what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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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…