It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Well I've gotten distracted from the books I was reading last week, because a couple inter-library loan books came in for me -- all books I've been waiting for with great anticipation! The first is Mary Syzbist's book of poems, Incarnadine, which recently won the National Book Award for poetry. I'm about halfway through the book, and I must say the award is well-deserved. Fascinating book that connects the incarnation with the poet and with contemporary life, and the poems are in an interesting variety of forms, both traditional and experimental (including one that is a diagrammed sentence).

I also got Karen Russell's book of short stories, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. These stories are all in the genre of magical-realism, and wow are they weird and interesting. I am not a big short story fan in general (I don't like it when stories are over too quickly!), but I'm really enjoying this book. The titles of the stories are alone are enough to catch my interest, including the titled of the volume, and titles like "Z.Z.'s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers" and "Ava Wrestles the Alligator."

The last book is an apocalyptic novel titled Everyone Says That at the End of the World. This is another very odd, and very interesting book from a great small press (Soft Skull). I'm not very far into the book, but so far it's been following two characters, young people who have just entered college, and now they have just met each other, and I'm guessing the rest of the book will follow their adventures together. It's hard to tell this early into the book, but the writing is so good and the characters so interesting -- this may end up being the best end-of-the-world book I've read in awhile.

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