what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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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…