what I’ve been reading lately:
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Love Is the Higher Law by David LevithanBorzoi (Alfred A. Knopf), 2009
I’d been sort of resistant to reading Love Is the Higher Law, because as the cover photo of the Tribute in Light makes clear, it’s David Levithan’s “9/11 book,” and I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a 9/11 book. But, well, it’s David Levithan, and I love how he writes, and I love how…
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Goings On About Town: Photographs for the New Yorker by Sylvia PlachyAperture/The New Yorker, 2007
This book of photographs, with a foreword by Mark Singer and an afterword by Elisabeth Biondi, consists of eighty pictures that were taken while Plachy was the photographer for The New Yorker‘s “Goings On About Town” section, plus one that wasn’t. The pictures are a mix of color and black & white, and are mostly…
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My Body Is a Book of Rules by Elissa WashutaRed Hen Press, 2014
My Body Is a Book of Rules is a memoir in essay form, but these essays aren’t just straight essays: there’s one (A Cascade Autobiography) that’s broken into sections and interspersed with other pieces; another is an academic paper about the use of the phrase “hooking up” by college-aged men and women, annotated after the…
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Railsea by China MiévilleDel Rey, 2013 (Originally 2012)
The style of Railsea, the language and syntax, won me over at the start. Plot-wise, Miéville is playing with Moby-Dick crossed with Treasure Island, with some nods to Robinson Crusoe and the Odyssey, but weird, because this is China Miéville. Our protagonist is Sham, or, really, Shamus Yes ap Soorap, and when the book opens…
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Eleanor & Park by Rainbow RowellSt. Martin’s Griffin, 2013
I liked Eleanor & Park, but not nearly as much as other people seem to have liked it, and I’m not sure why. It’s a YA love story set in Omaha in 1986, in which the two “star-crossed sixteen-year-olds,” as the flap-copy puts it, meet on the school bus and fall for each other without…
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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.…