what I’ve been reading lately:
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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
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The Truck Food Cookbook by John T. EdgeWorkman Publishing, 2012
I picked this book up from the library after my boyfriend heard about it on NPR, and while I don’t like it enough to want to buy it, it was fun to read through. The subtitle, “150 Recipes and Ramblings from America’s Best Restaurants on Wheels,” gives a pretty good idea of what you’re in
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Crusoe’s Daughter by Jane GardamEuropa Editions, 2012 (Originally Hamish Hamilton, 1985)
Crusoe’s Daughter is the story of Polly Flint, who, when she’s six years old, comes to live with her two aunts in a big yellow house on a marsh in the North-East of England. Polly’s mother has been dead since Polly was one; her father is a sea-captain and not around much, and, as it
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Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew BlumEcco (HarperCollins), 2012
In Tubes, Andrew Blum tells the story of when he “decided to visit the Internet”—and what he found there. At the start of the book Blum says that he, like many people, didn’t really think much about the physical structure of the Internet—until one day when a squirrel chewing on wires in a Brooklyn backyard
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Satantango by László KrasznahorkaiTranslated by George SzirtesNew Directions, 2012
I started reading Satantango without many preconceptions: the cover, designed by Erik Carter and Paul Sahr, caught my eye in the window of McNally Jackson, and then when I saw the book at the library I figured I might as well pick it up. The book, originally published in Hungarian in 1985, is Krasznahorkai’s first
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Almost Invisible by Mark StrandKnopf, 2012
Almost Invisible consists almost entirely of paragraph-long prose poems—there’s just one piece, the poem-within-a-poem of “Poem of the Spanish Poet,” that deviates from that form at all. I like prose poems, generally, the way they sometimes could almost be called short-short stories, and I like these prose poems, the way that in bite-sized pieces they
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The Canal by Lee RourkeMelville House, 2010
In this interview Lee Rourke says that The Canal is about boredom “and the fetishisation of modern culture and violence (especially the kind of violence that is deemed by its perpetrators to have a ‘just cause’: terrorism is a good example of this). It is also about the Regents Canal in London; a bench; a
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Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere by André AcimanFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011
I suspect that Alibis is the sort of book whose pleasure it would be good to prolong, the kind of book where it would be satisfying to read an essay a day and reflect on each one, because there is without doubt lots to reflect on here. That isn’t what I did—I started reading slowly,
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Timeless by Gail CarrigerOrbit (Hachette), 2012
Despite what I said in my post about the previous book in this series, I hadn’t actually sought this fifth and final book out. But then there it was sitting temptingly on the shelf of free-to-take books in the kitchen at work. So I took it. I didn’t read it immediately, and wasn’t even that