what I’ve been reading lately:
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette WintersonGrove Press, 2011 (Originally Jonathan Cape)
I saw Jeanette Winterson read excerpts from this book back in March, and it was satisfying to recognize certain passages—like the part where she talks about how Mrs Winterson, her adopted mother, read Jane Eyre aloud but bowdlerized the ending, improvising in the style of Charlotte Brontë. Mrs Winterson figures large in this book, as
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Mockingjay by Suzanne CollinsScholastic, 2010
I should start by saying: It’s hard to write about the last of the Hunger Games books in a in a non-spoilery way, so if you haven’t read this book yet, you might want to stop reading now. In Catching Fire, Katniss Everdeen unwittingly inspired revolution: now, in Mockingjay, the Districts are in full-out war
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Catching Fire by Suzanne CollinsScholastic, 2009
I liked The Hunger Games, but I wasn’t sure how much I was going to like Catching Fire. The early pages felt clunky; I couldn’t find or get into the rhythm of the narration. But then the plot got going and I didn’t care about the quality of the prose at all, I just cared
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Winter: Five Windows on the Season by Adam GopnikHouse of Anansi Press, 2011
Summer is my least favorite season: I don’t do so well with heat and humidity, which are pretty much the defining characteristics of summer in New York. Meanwhile, stores and office buildings and subway cars are over-air-conditioned in over-compensation, so I feel like I spend my time either sweltering or freezing. Summer has its pleasures,
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You Deserve Nothing by Alexander MaksikEuropa Editions, 2011
I was fairly delighted, about a hundred pages into You Deserve Nothing, to see the squiggles from the cover image near the top of the page, presented as an excerpt from the notebook of one of the book’s narrators. Gilad Fisher has just moved to Paris, and is a senior at the International School of
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Dogma by Lars IyerMelville House Publishing, 2012
Dogma is the sequel to Spurious, which I read last year and wrote about here. Like the last book, this one follows the meanderings of Lars and W., two English academics who share a tendency toward the apocalyptic and a fondness for gin. As in the last book, there is a lot of angst: about
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The Chemistry of Tears by Peter CareyAlfred A. Knopf, 2012 (Originally Faber and Faber)
Catherine Gehrig has lost her lover of thirteen years: he died suddenly, and because their affair was a secret (he was married), she’s unable to grieve publicly. Except their affair wasn’t entirely a secret: Catherine’s lover worked at the Swinburne Museum, as she also does, and was a close friend of her boss. Knowing she
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Schematics: A Love Story by Julian HibbardMark Batty Publisher, 2011
I liked the concept of Schematics more than I liked the execution of it. It sounds so promising: the back cover describes it as a “sparse, meditative, and enigmatic narrative embroidered with schematic diagrams,” and in an essay at the end of the book David LaRocca says that “Throughout Schematics Hibbard demonstrates the persuasive power
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Barley Patch by Gerald MurnaneDalkey Archive Press, 2011 (Originally Giramondo, 2009)
Barley Patch starts with a question posed by Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet, a question Rilke says all writers should ask themselves, namely: “Must I write?” (9) This question leads to other questions, so the book is structured as the narrator interviewing himself or explaining himself, except that the questions are sometimes so
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The Hunger Games by Suzanne CollinsScholastic, 2010 (Originally 2008)
I’d been somewhat resistant to reading this book/series, in part because I am generally not crazy about dystopian fiction, and in part because the premise seemed so horrible/violent. Which, of course, it is: each year, twelve boys and twelve girls between the age of twelve and eighteen, called tributes, are made to fight to the