"Dept of Speculation," by Jenny Offill

    This book was mentioned on the weekly podcast of The New York Times Book Review. It was one of the ten or so books that a couple of women critics listed as "breakthrough" books by women authors in the 21st century.
    And, yes, I think this deserved to be listed. It is an extraordinary book--an unending stream of consciousness of a woman experiencing the birth and early bringing-up of her daughter, while her marriage is rocked by her husband's affair. And she also copes with teaching, deals with a plague of lice, ghost-writes an astronaut's biography, moves apartments, moves to the country, goes to a therapist, screams at her husband, strokes his forehead in the night...
    The narrative technique is one of short paragraphs, interspersed with brief sentences, and strange wanderings of the mind. One page simply consists of the words "scared of" run together as follows:
scaredofscaredodscaredofscaredofscaredof ...and there are eighteen lines of it.
     Sometimes there is just a sentence--"A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things."
     A plethora of short passages like this--with the italics:
      "Three things no one has ever said about me:
        You make it look so easy.
        You are very mysterious.
        You need to take yourself more seriously."
      And lots of quotes from a wide variety of authors.
      It's a fairly quick read (168 I-Pad pages: downloaded from the DC Library), and I found it fascinating--though don't expect it all to make sense: after all, how much of our wandering thoughts make sense?
BTW the book was first published in 2014