What We Are Reading Today: "Beautiful Ugly"

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Updated 03 April 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: "Beautiful Ugly"

  • Alice Feeney is a New York Times bestselling author. In addition to “Beautiful Ugly,” she has also published “Rock Paper Scissors,” “Sometimes I Lie,” and “His & Hers”

Author: Alice Feeney

“Beautiful Ugly,” released in January, is a novel by British author Alice Feeney.

The story concerns Grady Green, an author, who is on the phone to his wife while she is driving home. During their conversation, he hears the screech of brakes as she spots an object on the road ahead.

Green’s tries to prevent his wife from leaving the car to investigate the object, before she mysteriously disappears.

To cope with his depression and grief, Green travels to an island in search of solace and perhaps a way to restore his life, particularly after losing sleep and his appetite for writing.

On the island, he is shocked to encounter a woman who resembles his missing wife, and the story takes another dramatic turn.

Although the novel has been rated by more than 87,000 users on Goodreads with an average of 3.6 out of 5 stars, some readers found the pace a bit slow.

“It’s a bit of a slow-burn mystery, which I feel is difficult to pull off since it doesn’t keep you on the edge of your seat the whole time,” one of the reviewers commented.

Despite being a work of fiction, another reader found the narrative unreliable and unrealistic, making it difficult to connect the events. Nevertheless, most readers appreciated the author’s writing style and imagination.

“All in all, I don’t hate the book, but there is too much melodrama and theatrical antics for a thriller. Since this is my favorite genre, I tend to be quite particular about how I like these novels to be constructed,” another reader said.

Alice Feeney is a New York Times bestselling author. In addition to “Beautiful Ugly,” she has also published “Rock Paper Scissors,” “Sometimes I Lie,” and “His & Hers.”

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘On the Art and Craft of Doing Science’

Updated 05 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘On the Art and Craft of Doing Science’

Author: Kenneth Catania 

Like any creative endeavor, science can be a messy and chaotic affair.

“On the Art and Craft of Doing Science” shares the creative process of an innovative and accomplished scientist, taking readers behind the scenes of some of his most pioneering investigations and explaining why the practice of science, far from being an orderly exercise in pure logic, is a form of creative expression like any other art.

Kenneth Catania begins by discussing how ideas set the stage for scientific breakthroughs and goes on to describe ways to approach experimental design.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fuji: A Mountain in the Making’

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Updated 04 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Fuji: A Mountain in the Making’

  • It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes

Author: ANDREW W. BERNSTEIN

Mount Fuji is everywhere recognized as a wonder of nature and enduring symbol of Japan.

Yet behind the picture-postcard image is a history filled with conflict and upheaval. Violent eruptions across the centuries wrought havoc and instilled fear.

It has been both a totem of national unity and a flashpoint for economic and political disputes.

And while its soaring majesty has inspired countless works of literature and art, the foot of the mountain is home to military training grounds and polluting industries.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Aquarium’

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Updated 04 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Aquarium’

  • Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history

Aleksandar Hemon’s 2011 essay “The Aquarium” is an exploration of parental love, grief, and the isolating toll of confronting a child’s mortality. The essay was first published in The New Yorker and later appeared in “The Book of My Lives” in 2013.

Written with unflinching honesty, the piece chronicles Hemon’s experience navigating his infant daughter Isabel’s diagnosis of a rare brain tumor and the family’s agonizing journey through surgeries, chemotherapy, and loss.  

Hemon juxtaposes the clinical detachment of medical jargon — “external ventricular drain,” “stem-cell recovery” — with visceral snapshots: Isabel’s breath on his chest, her laughter amid IV drips, her small hand gripping his finger.

At the heart of the essay lies the metaphor of an aquarium where the family exists in a suffocating bubble, visible to the outside world but severed from its rhythms.

Central to the narrative is Hemon’s elder daughter Ella, who processes her sister’s illness through an imaginary brother, Mingus.

Stylistically, Hemon oscillates between reporter-like precision and raw vulnerability. He rejects platitudes about suffering’s “ennobling” nature, writing: “Isabel’s suffering and death did nothing for her, or us, or the world.”

The essay’s power lies in its refusal to soften despair, instead confronting the “indelible absence” grief leaves behind.

Hemon’s writing grapples with displacement and identity, weaving together fiction, memoir, and history. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, he doesn’t just tell stories; he uses language to find pockets of hope in shattered lives.

Think of him as a guide through the chaos of modern exile — equal parts poet and provocateur.

 

 


What We Are Reading Today: Human Forms

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Updated 03 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Human Forms

  • In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy

Author: Ian Duncan

The 120 years between Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time.

In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses, even as the two were separating into distinct domains.

 


What We Are Reading Today: Utopianism for a Dying Planet

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Updated 02 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Utopianism for a Dying Planet

  • The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability

Author: Gregory Claeys

In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. 

“Utopianism for a Dying Planet” examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today’s thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe.

The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability.
Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives.