What We’re Reading This Week

Flippo

Rat Girl by Kristen Hersh

“Culled and rewritten from Kristen’s (of Throwing Muses fame) diary entries of her 18th year, the year her band was signed, she was diagnosed as bipolar, and found out that she was pregnant. I love this book for its intimate and very real accounts of somebody else’s psychoses. And her band’s good, too.”

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Steve

2017 by Olga Slavnikova

“I’m only reading modern Russian authors right now. This is a futuristic Russian novel that not only explores relationships, but also includes commentary on modern Russian life and folklore from the Ural Mountain region.”

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Clint

Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman

“This is an excellent and well researched book about one of the most popular and vilified new “religions” in the world. I’ve only just begun it so I haven’t come to any of the celebrity dirt yet, but Reitman’s documentation is superlative, so I doubt the organization can be litigious about this one.”

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Elizabeth

We the Animals by Justin Torres

“This is really good so far. It’s about three brothers and their relationship with each other and their parents. It’s a really well-written novella.”

Justin Torres will be here at BookPeople speaking and signing We the Animals on Tuesday, October 25th, 7p.

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Merrillee

Acceptable Loss by Anne Perry

“I just finished this mystery, it’s really good. Perry writes three different series, two of which are Victorian. This new one is set in the mid-Victorian era, around 1870. It’s about the head of the Thames River police who’s trying to figure out how and why a man who owns a child prostitution boat on the Thames was murdered. Perry just writes about the darkest, grittiest things you would not think Victorians were into, but they were. She’s really good at getting into the psychological underpinnings of why people do what they do. She’s such a good writer.”