what I’ve been reading lately:
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Shopgirl by Steve MartinHyperion, 2000
After I finished reading Travels in Siberia, I found myself in a sort of critical reading mood—unsure what to read next, and fearful that whatever I read wouldn’t live up to the intelligence, humor, and range of Ian Frazier’s book. I decided that something short, light, and fictional was the way to go, and so
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Travels in Siberia by Ian FrazierFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Siberia: you think “big,” you think “cold,” you think “isolation,” maybe you think “exile” or “gulag.” You probably don’t think “place I’d like to travel across by car,” but Ian Frazier did. He actually took five trips to Siberia over the course of sixteen years, not just the trans-Siberian drive he writes about in the
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Cooking Interlude: The Food Matters Cookbook by Mark Bittman
The idea of The Food Matters Cookbook is simple: eat fewer animal products and processed foods; eat more whole grains, nuts, legumes, fruits and vegetables. There are lots of reasons you might want to eat this way, and Bittman mentions a few in his introduction (health, ethics, environment), but this really is a cookbook, not
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Dogs by Emily GravettSimon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2010 (Originally Macmillan Children’s Books, 2009)
Several years ago, Megan and I read a picture book called Wolves by Emily Gravett, and were struck by how funny and clever and all-around excellent it was. So when I saw Dogs while wandering through Barnes & Noble in search of a page-a-day calendar, I was really excited: Emily Gravett, yay! And I love
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White Teeth by Zadie SmithVintage International, 2001 (Originally Hamish Hamilton, 2000)
I’ve been meaning to read this book for approximately a decade now, and am glad I finally did. On the most basic level it’s the story of two friends—Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal, who met when they served in WWII together—and their families. But it’s also about families in general, and culture and history
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The House of Paper by Carlos María DomínguezTranslated by Nick CaistorHarcourt, 2005
This book starts with a death, then proceeds to a mystery: Bluma Lennon, a professor at Cambridge, is walking down the street while reading, and she’s struck by a car and killed. A few months later, the narrator of the book (who’s taken over Bluma’s office and courseload, and who’s not entirely disinterested—he was her
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A Beautiful Blue Death: A Mystery by Charles FinchSt. Martin’s Minotaur, 2008 (originally 2007)
It was the cover of this book, that particular yellow and the three shelves of interestingly-shaped bottles with their lovely old labels, that made me pick it up from a pile of books someone left in the lobby of the apartment building where I live. It sat on my shelf for a few months, and
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Night Bloom: A Memoir by Mary CappelloBeacon Press, 1998
Family histories, family secrets, family gardens: a great-grandfather who had an affair, a grandfather who was a cobbler who gardened and wrote, a father who beats his two sons. Silences and gaps and a family transplanted, but also a family making things grow, planting hedges and flowers and herbs. In this book Cappello writes about
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Chasing Vermeer by Blue BalliettScholastic, 2005 (Originally 2004)
I found a copy of this book on the sidewalk and picked it up without realizing it had been annotated by its previous owner, a kid (his name and classroom number are written on the inside front cover and on the sides of the pages). This lead to some amusement: mostly, this kid underlined words,
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The Lost Art of Walking by Geoff NicholsonRiverhead Books (Penguin), 2008
Despite its (fairly frequent) snarkiness, and despite the fact that several sections read like strings of facts or anecdotes connected only loosely, I did enjoy this book, which is as much about Nicholson’s own walking experiences and philosophy as it is about, as the subtitle puts it, “The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism.”