Books I’m currently reading

— St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russel. Stand outs from this short story collection: “Ava Wrestles the Alligator,” “The City of Shells,” and “Z.Z.’s Sleep-Away Camp for Disordered Dreamers.” “Out To Sea,” where a beautiful girl named Augie visits an old retiree, was romantic but lonely.

— Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris. She’s the copyeditor of The New Yorker magazine. She’s so passionate about her work that she refers to punctuation marks like they were human beings. A very endearing work that, aside from telling us how Miss Noris got into her job (it is primarily an autobiography), she also tells us the difference between an em-dash (—), an en-dash (–), and a hyphen (-).

— Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy Kaling. I had tons of laughs with The Mindy Project, a show written and produced(?) by Miss Kaling herself. The hilarity was in the depiction of an Ob-Gyn who had all the time in the world. In real life, my friends in that profession could barely attend dinners, with their cesarean sections and all. Very light reading but quite insightful, too.