what I’ve been reading lately:
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Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
“There is no place in my life for sentimentality,” Taylor Markham thinks, near the start of Jellicoe Road. It seems true when she says it: she’s 17 and has been at the Jellicoe School for years, and now she’s “the one-in-charge” in the Territory Wars that happen for six weeks, in which students from her…
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The Uses of Literature by Italo CalvinoTranslated by Patrick Creagh
I like Italo Calvino’s fiction a lot, and I’m glad I read this book of essays, but I’m definitely not this book’s ideal reader: it’s a mix of big-picture literary/philosophical/political thought and close literary analysis of works/authors I’m (mostly) not that familiar with (e.g. Orlando Furioso or The Betrothed or anything by Charles Fourier). That…
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Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken
At the start of Black Hearts in Battersea, Simon, who was an endearing supporting character in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, has just arrived in London, where he’s planning to attend art school. He’s meant to live with Dr. Field, a minor character from the last book (who also paints, and who recognized Simon’s artistic…
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The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken
I can’t remember if I read The Wolves of Willoughby Chase when I was a kid or not, but when I bought a copy of Black Hearts in Battersea in a used bookstore on my Christmas vacation, I figured I’d better read/re-read this book before starting that one: they’re set in the same world, though…
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Crudo by Olivia Laing
Near the end of Crudo, the book’s protagonist, Kathy, is having a conversation about plagiarism, which doesn’t concern her, and we get this: “You take what you find, it’s all material, I mean what is art if it’s not plagiarising the world?” (121). Which is a pretty good thesis statement for the novel as a…
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Bilgewater by Jane Gardam
Early in Jane Gardam’s 1977 novel, Bilgewater, Marigold Daisy Green describes herself as a “strange, thick-set, hopeless adolescent, friendless and given to taking long idle walks by the sea” (11). She’s good at chess and math, started reading quite late (but loved being read to, and quotes Keats and Chaucer and Coleman and Blake), is…
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The Lonely City by Olivia LaingPicador, 2016
The Lonely City (whose subtitle is “Adventures in the Art of Being Alone”) is a blend of the personal and the art-historical, though a bit heavier on the latter. Laing writes about how she had been planning to move to New York City from England to be with a man who then changed his mind;…
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Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) by Mindy KalingThree Rivers Press (Crown/Random House), 2011
I haven’t watched The Office or The Mindy Project, and I don’t read many celebrity memoirs in general, but I found a copy of this book somewhere at some point (a Little Free Library? a giveaway pile at work? I don’t even remember) and thought it might be a good fun/light read. Which it was,…
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How to be both by Ali SmithAnchor Books (Penguin Random House), 2015Originally Hamish Hamilton, 2014
My reading experience of How to be both felt slower and more scattered than I would like—I started it while getting ready to move, and finished it after moving, and there was a lot of packing and unpacking boxes and generally being stressed in between—but it’s Ali Smith, and I pretty much always think she’s…