what I’ve been reading lately:
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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.
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Tipping the Velvet by Sarah WatersVirago Press, 2003 (originally 1998)
Engrossing from the first sentence, a story to get lost in. London theatres, London streets, love and cruelty. Music halls and girls in suits, rent boys turning tricks in parks and alleyways, all of it a delight to read.
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Rebecca Letters by Laynie BrowneKelsey St. Press, 1997
Time and seasons and light and ritual: boiling water, bundling warm against the cold. “Armlet” seems like “amulet”: little protections, memories.
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The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia WoolfFrank Hallman, 1975
An elegant little book of essays (an edition of 750 was printed by The Stinehour Press): the physical object, well-designed text on expensive paper, and, of course, Woolf’s prose. The essays were written in the early 1930s for Good Housekeeping, and they’re about modernity, democracy, Englishness, the present of London and the ever-present past, but