Author: Nadia Ghent

Are we really half-way?  It seems so hard to believe!  I feel as if I’ve barely started this ten-week reading project with all of you, and here’s another week in which I did a terrible job keeping track of the number of pages I read.  I’m somewhere in the ballpark, I think, possibly, maybe, perhaps??.

This is week 4? Or is it week 3?  February always confuses me–it’s over before I remember, yet again, that there are only 28 days to keep track of.  And it doesn’t help that last week went by in a blur of work, so I missed posting last Wednesday.  Nor does it help that I’ve

Um, ok.  So that’s a lot of books.  More than would be possible for me to read, at least given the present state of my life, and not to mention how many other projects I’ve got going at the same time.  But, oh well…38 pages a day should get me at least beginning to make

I’ve finally returned to Ann Patchett–I read Bel Canto years ago and really admired her fiction writing (talk about plot and character development!)–mostly because I was curious to find out what her non-fiction was like, but it took me two years to begin reading This Is a Story of a Happy Marriage.  Patchett has been

I am so glad that I left Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays until the very end of the Summer Reading Adventure–Smith writes so passionately about so many books that I haven’t read that if this had been the first work I’d read ten weeks ago, I would never have been able to stick

It is really stretching definitions to call Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry a book since it is only 86 pages long, and I’m really getting away with a lot by including it on my summer reading list while all of you have read so many very much longer books, but I was so eager

I wish that Jessica Valenti’s Sex Object were a better book.  I’m very interested in contemporary feminist writing, and not just theoretical aspects but closer-to-the-ground writing that might help me understand my twenty year-old daughter’s thinking about feminism as opposed to my own pre-historic concepts that were shaped in a radically different world.  And so

This summer, I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Paris for a week, a long-deferred dream of mine ever since I was in college and had to give up a chance to spend my junior year in France. I was actually invited by my 20 year-old daughter who’d been in Paris for

Ben Lerner’s 10:04 is not at all a standard point A to point B novel, and yet this deeply self-referential work, circular in structure and layered with multiple narratives and characters that appear to be both fictional and real is generous and engaging: one never gets the sense that Lerner wants to alienate the reader