what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Magician’s Land by Lev GrossmanViking Penguin, 2014
One of the things I like most about The Magicians and The Magician’s Land is the way they play with the tropes of myth and fantasy and quest narratives, the way that the quests in those books are never entirely straightforward, the way that a world in which magic exists is not necessarily a world
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Farthing by Jo WaltonTor, 2006
Farthing is a satisfying English-country-house murder-mystery set in an alternate 1949 in which England made peace with Hitler in 1941, and now exists across the Channel from the Third Reich. The book alternates, chapter by chapter, between the first-person narrative of Lucy Kahn, at whose parents’ house the murder takes place, and a third-person narrative
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Anastasia Krupnik by Lois LowryYearling, 1993 (Originally Houghton Mifflin, 1979)
I think I read this book as a kid—I certainly owned a copy of one of the later books in the series, and pieces of this one felt familiar—but it wasn’t one of my favorites, and I’m not sure why. Anastasia Krupnik is ten, and hilarious. She’s an only child, living with her English-professor/poet dad
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City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi by William DalrymplePenguin, 2003 (Originally HarperCollins, 1993)
One thing about City of Djinns, which is about a year that William Dalrymple spent in Delhi with his wife in his twenties, is that it suffers for me a bit by comparison to Tamara Shopsin’s wonderful Mumbai New York Scranton, which I read in February and loved. It’s not a fair comparison, really: both
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Painted Cities by Alexai Galaviz-BudziszewskiMcSweeney’s, 2014
This collection of linked stories set in the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen in the ’70s and ’80s does a great job of capturing a sense of place. The narrator of the first story puts it like this: “I remember all this vividly, our summer nights, but really, all I can recall is what it felt
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She Is Not Invisible by Marcus SedgwickRoaring Brook Press, 2013 (Originally Indigo, 2013)
“One final time I told myself I wasn’t abducting my little brother”: this is the start of She Is Not Invisible, and it certainly made me want to keep reading. The narrator is Laureth Peak, who’s sixteen; her brother, Benjamin, is seven. They’re at the airport, about to check in for a flight from London
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Plagued by the Nightingale by Kay BoyleVirago Modern Classics, 1981
In her preface to this reprint of her first novel, which was originally published in 1930, Kay Boyle writes that “the meaning of the book may perhaps be that there is always in life the necessity to choose,” which isn’t my favorite moral: I mean, yes, but sometimes the choice you get to make is
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Villa Bunker by Sébastien BrebelTranslated by Andrew WilsonDalkey Archive Press, 2013
Villa Bunker, a novella made of 133 numbered sections (ranging in length from a sentence to several pages each) is weird and interesting and pretty great to have read right after Martha Ronk’s Transfer of Qualities—I felt there were moments when these two books complemented one another interestingly. Ronk’s book was concerned, in large part,
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Transfer of Qualities by Martha RonkOmnidawn Publishing, 2013
This book takes its title from a phrase from Henry James, which features as the book’s epigraph: James wrote, in The Sacred Fount, about “the liaison that betrays itself by the transfer of qualities” from one person to another. Ronk writes about this idea more broadly, applying it to things as well as people: what
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Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju ColeRandom House, 2014
If you’re looking for a novel that’s plot-driven or character driven, Every Day Is for the Thief (which was originally published in Nigeria in 2007, by Cassava Republic Press) is probably not the book for you. This is an episodic novel, a novel of vignettes and moments, a novel where the city of Lagos (which