what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee StewartLittle, Brown and Company (Hachette), 2012
I didn’t even know there was a prequel to the Mysterious Benedict Society books, until I happened to be looking at books in Target while waiting for my boyfriend to finish his shopping. Clearly, once I knew about it, I had to read it: I really liked the rest of the books in the series,
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Berlin Stories by Robert WalserTranslated by Susan Bernofsky and othersNew York Review of Books, 2012
In her introduction to Berlin Stories, Susan Bernofsky notes that “while we tend to call these texts “stories,” Walser himself described them as “prose pieces”; this hybrid of story and essay remained his genre of choice for most of his writing career” (xi). The pieces are short—many are just two or three pages—and they read,
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Ragnarök: The End of the Gods by A.S. ByattCanongate, 2011
In a section at the end of this book called “Thoughts on Myths,” A.S. Byatt quotes Nietzsche, who wrote about myths as “presiding over the growth of the child’s mind” (158). Byatt writes about Ragnarök, the end of the gods and the end of the world, as presiding over the growth of her own mind,
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There but for the by Ali SmithPantheon Books (Random House), 2011 (Originally Hamish Hamilton)
Imagine the relief there’d be, in just stepping through the door of a spare room, a room that wasn’t anything to do with you, and shutting the door, and that being that. There’d be a window, wouldn’t there? Were there any books in there? What would you do all day? (44) There’s the premise, in
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Invitation to a Voyage by François Emmanuel, translated by Justin VicariDalkey Archive Press, 2011
I liked the last two short stories in this book the best, because one is a fairy tale and the other’s a spy story gone strange. Emmanuel’s style, which is sometimes dreamy but sometimes just trite, works for me when it’s playing with a genre like that: the other four stories in this book sometimes
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A Wave by John AshberyThe Noonday Press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 1998 (Originally Viking, 1984)
I’m not opposed to feeling adrift when reading, but this book, on my first read-through of it, made me feel more than adrift: I struggled to find a way in, or anything to hold on to. I haven’t read much by Ashbery: before A Wave I’d only read Notes from the Air, which I remembered
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Mauve by Simon GarfieldW.W. Norton & Company, 2002 (originally Faber and Faber Limited, 2000)
I was reading this book on the train last night, and the woman next to me asked if I was an artist—because I was reading a book about color. “No, just interested,” I said, and then she asked about the subtitle, which is “How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World.” “So, how
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Light: A Novel by Eva FigesBallantine Books (Random House), 1989 (Originally Pantheon, 1983)
I found Light on the sidewalk and brought it home on the strength of the back cover blurb, a quote from The New York Times Book Review that says the book is “a luminous prose poem of a novel” and also calls it “unhurried” and “richly descriptive.” I’d never heard of Figes, and have never