what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Wind on the Moon by Eric LinklaterNew York Review of Books, 2004 (Originally published in 1944)
At the start of The Wind on the Moon, Dinah and Dorinda are watching their father, Major Palfrey, pack his trunk: he’s getting ready to go to war. He tells them to be good while he’s gone, but no one’s very sure the girls will be able to: Major Palfrey says the ring of mist
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La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams by Georges PerecTranslated by Daniel Levin BeckerMelville House, 2012
La Boutique Obscure is Georges Perec’s dream journal, a record of 124 dreams from the period from May 1968 to August 1972, complete with an index (which is well worth reading: it’s got entries like “Fictitious names (?)” and “Retracing the same path” and “Remembering and forgetting” and “Dreaming about dreaming, or about waking up,
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The Stockholm Octavo by Karen Engelmannecco (HarperCollins), 2012
“Love and connection”: this is what one Mrs. Sofia Sparrow, gaming-parlor proprietress and cartomancer, prophesies for one of her customers, Emil Larsson. Having had a vision about his fate, Mrs. Sparrow says she’ll read his cards: she practices a Tarot-like form of divination using a spread of eight cards called the Octavo, in which each
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Invisibility by Andrea Cremer and David LevithanPhilomel Books (Penguin), 2013
Stephen is invisible: he was born that way. He doesn’t know the logistics, just that he can’t see himself, and no one else has ever seen him, either. He knows his invisibility is the result of a curse, but by the time he’s almost sixteen, and his mother (who raised him) is dead, it’s just
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The Reverberator by Henry JamesMelville House, 2013
The Reverberator, which was originally published in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1888, is about Americans abroad and the increasing intrusiveness of a certain kind of gossipy newspaper. It’s also, mostly, about people: how they act, what they say, what motivates them. It’s set in Paris, but aside from a trip to Saint-Germain and a ride through
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On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra HorowitzScribner, 2013
Near the end of On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz says this about the walks she’s taken over the course of writing the book, and how they’ve changed her: “I have become, I fear, a difficult walking companion, liable to slow down and point at things. I can turn this off, but I love to have it
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The Magic Circle by Jenny DavidsonHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013
I knew Jenny Davidson’s name because she’s a professor at Columbia, which is where I went to college: I didn’t take any classes with her but I went to an informational talk she gave for people who might want to go to grad school in the humanities (which is something I decided I did not,
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My Beautiful Bus by Jacques JouetTranslated by Eric LambDalkey Archive Press, 2012
This book (which was originally published in French in 2003) is the third book I’ve read by Jouet, and my second-favorite, after Upstaged, which I read in 2011. It’s, well, about a bus trip, but not really: it’s about story and possibility and motion, and it’s pleasingly metafictional, and I probably would have liked it
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Our Tragic Universe by Scarlett ThomasHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010 (Originally Canongate, 2010)
Meg, the narrator of Our Tragic Universe, is a writer: she’s been working for years on a novel that she can’t seem to finish, or even properly start. In the meantime, she’s been ghostwriting YA books, and also writing her own genre fiction, and also reviewing pop science books for a newspaper, the latter of
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Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth HandSmall Beer Press, 2012
The ten stories in Errantry range in length from sixty pages to three pages, with most falling somewhere in the middle, and, as the subtitle puts it, they’re all “strange.” Often, the strangeness is something unexplained or not fully resolved: a man goes to Cornwall in part to repeat a trip his now-dead wife took