what I’ve been reading lately:
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Mr. Kiss and Tell by Rob Thomas and Jennifer GrahamVintage (Random House), 2015
This was a really good read for a Sunday when I was home sick with a cold/fever: it was good enough that I didn’t even feel too bad about not being able to partake in my usual Sunday evening activity (rock climbing). I think it’s better-written than the previous Veronica Mars book (The Thousand Dollar…
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The 13 Clocks by James ThurberThe New York Review of Books, 2008 (Originally 1950)
Coffin Castle, the setting of this fairy-tale-like book, is not a happy place: it’s cold, and the thirteen clocks of the book’s title have all stopped, and the Duke who lives there with his “niece” (she’s not really his niece: she’s a princess he stole away from her family when she was a baby) is…
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The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas and Jennifer GrahamVintage (Random House), 2014
Last week the Fitbit Charge HR my boyfriend got me for Christmas finally arrived, and I’ve been loving it. It tells me how long I slept and how restless or not I was. If I go for a run, I can see a graph of my heart rate. It tells me how many flights of…
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Oranges by John McPheeFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988 (Originally 1967)
The seven sections of Oranges don’t feel like they necessarily have to be in the order they’re in, which is maybe the only thing I didn’t like about this book: it sometimes felt a little disjointed. Still, this was a really interesting read and I kept telling my boyfriend various things I was learning about…
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Ibid: A Life by Mark DunnMethuen, 2005 (Originally MacAdam/Cage, 2004)
In the acknowledgments at the end of Ibid: A Life (A Novel in Footnotes), Mark Dunn thanks his publisher “for allowing this most recent, brazen attempt at redefining the American novel,” and his readers for “giving [him] the chance to convince [them] that history can be more than dry facts and dates. And that naughty…
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An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris by Georges PerecTranslated by Marc LowenthalWakefield Press, 2010
In October 1974, Georges Perec spent many hours over the course of three days (a Friday/Saturday/Sunday) sitting in cafés on the place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. This book, which was originally published in French in 1975, is the result. It’s divided into days, and into numbered sections within each day. Each day starts with the date,…
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Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995 by Bill WattersonAndrews McMeel Publishing, 2001
My boyfriend checked this book, which is a catalog that accompanied a 2001/2002 Bill Watterson show at The Ohio State University Cartoon Research Library, out of the library and thought it’d be fun to read together. I think he was a little surprised that I didn’t have a strong connection to Calvin and Hobbes from…
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Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy FinchUgly Duckling Presse, 2010
I bought a copy of Ten Walks/Two Talks five years ago, after seeing the authors do a reading from it, but hadn’t actually read the whole book until now, despite the fact that I really like walking, New York, art that involves walking, and art that involves constraints, which basically guaranteed I would really like…
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Tono-Bungay by H.G. WellsEveryman, 1994 (Originally Macmillan, 1909)
I read Tono-Bungay for a class in college in 2001, and apparently liked it enough at the time to keep my copy of it, but when I started re-reading it, I didn’t really remember anything about it. As John Hammond says in his introduction to the book, it’s the story of “a pragmatic narrator divided…