What We’re Reading This Week

TOPHER AND TANECIA

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

“This book has a strong female assassin character that I’m really coming to enjoy. Intelligent, witty, kind of like Hunger Games. I want to see it on the screen. It’s funny.”

TOMOKO

The Peripheral by William Gibson

“I’m only about ten chapters in, but it’s really cool. Murder mystery futuristic sci-fi, cool and intense. I need to finish it before William Gibson does his reading at the store next month.”

SUTTERFIELD

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

“Stunningly, beautifully, lyrically written. Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Potawatomi Nation, and she tells the story of how we can have a better relationship with Earth. It’s a combination of traditional wisdom and scientific knowledge. I am ridiculously and overwhelmingly in love with this book.”

EMILY

Dear Elizabeth by Sarah Ruhl

“This play is based on letters between Elizabeth Bishop and Roebrt Lowell. Ruhl wanted to be a poet before becoming a playwright, so she’s very tuned into the lyrical quality of poetry, using words of poets as dialogue. Ruhl can pull it off. Lowell and Bishop only met a few times, and it’s exciting to see their relationship on the page. This play is more enjoyable to read than to see.”

MO

Bluets by Maggie Nelson

“I spent the winter of 2013 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, sitting crosslegged in wool socks reading and rereading Bluets. My women friends in my creative writing program were obsessed with this slim, powerful tribute to blue. The color, the mood. Loneliness is solitude with a problem, Nelson writes. When I begin to have a problem with solitude, I pull Bluets off the shelf, and think of the sister-writers I wrote with in the snow that winter, the irony being that a long prose-poem about loneliness was what bound us together that year, the year we joined our blue souls with Maggie Nelson’s, for her words spoke eloquently to our longings.”