what I’ve been reading lately:
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Starlings by Jo WaltonTachyon, 2018
When I picked up Starlings I thought it was a collection of short stories, but it isn’t, not quite. For one thing, it also includes poems and a short play. And as Walton puts it in her introduction, the short fiction here is itself varied: there are short stories but also “extended jokes,” exercises/experiments, first
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The Chosen Ones by Scarlett ThomasSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2018(Originally Canongate, 2018)
In Dragon’s Green, the first book in her Worldquake middle-grade fantasy sequence, Scarlett Thomas introduced us to Effie Truelove, a young True Hero just discovering her magical abilities, and to her also-magical friends/classmates (Lexy, Maximilian, Raven, and Wolf), and to the shape of the world in which they live, where a lot of magical power
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Border Districts: A Fiction by Gerald MurnaneFarrar, Straus and Giroux (2018)Originally published by Giramondo Publishing, 2017
Border Districts is one of those books that I admire, even though I didn’t love it: it feels well-constructed, and there’s a lot I appreciate about Murnane’s style, even as I feel like I’m maybe not the ideal reader for this book. It’s very much in its narrator’s head—if you’re looking for something plot-driven, look
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Animals Eat Each Other by Elle NashDzanc Books, 2018
Animals Eat Each Other is short and dark and intense, the kind of book it was easy to read in a day, even though being immersed in its narrator’s world made me feel a little queasy. It’s a story about obsession and insecurity and need and emptiness, and if you’re bothered by the idea of
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These Possible Lives by Fleur JaeggyTranslated by Minna Zallman ProctorNew Directions, 2017
This short book (it’s only sixty pages) consists of three biographical essays about writers: there’s one about Thomas De Quincey, one about John Keats, and one about Marcel Schwob. I was somewhat familiar with Keats before reading this, a bit less familiar with De Quincey (or TDQ, as he’s referred to in the book), and
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The Penderwicks at Last by Jeanne BirdsallAlfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2018
I’ve been loving Jeanne Birdsall’s books about the Penderwick siblings since I read the first one back in 2008, and this finale to the series was as delightful as I had hoped it would be. In The Penderwicks at Last, the focus is mainly on Lydia, the youngest Penderwick, who is now eleven: this makes
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The Game by Diana Wynne JonesHarperCollins Children’s Books, 2008(Originally Firebird, 2007)
I like Diana Wynne Jones a whole lot, in general: I feel like her books are a reliable blend of magic, inventiveness, well-developed characters, humor, heart, and satisfying plots. The Game, alas, feels lacking in terms of characters (and therefore heart), and the plot feels a little formulaic. But even though I feel like this
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Calypso by David SedarisLittle, Brown and Company, 2018
I’d read some of the twenty-one pieces in Calypso before, since some of them appeared in The New Yorker, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of this book at all: I feel like a David Sedaris essay generally stands up to a re-read. A back cover blurb from Marion Winik at Newsday captures the appeal
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Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen MylesOR Books, 2010
(Note: though Eileen Myles used the pronoun “she” at the time this book was written, they now use the singular “they,” so that’s what I’m using here.) Near the end of Inferno (which is split into three sections, each one loosely corresponding to a section of Dante’s Divine Comedy), Eileen Myles writes that “poetry is
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Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-BoseFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017
I found some of the fourteen essays in this collection more compelling than others, but, overall, I like Chew-Bose’s voice and the way she writes about memory/family/personal history and larger issues like race and the experience of being a first-generation North American. I liked “Summer Pictures,” about going to the movies in the summertime, a