what I’ve been reading lately:
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Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey NiffeneggerScribner (Simon and Schuster), 2009
The paragraph-long review of Her Fearful Symmetry in the New Yorker calls it a “gothic story,” and it is, which is why I was willing to forgive some sort of over-the-top plot developments. (I disagree, though, with the last line of that review: I saw a few of the big revelations coming.) But, right: the…
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The Sixteen Pleasures by Robert HellengaDelta, 1995 (Originally SoHo Press, 1994)
I wanted to love this novel, which is set in 1966-1967 and centers on a twenty-nine-year-old book conservator who goes to Florence to restore damaged books after the Arno floods, but either it’s just not the book for me or I wasn’t in the right mood. Maybe my problem is mostly structural: after starting really…
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Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon SheaPerigee (Penguin), 2008
This was a good book to read while home sick with a cold: fun, funny, and not too mentally taxing. Shea, who says in the introduction to this book that he collects words the way other people collect tangible and/or valuable things, read the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in its entirety, and…
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The Big Rumpus: A Mother’s Tale from the Trenches by Ayun HallidaySeal Press (Avalon), 2002
I don’t have kids or want kids, but this parenting memoir was a whole lot of fun. It’s episodic and loosely chronologically/thematically structured, and I would maybe have liked more of a narrative arc, but it’s well-written and very New York-y and often laugh-out-loud funny, like when Halliday describes breastfeeding on the subway, looking up…
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Conundrum by Jan MorrisFaber and Faber, 2002 (Originally 1974)
Near the end of Conundrum, Jan Morris writes about walking through Casablanca on the eve of her sex change operation as feeling like she was about to pay “a visit to a wizard,” like she was “a figure of fairy tale, about to be transformed” (119). And, as in some fairy tales, what she is…
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Codex by Lev GrossmanHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004
At the start of Codex, Edward, a twenty-five-year-old investment banker with an English degree from Yale, is about to take the first vacation of his working career. Not that he’s actually going anywhere: he’s about to transfer to a different position at the company he works for, in the London office rather than in New…
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Anastasia at Your Service by Lois LowryBantam Doubleday Dell 1992 (originally 1982)
I definitely owned this book as a kid, and was pleased to remember some parts of it as I read—including the really excellent/hilarious opening scene, in which Anastasia is so bored she’s lying on the floor acting out all the deathbed scenes she can think of (Beth from Little Women, Juliet from Romeo and Juliet,…
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Station Eleven by Emily St. John MandelAlfred A. Knopf, 2014
I read Station Eleven in three days, and over the course of those three days I was entirely engrossed in this book’s story, in this book’s world. On the day I finished it, I read while eating my breakfast, closed my office door at lunchtime to read while eating lunch, and was so caught up…
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Hotel World by Ali SmithAnchor Books, 2002 (Originally Hamish Hamilton, 2001)
Hotel World is a novel divided into six sections, each named for a grammatical tense (e.g. “present historic” or “future in the past”), and each (well, except for the last, which is broader) centered on a character with some connection to a particular hotel. As the back cover puts it: “Five people: four are living;…
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Waistcoats & Weaponry by Gail CarrigerLittle, Brown and Company, 2014
This is the third book in Gail Carriger’s “Finishing School” series, which is to say it’s a YA book set in a steampunk Victorian world with vampires and werewolves, in which the main characters are students at a school of espionage that’s housed in a dirigible. Most of the action in this one, though, takes…