Last Book I Loved

I am shitting my pants. Totally. Completely. And … well, figuratively. One night before my travel partner and I are scheduled to fly to Mumbai, she ditches me for Berlin. The city, not the band. So I am alone in Ethiopia,…

I was eight years old the first time I heard of The Great Gatsby. My mom took my two teenage sisters to see the movie as soon as it was released. I was jealous my sisters got to go and…

Two years ago, I ended a five-year relationship with a man who loved me. Very simply, it wasn’t enough anymore. Responses ranged from distraught to disappointment to disgust. My aunt cried, and my friend D said it was the most…

I picked up this classic as one of my “Top Books to Read Before I Die.” One thing this list is teaching me is that you should banish all preconceived notions of what a book is going to be about…

Sometimes you revisit a book you love, like Francine Prose’s Goldengrove. Once you finish reading this book for the third time, you start thinking about your near-hero worship of Prose and her, well, prose. You think about what a well-developed…

César Aira’s Ghosts: Meaning-saturated, beautiful and complicated. A heat soaked hallucination, this short novel moved through the minutes of the last day of the year in a building so new that it was still under construction.

I’d always assumed, mistakenly it turns out, that the book was about a sunken boat, with a vague notion that it maybe also had something to do with World War II.

I left Cassandra at the Wedding tearily hopeful and good and chastised. I say left, but mean emerged from, because Cassandra is as much a spell or an ocean as it is a book, with an inexorable pull and terrible…

In classical music, the term “fugue” is defined as a composition in which a particular theme or voice is repeated within the same piece, though changed in form so that the voice repeats over itself, like a ghostly echo. A…

I’m not one for New Years resolutions, but after a year of missing meals and several dates–all in the name of work sweet work–I decided that this year I would devote more time to pleasure reading. That is not to…

The last book that I loved was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I have tried for the better part of three days to figure out how to write this review/adoration. I wanted to write some grand theory or expound on some deep…