what I’ve been reading lately:
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Knowing the East by Paul ClaudelTranslated by James LawlerPrinceton University Press, 2004
Winged details: pinecones like rose petals, the curves of a pagoda’s roof, yellow soil, narrow streets. I love the poem on cities: London, Boston, New York in 1896 but it could almost be now. The trouble is how to capture joy, ideas: sometimes it works, sometimes it’s all overblown, exclamation points and rhetorical form. But…
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Lost in the Forest by Sue MillerKnopf, 2005
The world that Sue Miller creates in Lost in the Forest is a rich one, full of detail. Reading this novel, you can nearly see the slant of light over Napa Valley’s vineyards, the sidewalks and shop windows of a town that’s newly a tourist attraction. As family dramas unfold, Miller almost always perfectly captures…
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Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir by Mark DotyHarperCollins, 1996
Amazing book, filled with grief and love and beauty and joy and Doty’s distinctive gorgeous prose, way of seeing, eye for detail. On the back cover, a blurb from Michael Cunningham: “During the time I was reading Heaven’s Coast I found myself wanting to call everyone I knew and say, ‘Stop whatever you’re doing and…
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A Key into the Language of America by Rosmarie WaldropNew Directions, 1994
“Conimicut, Matunuck, Meshanticut”: so starts one of the lists of Rhode Island place-names in the introduction to this book. I grew up in Rhode Island; until I was five, we lived on Shawomet Avenue, within walking distance of Conimicut Point. These words have always been part of my vocabulary: Conanicut Island, Pawtucket, Chepachet. Waldrop writes…
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Grammar is a Sweet, Gentle Song by Erik OrsennaTranslated by Moishe BlackGeorge Braziller, 2004
A quick and charming fable about the value of words, and how we should use them. The whimsy of the details (especially near the end!) makes up for any overdone sentimentality or didacticism.
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The Grand Tour by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline StevermerHarcourt, 2004
I’d been waiting for months for the library to acquire this book. It’s the sequel to Sorcery & Cecelia, an epistolary novel that I absolutely loved. These books are a blend of historical fiction (set in 1817) and fantasy (magic/wizardry in the British tradition), and they’re clever and exciting and oh, wonderful. In this one,…
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The Unbearable Heart by Kimiko HahnKaya Production, 1995
Details like: the smell of garlic and how it lingers, how bedtime stories start in Japanese. Repitition of lines as one way to fragment the text, words inserted another, quotations (Barthes, Flaubert, Said) another still. Splitting the text open, splitting open sorrow: this is a book of elegies for a dead mother, and they are…
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A Reading Diary by Alberto ManguelFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004
A year in books, books re-read, musings on why certain stories resonate, theories on literature, on authors, on characters, wide-ranging references and quotations, lists, personal details of day-to-day living (travel, the weather, Manguel’s home in France). This book is a lovely hodge-podge of all of these things, and it makes me want to go read…
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I Can’t Tell You by Hillary FrankHoughton Mifflin, 2004
I have a thing for epistolary novels, and I liked the premise of this one: a college kid, after a fight with his best friend, decides he should avoid fucking up friendships by simply not speaking. He writes notes, instead, and that’s what this book is made up of: notes, e-mails, one-sided conversations in which…
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The Good People of New York by Thisbe NissenKnopf, 2001
Thisbe Nissen writes well: there are moments in this book that are perfect: descriptions, sentences, thoughts. Her characters are quirky and smart, especially Miranda, but their stories are less compelling than they could be. Something in the tone of this book struck me as off, or off-putting: it’s narrated in a third-person omniscient style, and…