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
Category: Fiction
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
Reading Roundup: December 2023
The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei. While I was devouring this book and trying to explain it to friends, my short pitch was pregnant women solving a murder in space. This is a gross oversimplification. For one, not everyone pregnant on this spaceship is a woman, and not everyone solving the murder is pregnant--but most… Continue reading Reading Roundup: December 2023
Reading Roundup: November 2023
I'm still slowly working through The Artist's Way--it seems that my rhythm is to go for three weeks and then completely abandon it in the fourth, swamped by end of the month deadlines, but I am still engaged enough to return to it once my duties are discharged. This month, one of the challenges proposed… Continue reading Reading Roundup: November 2023
Sara Davis 