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
Category: Fiction
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
Reading Roundup: February 2024
How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto. I inhaled this book, which was darkly satirical and so much fun to read. It centers on the Rubin Institute, a neoliberal fever dream of a university where disgraced public figures are exiled after being fired for saying or doing something unforgivable in the public eye.… Continue reading Reading Roundup: February 2024
Reading Roundup: January 2024
Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter. This is exactly the sort of read I wanted to kick off the new year: short, moody, a hint of magic in the mundane. The title story was originally published in Harper's and won a fiction prize, and it is still a perfect modern fairy tale: mysterious, wonderful, bleak. The… Continue reading Reading Roundup: January 2024
Books I loved in 2023
I read 55 books in 2023 for my own pleasure, plus another 13 in my capacity as a nonfiction book reviewer for Publishers Weekly before I took a hiatus from that role. 2023 felt like a fantastic year in reading, for me: I continued to really love reading on my couch during meals, enjoying daylight and… Continue reading Books I loved in 2023
Sara Davis 