what I’ve been reading lately:
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Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe ValtatMelville House, 2010
A nighttime view of New Venice, 1908: They were now entering the centre of the city, an off-white grid of frozen canals and deserted avenues, lined with impressive Neoclassical and Art Nouveau buildings. In the twilight, their incongruous stuccoed, statue-haunted silhouettes, rising darker against the darkening horizon, gave the eerie impression that they had been…
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Heartless by Gail CarrigerOrbit (Hachette), 2011
Lady Alexia Maccon is pregnant, and since she’s a preternatural, a.k.a. “soulless,” and her husband’s a werewolf, no one’s quite sure how the child is going to turn out. Rumor has it that the child is likely to be a creature called a “soul-stealer” or “skin-stalker,” someone both mortal and immortal, and the vampires of…
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Spiderweb for Two: A Melendy Maze by Elizabeth EnrightSquare Fish, 2008 (Originally Rinehart & Co.,1951)
Unlike the rest of the Melendy Quartet, this one’s not really about the whole family: summer has ended, the older boys (Rush and Mark, who’s an adopted Melendy now) are away at boarding school, and Mona is living in the city, where she’s staying with Mrs. Oliphant, a family friend, and going to school and…
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Then There Were Five by Elizabeth EnrightHenry Holt, 2002 (Originally Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1944)
As you probably gathered from my last two posts, I’m totally enjoying Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet, in which this book is the third volume. The kids (Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver) are all satisfying characters (though I feel like Mona’s a bit less developed than the others, or maybe I’m just less interested in her),…
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The Four-Story Mistake by Elizabeth EnrightHenry Holt, 2002 (Originally Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1942)
The Four-Story Mistake, the sequel to The Saturdays, picks up some months after that book left off: it’s October, and the Melendy family is moving out of their Manhattan brownstone to a house in the country. As in The Saturdays, the characters and the story are charming, and Enright is emotionally astute: I loved this,…
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The Saturdays by Elizabeth EnrightSquare Fish, 2008 (Originally Farrar & Rinehart, 1941)
“It would have to rain today,” said Rush, lying flat on his back in front of the fire. “On a Saturday. Certainly. Naturally. Of course. What else would you expect? Good weather is for Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday; and rain’s for Saturday and Sunday, and Christmas vacation and Easter.” “Oh, Rush, do stop grousing,”…
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The Golden Age by Michal AjvazTranslated by Andrew OaklandDalkey Archive Press, 2010
Apparently June is my month for reading and really liking books by Michal Ajvaz. I read and enjoyed The Other City last year (I wrote about it here), and this year I couldn’t resist The Golden Age when I saw it at the library. The back cover describes The Golden Age as “a fantastical travelogue…
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The Ada Poems by Cynthia ZarinAlfred A. Knopf, 2010
I haven’t yet read Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor, though I own a copy, but I think that’s OK: I think it’s enough to read The Ada Poems informed just by the quotes from Nabokov that Zarin uses throughout, and by the flap copy, which explains that these poems are “inspired and inhabited by the title…
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Eyes in the Fishbowl by Zilpha Keatley SnyderAtheneum, 1968
Dion James has been a fan of Alcott-Simpson’s, the big department store in the city where he lives, since the time he first saw it, back when he was eight or nine and shining shoes on the sidewalks. The first time he went inside, it made an impression: After the ordinary winter world outside, dirty…
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In Office Hours by Lucy KellawayGrand Central Publishing (Hachette), 2011
In Office Hours, which traces two office romances (focusing on the woman in each affair: one is Stella, a middle-aged high-level executive who falls for Rhys, a 27-year trainee, and the other is Bella, a 27-year old personal assistant/researcher and single mom who falls for her middle-aged boss, James) is compelling, funny, and also somewhat…