Never before have I read a book quite like BLUETS by MAGGIE NELSON. I finished it yesterday on the plane as I was seated in 10D, a window seat, which allowed me to look out the window at the clouds encased by blue. And in that moment, in reading passage 168, I understood Nelson's reference of words attributed to Cézanne: '"If I paint all the little blues and all the little browns, I capture and convey his glance," he said of painting a man's face." So to paint clouds, I don't need to paint them. Just the blue that surrounds them.   I don't want you...

When I started reading THERE THERE by Tommy Orange, I thought it was a collection of short stories. And then after about 50 pages, I realized it isn't a collection of shorts, it's one cohesive novel ... where seemingly unrelated stories and characters intersect, interrelate, inter-tangle. The older I get, the more I realize that everything is connected. I realize that a person from this interaction is related to a person from that interaction and that this word affects that word, and this treatment affects that treatment.  There is righteous rage in this book. The kind of rage I felt a...