what I’ve been reading lately:
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See Me Improving by Travis NicholsCopper Canyon Press, 2010
I didn’t particularly like this book after my first reading of it: it seemed somehow both too strange and too ordinary, with more humor and less beauty than I like the poetry I read to have, but I decided to give it another try. It’s a short book, and maybe part of my problem the
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Spurious by Lars IyerMelville House, 2011
I’m not going to lie: I checked this book out of the library in part because of the excellent cover image, which is a photo from William Hundley’s Entoptic Phenomena series. Plus, it’s published by Melville House, a small press I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now: I’ve walked by their bookstore/office
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A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press, 2011
In this, the third Flavia de Luce mystery (after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, both of which I read and liked last May ), we once again find ourselves in the little village of Bishop’s Lacey, which is again beset by mysterious criminal happenings.
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World Enough by Maureen N. McLaneFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
The poems I like best in this book are the ones that deal with places, maybe because these poems are full of satisfying specificity: Vermont and its lake and gulls, Saratoga in summer rain, L.A. with its oleander and “Hockney blue” pools and, perhaps my favorite poems of all, the ones about Paris in the
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The Lover’s Dictionary by David LevithanFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011
This is the story of a relationship, alphabetically: a dictionary whose entries are vignettes from a couple’s life together. Sometimes an entry is a page or a paragraph or a few pages; sometimes it’s just a line, like: autonomy, n. “I want my books to have their own shelves,” you said, and that’s how I
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Embers by Sándor MáraiTranslated by Carol Brown JanewayVintage International, 2002
This book, which was originally published in Hungarian in 1942, is very much about the ends of things, the passing of time: the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the end of the nineteenth century, the end of a friendship, the end of a marriage, the end of an affair. Henrik, the reclusive General, lives alone
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Curriculum Vitae by Yoel HoffmannTranslated by Peter ColeNew Directions, 2009
This book and I didn’t totally click, and I’m not sure I can articulate why. The back cover describes it as “part novel and part memoir,” and its 100 short sections tell the story of a life: childhood, marriage, parenting, travel. It’s set mostly in Israel, with bits elsewhere (primarily Japan), and it sometimes reads
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An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 by Adrienne RichW.W. Norton & Company, 1991
I think Adrienne Rich was the first poet I really enjoyed reading: I read “Diving into the Wreck” in a high school English class, then bought The Fact of a Doorframe later in high school and read and re-read my way through that book in late high school and early college. I haven’t read so
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Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles by Kira HenehanMilkweed Editions, 2010
The back cover blurb mentions the “off-kilter world” of Finley, our narrator: that’s an understatement. This book is a detective story but not really, or rather, it’s a detective story about finding oneself. It’s set in a world that is almost our own but not quite, or maybe it is our world and all the
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The New Brooklyn Cookbook by Melissa Vaughan and Brendan VaughanWilliam Morrow (HarperCollins), 2010
This book’s subtitle is “Recipes and Stories from 31 Restaurants That Put Brooklyn on the Culinary Map:” I’ve lived in Brooklyn for coming up on seven years now, and of those 31 restaurants, I’ve been to exactly three: applewood (literally down the block from where I lived for five and a half years, great food,