Category: Fiction
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Witch Grass by Raymond QueneauTranslated and with an Introduction by Barbara WrightNew York Review Books, 2003(Originally published in French by Librairie Gallimard, 1933)
When I saw Carol’s post about NYRB Reading Week, hosted by The Literary Stew and Coffeespoons, I thought it might be a good time to read Witch Grass, which is a New York Review Book that also happens to be on my languishing TBR Challenge list. The price-sticker on the back of my copy of…
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Bitter in the Mouth by Monique TruongRandom House, 2010
I read and loved Monique Truong’s first novel, The Book of Salt, back in 2004, so I was excited to hear that she had a new novel out this year. The narrator of this one, Linda Hammerick, is a quirky person from a quirky family, which could be annoying but which I found pretty charming.…
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Norwegian Wood by Haruki MurakamiTranslated by Jay RubinVintage Books, 2000
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.…
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The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey NiffeneggerHarcourt, 2004 (Originally MacAdam/Cage, 2003)
It’s been a while since I picked up any of the books I picked for Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge—I’ve only read three books from my list so far, and it’s already August! But after reading Fire and Hemlock I was in the mood for another novel, specifically another novel with a quirky romance…
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Between Books/Reading Short Stories
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…
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To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie WillisBantam Spectra, 1998
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…
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Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Phillippe ToussaintTranslated by John LambertDalkey Archive Press, 2010
“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…
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The Bride’s Farewell by Meg RosoffViking (Penguin), 2009
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…
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The Other City by Michal AjvazTranslated by Gerald TurnerDalkey Archive Press, 2009
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.…
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The Last Rendezvous by Anne PlantagenetTranslated by Willard WoodOther Press, 2009
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,…