what I’ve been reading lately:
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The City Under the Skin by Geoff NicholsonFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
The flap copy of this book calls it a “haunting literary thriller” that’s a “deft portrait of a city in transition” and “a hymn to the joys of urban exploration.” It has moments of being all those things, but I’d say it’s mostly a thriller, which isn’t a genre I really read. Maybe that means
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A Long Way from Verona by Jane GardamEuropa Editions, 2013
I like the humor and atmosphere of A Long Way from Verona, which is basically a coming-of-age story set in England about a year into WWII. The thirteen-year-old narrator, Jessica Vye, is solitary and quirky: she starts off by saying she is “not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine”
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The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. LockhartHyperion, 2008
This YA book starts with “A Piece of Evidence,” a letter dated 2007 from one Frances Rose Landau-Banks (everyone calls her Frankie) to the headmaster of Alabaster Preparatory Academy, confessing that she “was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds” (1). Based on this, and the list that
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Mr. Gwyn and Three Times at Dawn by Alessandro BariccoTranslated by Ann GoldsteinMcSweeney’s, 2014
This book, for me, felt right on the edge of being twee in a kind of off-putting way. But it wasn’t: it was whimsically charming. It’s really two short books, the first of which is about Jasper Gwyn, a successful author who decides that he’s going to stop writing and publishing books, and who announces
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Half a Crown by Jo WaltonTor, 2008
Half a Crown was compulsively readable, the kind of book that had me staying up past my bedtime, sitting on the edge of the bathtub reading after I’d brushed my teeth, reluctant to put it down. It also had me repeatedly wailing, “This is terrible!” to my boyfriend, who read this a few months ago.
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The Guest Cat by Takashi HiraideTranslated by Eric SellandNew Directions, 2014
This quiet novella, which originally appeared in Japanese in 2001, is the story of a couple in their thirties who live in a suburban-ish neighborhood of Tokyo in the late 1980s, in a rented cottage that used to be a mansion’s guesthouse. Their cottage is next to an alley, and a neighbor across the alley
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Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell by Katherine AngelFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013 (Originally Allen Lane, 2012)
The structure and subject of and tone of Unmastered—prose in numbered sections, sex, the mix of the personal with semi-academic meditations—made me think of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, though I am not as in love with this book as I am with that one. Which isn’t to say this book is bad, just that it didn’t
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Tristano: A Novel (#11232) by Nanni BalestriniTranslated by Mike HarakisVerso, 2014
I picked up this book because of the flap copy, which starts like this: “This book is unique as no other novel can claim to be: one of 109,027,350,432,000 possible variations of the same work of fiction.” As the flap copy goes on to explain, the book “comprises ten chapters, and the fifteen pairs of
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Quick Question: New Poems by John Ashberyecco (HarperCollins), 2012
I have a hard time with John Ashbery’s poems, but I keep trying anyway. I think the problem is that I like to read poems that are more recognizably set in this world; I like poems that are “about” everyday life but told in a way that focuses on luminous detail, or that somehow makes
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Pietr the Latvian by Georges SimenonTranslated by David Bellos, 2013
Pietr the Latvian, which was originally published in serial form in French in 1930, is the first of Georges Simenon’s novels featuring Detective Chief Inspector Maigret, and is the first of Simenon’s novels that I’ve read. It’s no cosy mystery: it’s a gritty police procedural (albeit light on procedure) that moves back and forth between