what I’ve been reading lately:
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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
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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: