what I’ve been reading lately:
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Between the Acts by Virginia WoolfHogarth Press Uniform Edition, 1953 (originally 1941)
“Scraps and fragments,” swallows and starlings, bits of Shakespeare, bits of Byron, bits of Keats. Little pieces of literature and history that surface, little pieces of emotion, of meaning. The shifts in perspective, what is spoken and what is felt. Each person playing a role, whether aware of it or not; art and connection and…
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Anonymous: Enigmatic Images from Unknown Photographers by Robert Flynn JohnsonThames & Hudson, 2005 (originally 2004)
Light and water, the Eiffel Tower being built, Cliff House before the fire. So much detail: a carved ivory elephant resting on piano keys, narrow wooden bridges, the light in rooms across oceans. This book is gorgeous: a collection of well-chosen images, pictures to make you pause. (And to make you want to rummage through…
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Swallows and Amazons by Arthur RansomeDavid R. Godine, 1985 (14th printing, 2005), originally Jonathan Cape, 1930
Megan and I read this book aloud to one another over the course of several months, and oh, it was the perfect book for reading aloud. A family on summer holiday, the children allowed to go sailing and camping on their own: all the details of their camp, the tents and the teakettle, and all…
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Weight by Jeanette WintersonCanongate, 2005
The myth of Atlas, re-told. Weight & destiny & choice: how things seem inevitable, but what if they’re not?
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Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette WintersonHarcourt, 2004 (originally Fourth Estate, 2004)
A book full of wind and sea and salt. Silver, an orphan, is apprenticed to a lighthousekeeper to learn the trade, but of course, this being Jeanette Winterson, that’s only one of this book’s many stories. (There are always many stories, stories to hear and stories to tell.) There’s the story of Babel Dark, or…
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Wet Magic by E. NesbitSeaStar Books, 2001 (originally T. Werner Laurie, 1913)
I love E. Nesbit and this book is especially lovely: four children go to the seaside for a summer holiday and learn, on the way there, that a mermaid has been sighted. This is very exciting news, especially for Francis, the eldest, who has never seen the sea before but is entranced by a print…
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Budapest by Chico BuarqueTranslated by Alison EntrekinGrove Press, 2004
Ways of displacing the self, ways of finding the self: writing words for other people (this novel’s protagonist is an “anonymous author”), walking through an unknown city, learning to speak a new launguage, falling in love.
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The Changing Metropolis: Earliest photographs of London 1839-1879 by Gavin StampViking, 1984
Calotypes, daguerrotypes, old city streets and buildings just the same or long disappeared. The lettering on the advertisements: “Maravilla cocoa,” “India rubber & vulcanite works,” a sign for a wigmaker, est. 1760. Gaslights and the working waterfront, bridges being built across the Thames. Somerset house, the basement at the water’s very edge. The dome of…
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London: A History by A.N. WilsonRandom House (Modern Library), 2004
A fine brief overview of London history, though lacking in the kind of detailed and personal description that I enjoy in city-books like H.V. Morton’s. Also, I rather disagree with Mr. Wilson on the subject of modern and contemporary art, so at the end of the book, I was left rolling my eyes at his…
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Fingersmith by Sarah WatersVirago Press, 2004 (originally 2002)
As impossible to put down as Tipping the Velvet was, a story of petty thieves, scheming to get rich, plot twists and the question of who knows what, and when. And London, always London: the narrow streets of Southwark, the dome of St Paul’s and the polluted Thames.