Emily > Recent Status Updates

I already regret that this is a library copy--almost every sentence is one I'd underline.

Re-reading it so I’m ready for her new book.

This is also an absolutely brilliant revision of of Mrs. Dalloway, with its expansiveness always circling back to the smallness of our days and allusions to Woolf—names like Peter, Perceval, and the conjugal nickname Mongoose..,

Everything Hanya Yanagihara writes guts me—didn’t think anything could be as gorgeous, painful, and human as A Little Life, but this is already a book I know I’ll be living with for a long time.

I'm only 50 or so pages into this, but it's already on my best of 2021 list. What's brilliant is how Erdrich has created so many metaphors and realities/materialities of paper (and the sentences on it): how we hunger for it, how it kills us, what we use it for.

I requested this book from the library because I thought, "Oh, wizards, what a great way to escape." Ummmm, wrong. This is a painful, gorgeous book about the collective historical and enduring/individual traumas BIPOC experience every day in America because of systemic racism.

Only a few chapters in, and this has already made my list of the best books of 2020. With its luminous first sentence to its depiction of sounds that are an “elemental as silence,” it’s brilliant evocation of ghosts (and goats), and the powerful descriptions of love along lines of latitude, I can tell Shubhangi Swarup’s words will haunt me.

I thought reading this would feel less urgent than Station Eleven, but I already feel like Emily St. John Mandel has written one of the books that will be linked in its prescience and intelligence to COVID-19 by way of Y2K.

If the dog scene in Disgrace broke your heart, this book will destroy you.

I decided it's time to re-read everything Austen...

I’ve only read the first few chapters, but I already think this is one of the best analyses of structural misogyny and it’s impact on individual women as well as larger social structures.

I am so in love with this--it's absolutely what Andy Weir's ridiculously misogynist second book could have/should have been. In the first chapter, the 54-year-old protagonist explains she's had to learn how to behave according to PIG rules (Polite, Interested, Good humored), and it gets better from there.

This is up there with A Little Life--a book I want to stop reading before it breaks my heart but can't.

Fox Valley bookish friends: here are a few details about Poetry Unlocked's upcoming recitation event, scheduled for Monday, February 19, 2018, from 7:00 - 8:30 pm at The Draw (800 S Lawe St, Appleton, WI). We're inviting readers, any readers, to recite a favorite poem, not your own, by heart.

$0.99 kindle deal today--it has to be worth a dollar for me to see what the 50 shades thing is about, right?

This is one of my new favorite quotations--"I also called pizza crust 'pizza bones.' I don’t know why I’m telling you this."

BEST BOOK I AVER READ! LM Montgomery is the best author ever. Anne is so realistic and has such a great outstanding story, and touches the heart and the funny bone. It is something I've never read before. It saved me from having to look for a different book every day. And my first grade teacher Ms.O'Connell sometimes has us not look at the pictures: this is a great book because I can imagine it in my mind. I love it.