what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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Excellent Women by Barbara PymPlume Books (Penguin), 1988 (Originally Jonathan Cape, 1952)
Mildred Lathbury, “an unmarried woman just over thirty, who lives alone and has no apparent ties,” enjoys the ordinary routines of her days, months, years (5). She works part-time at an organisation that helps “impoverished gentlewomen”; she is involved in her local church and is close friends with the vicar, Father Malory, and his sister…
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Eating: A Memoir by Jason EpsteinAnchor Books (Random House), 2010 (Originally Knopf, 2009)
I started this book feeling a little grumpy: when I finish reading a novel and pick up a work of nonfiction, it requires a little adjustment—and maybe this is especially true when switching from a novel to episodic nonfiction like this book. Eating started not as a book but as a recipe column in the…
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Mistress of the Art of Death by Ariana FranklinBerkley (Penguin), 2008 (Originally G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007)
I think what I liked best about this book was its setting: Cambridge, England, in 1171. Spring and the rain and the cherry blossoms, and a city centered around its river, a city of traders and barges and punts and quays and bridges. Comparing it to her hometown of Salerno, the main character thinks about…
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Shiver by Maggie StiefvaterScholastic Press, 2009
Grace has grown up watching the wolves behind her family’s house in Mercy Falls, Minnesota. As a child, she was actually attacked by them once: one dragged her from her tire swing on a cold winter day, and the others circled around—but one wolf stopped the attack partway through. That wolf, the yellow-eyed wolf, becomes…
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London Orbital by Iain SinclairPenguin, 2003 (Originally Granta Books, 2002)
So. Hi again. It’s February, and it’s been nearly a month since I last posted here. During that time period I moved (not far: from Park Slope proper to the edge of Park Slope/Windsor Terrace). There was much packing, much unpacking, and much packing-and-unpacking-related angst. There was not much reading around moving day: my brain…
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The Rabbit Problem by Emily GravettSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2010(Originally Macmillan Children’s Books, 2009)
Once again, Emily Gravett slays me with the combination of cleverness plus rabbits. This book is amazing, from the endpapers on, and it’s full of so many smart and hilarious details. At its most basic level, the premise is simple: it’s a visual representation of Fibonacci’s Rabbit Problem. If you need a refresher, it’s nicely…
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Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol BirchDoubleday (Random House), 2011 (Originally Canongate)
Books that are “writerly” or self-consciously “literary” in certain ways really appeal to me, and part of what I enjoyed about Jamrach’s Menagerie is that writerly charm. First, there’s the prose: it’s lush, detailed, descriptive, full of place, of weather, of sound, of slants of light. It’s beautiful (though there are also, you should be…