what I’ve been reading lately:
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
This One Is Mine by Maria SempleLittle, Brown and Company (Hachette), 2008
In the reading group guide in the back of a different edition of this book, Maria Semple says this: “When I decided to write a novel, I had just finished rereading The House of Mirth and was in the middle of rereading Anna Karenina. I realized my favorite kind of story involves strong, singular women…
-
PopCo by Scarlett ThomasHarvest (Harcourt), 2004 (Originally Fourth Estate)
“If you ever plan to hang around train stations in the middle of the night, you should always make sure you can hear your own footsteps, and, if you are at all musical, you should try to work out which notes you make as you walk, as it stops you from being lonely, not that…
-
Smut: Stories by Alan BennettPicador (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2012 (Originally Faber and Faber, 2011)
There are two stories, or maybe you could call them novellas, in Smut: the first, which I liked better, is the longer of the pair, at 93 pages; the other is 59 pages. Both stories are, to a large extent, about secrets, or about things people think are secret that aren’t secret after all, and…