what I’ve been reading lately:
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NW by Zadie SmithThe Penguin Press, 2012
NW is about the intersecting/intertwined lives of four Londoners (two women and two men) who grew up on the same housing estate in the northwest part of the city. Leah and Natalie, who have been best friends since childhood (back when Natalie was called Keisha: she renamed herself when she left for university) are the
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Mokie & Bik Go to Sea by Wendy OrrIllustrations by Jonathan BeanHenry Holt and Company, 2010
The art was my favorite thing about Mokie & Bik (which I wrote about here)—it was crisp and fleshed out. In this book, the art (some of which you can see on Jonathan Bean’s website) is in pencil rather than pen, and it’s sketchy, looser. Sometimes this works for me—I love the opening spread, with
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Mokie & Bik by Wendy OrrIllustrations by Jonathan BeanHenry Holt and Company, 2007
Mokie and Bik are fraternal twins who live on a boat with their mom, their nanny, and some pets, which is just as exciting as it sounds. The art, by Jonathan Bean, is great: the cover, with Mokie swinging from a rope, pigtails flying, sets the tone of mischievousness and charm, and the endpapers—one of
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel BarberyTranslated by Alison AndersonEuropa Editions, 2008 (Originally published in French in 2006, by Editions Gallimard)
Renée, who’s 54, has been the concierge of a luxury apartment building in Paris for the past 27 years. She’s a widow, and lives alone with her cat (because, you know, all lady concierges have cats). She does her job competently, and counts on people not really seeing her (because people only ever see what
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Swimming Studies by Leanne ShaptonBlue Rider Press (Penguin), 2012
In the last of the thirty pieces (some all text, some all images, some a mix of both) that make up Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton writes this: I think about loving swimming the way you love somebody. How a kiss happens, gravitational. About compromise, sacrifice, and breakup. […] I think about loving swimming the way
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The Drowned World by J.G.BallardLiveright Publishing (W.W. Norton), 2012(Originally Berkley Books, 1962)
I won a free advance reading copy of the 50th anniversary edition of The Drowned World, with a new introduction by Martin Amis, from W.W. Norton via a Goodreads giveaway. I’ve been meaning to read something by Ballard for a while, and this book, an early vision of a world in which global warming has
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Meander: East to West, Indirectly, Along a Turkish River by Jeremy SealBloomsbury USA, 2012 (Originally Chatto & Windus, 2012)
I read about this book in an issue of Booklist that I picked up earlier this year: in a brief review, Gilbert Taylor calls this book, which is about Seal’s canoe trip along the length of the Meander River in 2008, a “charmingly mordant, twisting travelogue,” which was enough to make me want to pick
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When You Reach Me by Rebecca SteadRandom House, 2009
It’s April 1979, and twelve-year-old Miranda is helping her mom get ready to be a contestant on The $20,000 Pyramid. But the arrival of the postcard saying her mom gets to be on the show reminds Miranda of something else—an anonymous note she’d gotten during the winter, a note that included the date of the
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Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems, 1964-2001 by W.G. SebaldTranslated by Iain GalbraithRandom House, 2011 (Originally Hamish Hamilton, 2011)
In his Translator’s Introduction to Across the Land and the Water, Iain Galbraith lists some of Sebald’s concerns (in both his poetry and prose) as follows: “borders, journeys, archives, landscapes, reading, time, memory, myth, legend, and the “median state” (Edward Said) of the exile, who is neither fully integrated into the new system nor fully
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Virginia Wolf by Kyo Maclear and Isabelle ArsenaultKids Can Press, 2012
Vanessa’s sister Virginia wakes up one day feeling wolfish. Everything bothers her, she won’t talk to anyone, and she just wants to be alone, under the covers, in bed. Vanessa wants to cheer her up, but isn’t sure how. She tries just keeping Virginia company, cloud-watching with her, and maybe that helps, but Virginia still