what I’ve been reading lately:
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Talismano by Abdelwahab MeddebTranslated by Jane KuntzDalkey Archive Press, 2011
Talismano, which was originally published in French by Éditions Sindbad in 1987, must have been quite a lot of work (and perhaps also quite a lot of fun) to translate. In her introduction, Jane Kuntz calls the book “willfully cryptic” and talks about how Meddeb’s language is a French inflected by Arabic, and not just…
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Wabi Sabi by Mark ReibsteinArt by Ed YoungLittle, Brown and Company, 2008
Wabi Sabi is a seriously gorgeous book. It’s big (the pages are 11 by 11 inches) and when you have it closed, the spine’s at the top—so you open it like a wall calendar, and it’s made up of a series of two-page spreads. The art, by Ed Young, is lovely: his collages, made of…
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Upstaged by Jacques JouetTranslated by Leland de la DurantayeDalkey Archive Press, 2011
True story: my high school had (and for all I know, still has) a tradition of having a “freshman play”: the first play of the school year, during my high school career, was put on by the whole freshman class, and only the freshman class (with some advice and assistance from the drama teacher and…
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Under the Harrow by Mark DunnMacAdam/Cage, 2010
I read and really liked Ella Minnow Pea back in 2004 (I am a sucker for epistolary novels and also for wordplay) but I hadn’t sought out or heard about anything else by Mark Dunn until I saw Jenny’s post about Under the Harrow back in June. The promise of another quirkily charming book by…
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The Tin Princess by Philip PullmanAlfred A. Knopf, 2008 (Originally 1994)
In London, in 1882, sixteen-year-old Becky Winter gets her first tutoring job: she’s to teach German (her first language) to a girl named Adelaide, who’s a few years older than Becky, and who needs tutoring in more than just German, it turns out. Though she’s married to the prince of a tiny kingdom called Razkavia,…
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The Magician King by Lev GrossmanViking, 2011
(This is the sequel to The Magicians and it’s basically impossible to talk about without mentioning some key plot points/spoilers from the first book. So if you don’t want to see those, stop reading now.) At the end of The Magicians, Quentin Coldwater changes his mind about giving up magic entirely, about resigning himself to…
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The Magicians by Lev Grossman Viking, 2009
I first read this book in October 2009, and I don’t have much to add to my original post about it, which is here. This summer, I heard that there was a sequel out, and promptly put a hold on the sequel at the library, but felt like I should re-read this first. I felt…
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The Tiger in the Well by Philip Pullman Dell Laurel-Leaf, 2004 (originally Knopf, 1990)
Though The Tiger in the Well is a Sally Lockhart Mystery, the “mystery” isn’t so mysterious: the identity of the villain becomes apparent pretty early in the book—or, in my case, earlier: the back cover of the edition I read makes it pretty clear. But that doesn’t make the book any less satisfying or even…
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The Shadow in the North by Philip PullmanAlfred A. Knopf, 2008 (originally Oxford University Press, 1986)
The Shadow in the North is the second of Pullman’s Sally Lockhart mysteries, and I think it’s better-written than The Ruby in the Smoke, or maybe I just liked it more because I already know the main characters. Sally, who’s now twenty-two, is a partner in Garland & Lockhart’s photograph studio and has also set…
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The Ruby in the Smoke by Philip Pullman Alfred A. Knopf, 2008 (originally Oxford University Press, 1985)
It’s October, 1872, and sixteen-year-old Sally Lockhart, whose father died in late summer, has just gotten a letter from Singapore. Singapore is where her father was last, but the note’s not in his handwriting, and she’s got no idea what it means: it says to beware of the Seven Blessings, and it says that someone…