There are a hundred ways to choose a book. Reviews, recommendations, or maybe you just like the picture on the cover. I've been known to seek out books after spotting other people reading them on the subway. But this is the first time I've picked up a book because its plot is centered on my birthday. In Book One of On the Calculation of Volume by Danish novelist Solvej Balle, antiquarian bookseller Tara Selter has somehow become trapped living the same day on an endless loop

Last week, I wrote about the universal pull of moon stories in the wake of the Artemis II lunar mission. Now, on to the book I read recently that put me in a celestial frame of mind: John Steinbeck's World War II novella, The Moon Is Down . I only came across this Steinbeck book recently and decided to read it because I was intrigued by the title. It comes from a chilling scene in Macbeth , when Fleance warns that "the moon is down" just before Macbeth murders King Duncan. Fo

Like so many others, I was transfixed this past week by the awe-inspiring Artemis II mission to circle the moon, and by the perilous re-entry and dramatic splashdown that brought our astronauts safely back to Earth. Even before Artemis blasted off, I had been thinking about how the moon is emblematic of so many things: madness, danger, melancholy, longing, romance and more. I had just finished reading a book with "moon" in the title, though I'm saving that discussion for anot

Raise your hand if you slogged through The Scarlet Letter in high school. I distinctly remember how much hate this book elicited from my 11th-grade English class. Secretly though, I kind of loved Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale of sin, hypocrisy and guilt among the Puritans. Still, I never returned to Hawthorne until just now, when I decided to read The Marble Faun , his final completed novel. The book centers on a group of young expatriate artists in 19th-century Rome who become

A company in South Korea made headlines last year when it announced it would award employees 100 million won (about $75,000) for every baby that they have. It's part of an effort to reverse the country’s low birth rate, which has been fueled by high living costs, a grinding work culture, and the growing sentiment among many young women that marriage isn't worth the hassle. In the short and sly novel Apartment Women , first published in Korean in 2018 and translated into Engli

Literature is full of characters who find their way to New York to remake themselves, from Jay Gatsby to Holly Golightly. In Toni Morrison's 1992 novel Jazz , Joe and Violet Trace arrive in Harlem during the Great Migration with hopes of moving past the violence and indignities of the rural South, only to find that the city offers no escape. I just finished reading Jazz and found it to be dazzling and thought-provoking, just like every other Toni Morrison novel I have read.

Beth Macy is a journalist who has written several acclaimed nonfiction books, including Factory Man , the story of a Virginia furniture maker who battled to save his company and prevent hundreds of American manufacturing jobs from being lost to offshoring, and Dopesick , a chronicle of America's opioid epidemic. Her newest book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America , published in 2025, recounts her upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s in what was once

I'm very interested in learning more about the Vietnam War, and in better understanding both how the United States got entangled in the conflict and what has happened in the decades since we withdrew. Today, Vietnam has transformed into one of the most dynamic economies in Asia. I also hear that it's an amazing place to visit. One book that came highly recommended is The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam, and I already have a copy sitting on my bookshelf. It is wide

I read a wild article in The Wall Street Journal recently about an artificial intelligence tool called Moltbot that creates agents to handle day-to-day tasks autonomously, like booking dinner reservations and sifting through your inbox. But it hasn't taken long for these AI assistants to go beyond their original remit: they have forged a community among themselves in which they engage in dark, dystopian chatter. They have concocted their own religion and call humans dumb. A

I was supposed to have gone on a trip to Israel earlier this month. Unfortunately, I had to cancel my plans owing to the current geopolitical situation in the Middle East. One thing I had been especially looking forward to was a visit to the ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv to see 20 & 20: A Lens of Her Own , an exhibition about trailblazing Jewish women photographers and their contemporary successors. Maybe I'll still get to see it before it closes, but until then

I almost did a double take when I read that the new film adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is being released this weekend to coincide with Valentine's Day. Seriously? This book is many things — brilliant, intense and unforgettable — but a date-night romance it is not. At least not in any traditional sense. For many years, I put off reading this book, but I finally tackled it during the pandemic when I had more time to read. I don't know what took me so long.

Here in New York City, it's still very cold and icy outside following this past weekend's blizzard. So, what better way to contemplate the elements than to snuggle up with a book about an even colder and snowier place — the Nordics! Extreme North , a 2022 book by historian Bernd Brunner, promises a sweeping cultural history of the world's northernmost regions. I wasn't familiar with this book until I picked up a copy in the sale section at my local bookstore. I’ve been intere

Roxie Laybourne is probably a name that you do not know. Thanks to the wonderful and deeply researched biography The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne by Chris Sweeney, I hope that many more people will meet this remarkable 20th century pioneer of science. This book was published in 2025, and it is the newest book I have written about since launching this blog. Roxie, as everyone called her, almost singlehandedly invented the fi

Ernest Hemingway famously used the term "the iceberg theory" to describe his writing technique, in which only a small part of his meaning is visible, and the rest is submerged. Reading his work today, it's easy to forget how experimental his approach was at the time. I underlined the following passage because I think it encapsulates Hemingway's mastery of understatement, as well as his flair for pointing out the absurd in subtle ways. This paragraph appears toward the end of

In 1926, Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises , his first novel. To mark its 100th anniversary, it felt fitting to re-read the book and to reflect on why I think it's an American masterpiece. The first time I encountered this book was in my AP English class in high school. I was instantly hooked on Hemingway's style and his Prohibition-era tale of American and British expats behaving badly as they gallivanted through Europe. At the same time, I didn't really get a l

Ever since I read The Hebrew Teacher , the first book translated into English by the US-based, Israeli-born writer Maya Arad, I have been eagerly anticipating the publication of her next book in English. The Hebrew Teacher is a collection of three novellas, all centered around Israeli transplants in America and the complicated bonds they have with one another and their homeland. The title story takes place at a college in the Midwest, and the other two are set in Northern C

I am ringing in the new year by launching my book blog — a little corner of the Internet to call my own. A quick introduction: I’ve been a passionate reader for my entire life. One of my earliest recollections is memorizing The Cat in the Hat  after countless bedtime readings and then pretending to read it aloud to my family. In school, I always loved reading and writing, so I majored in English and went on to have a two-decade career as a journalist. These days, I work on t