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Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia My rating: 2 of 5 stars I had high hopes for Mexican Gothic, given I’ve always been a fan of the Gothic novel; while Moreno-Garcia does use Gothic tropes—especially in the first third of the book—the novel soon devolves into a supernatural horror, a genre I’m definitely not a fan of.

The Current by Tim Johnston

The Current by Tim Johnston My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Because it was only girls… In the river. It’s always been only girls.
The Current is not your ordinarily mystery/thriller; in fact, I would strongly discourage those who enter its icy, frozen Minnesotan (and Iowan) world to read it for the mystery, or dissuade those looking for a fast-paced thriller.


What Johnston has written instead are…

The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope

The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope My rating: 4 of 5 stars
”I know very well that men are friends when they step up and shake hands with each other. It is the same as when women kiss.”

“When I see women kiss, I always think that there is a deep hatred at the bottom of it.”
And so the long, arduous, fitful, endearing, maddening, and epic-filled Chronicles of Barsetshireare at an…

The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope

The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Speeding through Trollope is never wise: each of his books are long, drawn out performances, where the various threads he weaves throughout eventually come together in the end—the different characters of different social stations and statuses; the bickering family members, neighbors, and parish members; and also the young…

So... Lately I’m not really here or on Twitter anymore, but you can find me on Goodreads. I’m not reviewing much on there, but feel free to follow me if you like, if only to see what I’m reading these days.

And if the story sounds so far like a dream, a glossy tale of the kind one occasionally—on holiday or a long-haul flight—allows oneself to lean back into and, as if it were sinful, a praline, vanish within for a brief moment, then it's because life is a dream, a dream from which you never wake up, but which one day is nonetheless suddenly long since over, but you're still here and can either use 'the rest of your days' to forget and 'get on with it' or on the other hand, like me, abandon what is and try to retrieve what was, even the tiniest little thing that has been lost, even what perhaps didn't really exist but nonetheless belongs in the story, call it forth and tell it so it doesn't vanish but on the contrary now at last becomes real and in a way more real than anything else.

Madame Nielsen, The Endless Summer

Tentacle

for A. 
we send them both off bare-chested into the den to plug in their machines and watch the images on screens morph into shapes they assume for the duration of the spell     in Guadalajara the trees bloom and then wilt spent spine curved like a question mark I send you messages while they are occupied that sound like branches snapping or me lapping up your saliva     when he is next to me the…