what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie KondoTranslated by Cathy HiranoTen Speed Press, 2014
This book (which was originally published in Japan in 2011) came out in the US in 2014, and I’ve been meaning to read it since then—prompted partly by this NY Times piece, and then by friends who read it before I did. The main idea of the book appears on the first page: the idea
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The Diamond Age by Neal StephensonSpectra (Bantam), 2008 (Originally 1995)
Two things that are true: 1) I don’t read that much SF. 2) When I do, I sometimes get a little impatient with world-building. I don’t know if there’s a cause/effect relationship between those two things, and if there is, I don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect, but I did
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The Wander Society by Keri SmithPenguin Books, 2016
In some ways, I feel like I’m the ideal audience for this book: I’ve read Keri Smith’s blog for years and I like her art, and I like walking, and I like art about walking. Five years ago I took part in a learning experience called the Walk Study Training Course, which involved reading about
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The Last Bogler by Catherine JinksHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016
This book is the third in a middle-grade historical fiction/fantasy trilogy, and I found it a pleasing conclusion to the story of Alfred Bunce, who kills monsters (bogles) for a living, and his various young friends/apprentices. Each book focuses on a different one of the kids, and at the center of this one is Ned
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Slade House by David MitchellRandom House, 2015
If I’d known beforehand that Slade House is a kind of companion to The Bone Clocks (which I haven’t read—James Wood’s New Yorker piece about it made me unsure if I wanted to), I’m not sure I would have picked it up. But I think it works as a standalone piece, and, I don’t know,
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All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane AndersTor, 2016
All the Birds in the Sky is the kind of crossover genre book, like, say, Lev Grossman’s Magicians books, that I can really get into. It’s smart and funny, and self-consciously places itself in/plays with genre conventions (quest narratives, saving-the-world stories, stories of outcast geniuses) and other literary conventions (star-crossed lovers, a sort of fairy-tale
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The Wright 3 by Blue BalliettScholastic, 2007 (Originally 2006)
Lately I seem to be alternating between reading The New Yorker and reading middle-grade fiction, which is pretty satisfying. (The April 11th issue of The New Yorker was amazing! It had zero long articles about politics or economics, but had long articles about: an Icelandic artist, a walk in the Alps, a motel owner/voyeur, and
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A Plague of Bogles by Catherine JinksHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015
This is the sequel to How to Catch a Bogle, and like that book, it’s middle grade historical-fiction/fantasy: Victorian London, with child-eating monsters called bogles. Birdie McAdam was the child protagonist of that book, and she’s still present in this one, but now her acquaintance Jem Barbary takes center stage: Birdie is no longer an
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The Global Soul by Pico IyerVintage, 2001 (Originally Knopf, 2000)
This was a slow read for me, and mostly not because I was savoring it. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t in the right mood, or maybe this just isn’t the book for me: maybe I wanted a travel book more than I wanted a book about globalization and multiculturalism, or maybe the ways things
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Code Name Verity by Elizabeth WeinDisney-Hyperion, 2012
Code Name Verity is one of those books I had sort of put off reading, and I’m not sure why. Because there was a lot of hype about it? Because historical fiction set in WWII isn’t necessarily my thing (with the exception of Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis)? I don’t know: it never