what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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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,…