Month: September 2007
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The Nature of Monsters by Clare ClarkHarcourt, 2007
I read a post about The Nature of Monsters over at A Work in Progress a few months ago, and that description of the bookseller’s shop that Danielle quotes was enough to make me want to read it. I like how gripping the story is, and the boldness of its heroine, and of course I…
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Rebel Angels by Libba BrayDelacorte Press, 2005
So delightful: plot twists and suspicions confirmed and suspense and danger, but also Christmas balls and gaslit London streets and desire. I like how Bray plays with the idea of illusion and what it means or how it works; I like emphasis on choice, choosing well, the “I choose this” of the first book and…
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Middlesex by Jeffrey EugenidesFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
Clever & sprawling; I loved all the detail and sense of place (Smyrna, Detroit) and cultural/familial history, plus all the Homeric turns of phrase (someone drives a “wine-dark Buick”).
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A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba BrayDelacorte Press, 2003
Delicious: silk and velvet and mystery, magic and power and desire. Victorian boarding school! Transgressiveness! I picked this book up at breakfast this morning and just kept reading, and now am all impatient to start the sequel.
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The Waves by Virginia WoolfHarvest Books, 1978 (originally Hogarth Press, 1931)
A book to read slowly, in sips. One image, then the next, then the next: how jarring it is at the start, to step into one character’s thoughts, then another’s, then another’s. The tension between aloneness and connection, or the balance. How time passes. The poetry of place: the sea, the garden, St. Paul’s with…