This week, Entropy contributors share what they’ve been reading this month.
Alexandra Naughton
I just finished A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore and now I’m finishing Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri which I had loaned to my granny last Thanksgiving and got back this year when I visited her.
Ben Fama
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Andrea Lambert
The Reductress, How to Win at Feminism: the Definitive Guide to Having it all – and Then Some.
Kari Larsen
I’m finally reading Jen George’s The Babysitter at Rest—I was a year behind and on Dorothy titles and with each successive book, I couldn’t believe they could keep getting better. But I am confident that, after a year of pretty astonishing reading, The Babysitter at Rest is the best new book I’ve read in 2016. “Not a moment too soon” would’ve really applied to any moment this year but now it really, really mattered.
David S. Atkinson
Ishmael Reed’s The Free-Lance Pallbearers
Gina Abelkop
Becca Klaver’s Empire Wasted and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall
Quincy Rhodes
Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer and FF Vol. 2: Family Freakout by Matt Fraction et al.
Sarah Hoenicke
Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am.
Rosa Quezad
Bruja by Wendy C. Ortiz
Shane Jesse Christmass
Just finished the chapbooks from Sommer Browning and Bill Lessard, both available from Reality Beach. Currently reading the 40th Anniversary version of Marvin Cohen’s Others, Including Morstive Sternbump. Tough Poet’s Press ran a Kickstarter as the book was out of print for years. It’s a whirlpool of language and is his usual style of parables, fables and tongue-twisting absurdity.
Laura Vena
Southward Into the Vanishing Lands, Monique Verdin about the threat to the Houma’s territory posed by rising tides, and victim to displacement, relocation, and European clear-cutting. Published in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas by Rebecca Solnit.
Joseph Milazzo
Dian Wakoski, The Man Who Shook Hands; Jeffrey A. Lockwood, LOCUST: THE DEVASTATING RISE AND MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF THE INSECT THAT SHAPED THE AMERICAN FRONTIER; Antonio Tabucchi, TIME AGES IN A HURRY
Barrett Warner
I’m reading Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Jefferson is sort of like Beowulf, but in a political way. Just trying to understand my hell, our hell, today. I wasn’t going to read it but then I saw my dad for the first time in a year at his Milwaukee rest home and for a few minutes he was right on time but then he broke down over Trump and then he caught his words and only stared straight ahead but he was shaking and he just didn’t stop even when I said I love you dad.
Sylvia Aguilar Zeleny
I just finished Hot Milk by Deborah Levi, and now I am on the Third book of the Napolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante and Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien.
Adam Tedesco
Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, the new issue of Prelude, Tell Me If You’re Lying by Sarah Sweeney, and About A Mountain by John D’Agata
Sara Finnerty
Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson, and for a book club, These Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante and The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson.
Dennis James Sweeney
I had the amazing fortune to stumble into Lithic Press in Fruita, CO on the way to a snowshoeing trip in the mountains this weekend. I bought Kyle Harvey’s July (from Lithic Press) and Emily Griffin’s Butter Knife (from Fog Machine), so I’m in the middle of those. Long game is Tracey Daugherty’s biography of Donald Barthelme, for school and life.
