what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Eyre Affair by Jasper FfordePenguin Books, 2003 (Originally Hodder and Stoughton, 2001)
In 1985 in the alternate England in which The Eyre Affair takes place, time travel is possible, the Crimean War has been going on for 131 years, Wales is independent, and classic English literature is a very big deal. Our heroine, Thursday Next, is a LiteraTec (Literary Detective): a special agent whose department investigates manuscript
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Curtsies & Conspiracies by Gail CarrigerLittle, Brown and Company (Hachette), 2013
I enjoyed this book more than the first in this series, maybe just because I was more in the mood for it, or maybe because the setting and characters are largely already established, which lets things flow more smoothly. The book opens with an interruption: fifteen-year-old Sophronia Temminick and her best friend, Dimity, both students
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Mumbai New York Scranton by Tamara ShopsinScribner (Simon & Schuster), 2013
This book starts with an arrival in a place far from home and ends with a homecoming of sorts, a return to a familiar place and family and a feeling of normalcy, though it isn’t the book’s opening trip to India that Shopsin’s returning from. (The three cities of the book’s title are indeed visited
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Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker by Susan HoweNew Directions, 2013
I. I’ve never seen any of Chris Marker’s films, but this book made me want to. (You can watch La Jetée online, or it’s available on DVD, along with Marker’s 1982 film, Sans Soleil.) (I’ve never read Moby-Dick, either, and this book made me want to do that as well.) II. Howe’s book is mostly
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A Death in the Small Hours by Charles FinchMinotaur Books, 2012
Near the start of this book, Charles Lenox, detective turned politician, gets a letter from his late mother’s cousin (who he knows as Uncle Frederick) asking him to come visit him at his country estate. Charles isn’t planning to go, but then he’s invited to give the opening speech for the upcoming session of Parliament,
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Whose Body? by Dorothy L. SayersHarperPerennial, 1993 (Originally Boni & Liveright, 1923)
Whose Body? is the first of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, and the first Dorothy L. Sayers book I’ve read: I suspect I will read more. Lord Peter Wimsey is an aristocrat/amateur detective who collects rare books: when this novel opens he’s on his way to a book sale but gets sidetracked when he hears
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Glaciers by Alexis M. SmithTin House Books, 2012
“Isabel often thinks of Amsterdam, though she has never been there, and probably never will go”: this is the first sentence of Glaciers, and pretty representative of the whole book’s tone: it’s a story about longing, partly for romance and connection, partly for the past (real or imagined), partly for a life rooted in and
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The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett ThomasMariner Books, 2010 (Originally 2006)
Ariel Manto is in the slightly weird position of being a PhD student without anyone to supervise her work: she’s writing a thesis on thought experiments, but her supervisor, who is one of the few people in the world to have done research on Thomas E. Lumas, a (fictional) nineteenth-century writer who is also one
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Green Is for World by Juliana LeslieCoffee House Press, 2012
I picked this book up at the library based mostly on the cover art (a collage by the author) and the back cover blurbs, which talk about how these poems are, in the words of Joshua Marie Wilkinson, “trafficking in the near-spoken, the peculiar particulars, and in the unseen textures of lived experience.” The twenty-three