what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Patagonian Hare by Claude LanzmannTranslated by Frank Wynne Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012(English translation originally Atlantic Books, 2012)
Claude Lanzmann knows how to get a reader’s attention: the first sentence of the first chapter of his memoir (originally published in French in 2009) is this: “The guillotine – more generally, capital punishment and the various methods of meting out death – has been the abiding obsession of my life” (1). He goes on
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Etiquette & Espionage by Gail CarrigerLittle, Brown and Company (Hachette), 2013
Having abandoned my TBR Double Dog Dare plans of reading from my own shelves until April 1st by checking out Speaking from Among the Bones from the library, I couldn’t resist checking out Etiquette & Espionage, too. It might not have been the right book at the right time for me, though: reading this particular
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Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press (Random House), 2013
Oops, so much for sticking to the TBR Double Dog Dare until April 1st. I heard that there was a new Flavia de Luce mystery out, and promptly put a hold on it at the library, expecting it might take a while to get to me. But it didn’t, and once I got the email
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Un Lun Dun by China MiévillePan Books, 2011 (Originally Macmillan, 2007)
Un Lun Dun seems, at first, like it’s going to be one of those standard YA fantasy stories where a young person is somehow chosen to learn about another world whose existence he or she hadn’t ever imagined And, you know how it goes, that other world is in peril, and the chosen one has
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Cryptonomicon by Neal StephensonAvon Books, 2002 (Originally 1999)
I should perhaps start by saying that Cryptonomicon probably isn’t a book I would have picked up on my own. I’d heard good things about it, and all my friends on Goodreads who have rated this book either liked it or really liked it (four gave it five stars, two gave it four stars, and
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The Casual Vacancy by J.K. RowlingLittle, Brown (2012)
It was Ian Parker’s piece in the New Yorker back in October that made me want to read The Casual Vacancy: in that piece, Parker describes it as “a rural comedy of manners that, having taken on state-of-the-nation social themes, builds into black melodrama,” and says the plot focuses on several households in a fictional
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Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty by Diane WilliamsMcSweeney’s Publishing, 2012
One of the quotes on the back cover of Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty is from Ben Marcus, who calls Diane Williams’s stories the “ideal delivery system” for “the uncanny”: that was the closest thing I could find as a point of entry to these fifty-one short short stories. Or maybe that’s not entirely true:
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The Duel by Heinrich von KleistTranslated by Annie JanuschMelville House, 2011
This is the second of the five books called The Duel in Melville House’s Art of the Novella series that I’ve read, and the second that I haven’t been crazy about, though I’m still curious to read the others and see how I feel about them. I think there are two main things that contribute
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The Thing about Thugs by Tabish KhairHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012 (Originally HarperCollins, 2010)
The thing about The Thing about Thugs that’s most pleasing to me is the way it’s told, the way the narrative perspective and style shifts. There’s the first-person narration of a present-day author-figure who finds a bundle of notes from the mid-1800s in his grandfather’s library in India: the notes are in Farsi and are