Category: Fiction

Picking a book to bring along on vacation—especially a vacation where I was traveling alone and traveling light—was tricky: I was busy making a packing list and rolling up my clothes to make them fit in my backpack, and I wasn’t finding the process very conducive to reflecting on what I wanted to read next.…

I’m currently catching up on back issues of The New Yorker—I’m not quite sure how I got behind: I used to always be caught up! I used to see people reading old issues on the train and think, “really, you’re just reading that now?” But it’s OK: I don’t feel (too) bad about the fact…

November 15, 1940: Coventry Cathedral is full of smoke and rubble, and Ned Henry is looking for the bishop’s bird stump, which is a Victorian vase, which he needs to find because Lady Schrapnell, who is rebuilding the cathedral in time for the 125th anniversary of its destruction, wants to know exactly what was in…

“Every time I travel,” this book starts, “I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded…

I’d read and liked three of Meg Rosoff’s books (and particularly liked two of them—What I Was and How I Live Now), so when I read Emma Carbone’s review on one of the NYPL blogs of The Bride’s Farewell, I knew I’d want to read it eventually. But I wasn’t sure I’d like it: after…

The Other City is strange and wonderful, a book about seeing, a book about reading. It’s a slim novel, but one to read slowly: it’s full of images that I wanted to linger over. It starts normally enough: a winter day, an antiquarian bookshop, snow starting to fall outside, the smell and texture of paper.…

The flap copy calls this a “Romantic novel in every sense of the word,” which it is: it’s a romance, a love story, and also a story set in the Romantic era, with protagonists who are part of the French Romantic literary/musical/dramatic scene. It’s the story of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, first an actress, then a poet,…

Earlier this month I read and really enjoyed Blackout, Connie Willis’s latest book, so I knew I wanted to go back and read this one, which is set in the same world. It’s Oxford in 2054 and the history department, which uses time travel to observe the past, is at the center of this story.…

The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag picks up a little more than a month after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie leaves off, so it was good to read them consecutively. It’s summer in Bishop’s Lacey, the little village outside of which eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce lives with her father and two…