what I’ve been reading lately:
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Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy KnisleyFirst Second, 2013
I read Relish in the middle of a week-long vacation that started with amazing food in New Orleans (still-warm house-made potato chips! fried oyster slider! maple sriracha donut with candied thyme! lamb neck and beet green curry! condensed-milk cake with chicory ice cream and Meyer lemon sauce!) and proceeded to less-than-amazing food on Grand Cayman
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Three Parts Dead by Max GladstoneTor, 2012
Three Parts Dead is set in a world where gods exist, and where the power of a god can power a city. That’s literal in the case of Alt Coulumb, where the power of the fire-god Kos fuels the steam furnaces that heat the city and make its trains run. In this world, gods gain
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Elegy Owed by Bob HicokCopper Canyon Press, 2013
I like the humor and matter-of-fact tone of a lot of the sixty-five poems in this book, like the great simile below, which comes from “How we came to live where we live”: as when you stand before a painting in a museum for as long as you hope says something good about you, even
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Witch Week by Diana Wynne Jones in The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume II (HarperCollins), 2007 (originally 2001)
Witch Week was published in 1982 and is therefore the third, in publication order, of the Chrestomanci books, but it’s the fourth one presented in the two volume set of The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, and that set determined my reading order of the books. Actually, you could read Witch Week on its own, but it
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The Magicians of Caprona by Diana Wynne JonesBeech Tree Books (William Morrow & Co.), 1999 (Originally Macmillan, 1980)
This book is set in the same world as Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, except instead of taking place in a magical version of England, it’s in a magical version of Italy. Caprona, where the action takes place, is known for the quality of the magic spells it produces and sells. The
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The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1, by Diana Wynne JonesEos (HarperCollins), 2007 (originally 2001)
This volume contains two separate books, Charmed Life, which I read multiple times as a kid, and The Lives of Christopher Chant, which I read for the first time about six years ago. Last month, I was at an amazing used book sale in my neighborhood and found a copy of another book in the
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An Old Betrayal by Charles FinchMinotaur Books, 2013
In this mystery, set in London in 1875, Charles Lenox, member of Parliament, is yet again drawn back to detective work: at the start of the book his former protégé, Lord Dallington, asks him to go to a meeting with a potential client in his stead. (Dallington is too ill to go himself, and the
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The Daylight Gate by Jeanette WintersonGrove Press, 2013 (Originally Arrow Books/Hammer, 2012)
The Daylight Gate, which uses the basic circumstances of a 1612 witch trial in Lancashire as its starting point (“but with necessary speculations and inventions,” as Winterson puts it in the introduction) is much more bleak and gruesome than I tend to like my fiction. There are rapes; there is torture; there is a severed
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Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil GaimanHarper, 2009 (Originally Bloomsbury, 2008)
My boyfriend gave me a copy of this book for my birthday last year, but my birthday’s in late April and this is definitely a wintry book, or maybe a winter-on-the-edge-of-spring book, so it took us a while to pick it up. We read this aloud to each other, alternating chapters, on the evening of
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The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press (Penguin Random House), 2014
The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches is the sixth mystery by Alan Bradley featuring Flavia de Luce, a precocious eleven-year-old fond of chemistry and crime-solving, but it’s a bit less of a mystery than the others. There is a death, practically at the start of the book (a stranger gives Flavia a message to pass