A former student of mine, let’s call her “Madison,” insisted I read this book because it’s her favorite book and she reads it annually. This is a lot of pressure…
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Everything I Never Told You
August 6, 2018This novel was picked for the first-year program’s common read at my university. So of course I also imposed this as a common read pick for the three-family beach-house week…
The Woman Who Did
July 13, 2018Probably the most depressing thing I’ve read all year. This 1895 novella by Grant Allen features a fiercely principled woman, Herminia Barton, who refuses to marry (before and after she…
A Wrinkle in Time
June 1, 2018Here’s my contribution to the “unpopular opinion” trope going around social media: I do not like this book. I tried, but I failed to see what people seem to appreciate…
The Mothers
March 14, 2018This was one of the best novels I’ve read in a very long time. I thought it would be about women struggling with infertility (provenance of mistaken belief: a half-listened…
Camino Island
February 17, 2018Camino Island, by John Grisham, definitely felt like a guilty pleasure. I listened to it, for the neighborhood book club, while driving around town for a few weeks. It’s the…
Au Bonheur des Dames
January 11, 2018While I enjoyed this novel, in part for its detailed descriptions (Zola’s realism is exquisite), it also felt like it took me forever to read it. For a while I…
In Times of Siege
December 15, 2017Githa Hariharan’s 2003 novel offers a glimpse of what it’s like to teach at the university level without the guarantee of academic freedom. The protagonist is a History professor whose…
Ghachar Ghochar
November 6, 2017According to Suketu Mehta’s blurb on the front of the novel, “Vivek Shanbhag is an Indian Chekhov.” This is pretty accurate. Ghachar Ghochar is short, subtle, and totally compelling. The ending…
All the Missing Girls
October 27, 2017Another pick from the neighborhood book club. Like Gone Girl but with the innovation of narrating the story backwards. So you get the protagonist, an unsympathetically drawn woman from a small…