Month: February 2007
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Tanglewreck by Jeanette WintersonBloomsbury, 2006
Lighthousekeeping is the story of an orphan named Silver. Tanglewreck is also the story of an orphan named Silver. It’s a story about duty, hope, multiplicity, possibility. Possibility: the Silver of Tanglewreck as the Silver of Lighthousekeeping, elsewhere in the multiverse? “There are Lighthousekeepers and Lock Keepers, and Housekeepers […] and there are Timekeepers.” (p…
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Black Swan Green by David MitchellRandom House, 2006
A few weeks ago, I read this post about reading on the Harvard University Press Publicity Blog, which led me to this post in the Boston Globe’s “Brainiac” blog, which, in turn, led me to this piece by Lindsay Waters in the Chronicle, which contains the following quote. I have increasingly come to believe that…
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The Sea by John BanvilleAlfred A. Knopf, 2005 (originally Picador, 2005)
Light and place and atmosphere: weathers and seasons beautifully described. This book is full of unusual words, elegant turns of phrase. Not much action, but the past: what we remember and how memory is true or false, the things we don’t see at all or the things we see wrongly, or the things we see…
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The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, trans. Robin FultonNew Directions, 2006
These are poems to read and re-read, full of beautiful images. I like how Tranströmer writes about space, about place, whether that space is a forest or an island or the middle of Stockholm. There is so much light in these poems, and beauty, and joy and music, poems about Haydn and Schubert, poems with…
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Notes from the Midnight Driver by Jordan SonnenblickScholastic, 2006
A funny and sweet book, with a perfect smart-ass narrative voice. Alex, who is sixteen, is arrested for drunk driving: he’d planned to tell off his dad for leaving his mom, but he only makes it as far as a neighbor’s lawn. As an alternative to a trial and jail time, he gets probation—and a…
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I, City by Pavel Brycz, trans. Joshua Cohen and Markéta HofmeisterováTwisted Spoon Press, 2006
A novel in vignettes, in prose-poems: a novel told from the viewpoint of a Czech city, and so containing flashes of the lives of its inhabitants. The city in question is Most, a mining town that was “literally relocated to get to the brown coal beneath it,” as the flap-copy explains. “Sometimes I feel like…