reading Roundup: March 2024
Sara Davis 