Call Me By Your Name: More Thoughts

A week after reading it for the first time, I read Call Me By Your Name again. Actually, I listened to it again, which is practically unheard of for me. In fact, I've never re-listened to an audiobook (although I have a few on my list). But this book was so lush and so layered...

Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman

Call Me By Your Name is the most stunning, hauntingly beautiful, and painfully true novel I've read in some time. I finished it last night, and I am still bereft--not only because I'm heartbroken that it's over, but because it feels like I'll never read anything as good ever again. I know this is not...

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

I reread this on audio, since the last time I read it was in high school, and I did not love it. I decided to count it for one of this year's Read Harder tasks: an assigned book you hated or never finished. I definitely didn't hate it, but...wow. All I remember from my first...

The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs

There's a certain kind of light you sometimes see on winter afternoons: sharp, saturated, so glittering and vivid it's as if the sun is turning the sky an entirely new color that's never exited before. This book was like that. Every sentence shimmered, so bright it hurt. I had heard that that this book was both...

Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward

This book was beautiful and haunting from page one. I was completely drawn in by the writing, which was lush and intimate, at times dreamlike, and which grew and blossomed as the story unfurled. The whole book was internal and visceral. When I finished it, it felt like coming out of a deep well. I am...

The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

I have never read a book of true crime before--it's a genre that's never held much interest for me. After reading The Fact of A Body, I'm hesitant to ever read one again, because it's hard to imagine anything ever living up to it. I've heard from others who do read a lot of true crime...

The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

This may sound like a strange comparison, but the brilliance of this book--and the reasons that I loved it so much--reminded me of Adam Silvera's History is All You Left Me. Though entirely different, both novels are perfectly structured: flawless beauties crafted with a finesse that shimmers. But both were so compelling to me because,...

Hide by Matthew Griffin

This is one of those rare books that evoked a physical reaction from me, not just at the end of the novel, but throughout the entire thing. While I was reading it, I felt an achey, tender, sadness in my gut. I could feel my heart beating through most of it. There were moments so...

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

After hearing so much about this book, I was prepared to be disappointed. I was not. Strange, constantly shifting, aways surprising, at turns shocking, baffling, heartbreaking. Saunders turns the world on its head, and yet manages to remain grounded in reality. Once I fell under the spell of his graveyard world of ghosts and not-quite...