what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Steps Across the Water by Adam Gopnik, Illustrated by Bruce McCallDisney – Hyperion, 2010
Rose, the younger sister of Oliver from Gopnik’s other kids’ book, The King in the Window, has a little bit of a speech impediment: she’s prone to Spoonerisms, switching the starts of her words to say, for example, “U Nork” instead of “New York.” She’s adopted—she was born in Russia, and lived in an orphanage
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The House of Ulysses by Julián RíosTranslated by Nick CaistorDalkey Archive Press, 2010
I like how this book starts, the way the first sentence takes you immediately into a place of questions or uncertainty or play: “Step inside and take a look, or perhaps he said a book, sweeping his magic wand in a semicircle in front of him” (3). The story is structured as a walk through
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Arriving in Avignon: A Record by Daniël RobberechtsTranslated by Paul VincentDalkey Archive Press, 2010
The Editor’s Note describes this book as “an uneasy synthesis between fiction and journal, confession and travel guide”: it’s the story of Avignon, a walled city seen from outside and in, Avignon as object, as something to be explored, but also Avignon as a place to be skirted around, passed through, a place connecting points
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All Clear by Connie WillisSpectra, 2010
When my hold on All Clear finally came in at the library, I realized I hadn’t planned ahead enough to be able to re-read Blackout, as I thought I might want to. (I read Blackout back in May.) But I figured I’d go ahead and read All Clear anyhow, hoping that Connie Willis would remind
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Cooking Interlude: More from Nigella Kitchen by Nigella Lawson
Having spent some more time with this cookbook, I can now share some general things I do and don’t like about it. For starters: every bulleted list in this book (and there are many of them) uses hearts as bullet points. This gets old really quickly. Another small annoyance: all recipes in this book that
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Seedlip and Sweet Apple by Arra Lynn RossMilkweed Editions, 2010
Before reading this book I’m not sure I could have told you the name of the founder of the Shakers. Now I can: it was Mother Ann Lee, and this book of poems tells the story of her life. The three sections of the book are arranged chronologically: the first, the Word of Life, tells
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Cooking Interlude: Nigella Kitchen by Nigella Lawson
This weekend I’d been thinking that I’d go on a 15-mile walk on Staten Island on Sunday with a group of like-minded folks who enjoy city-walks in all kinds of weather. But when this morning came, I changed my mind: I didn’t feel like getting up early, and the arch of one of my feet
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The Rehearsal by Eleanor CattonReagan Arthur (Little, Brown), 2010 (Originally Granta, 2009)
This book, with its shifty chronology and its disorientation and its self-consciously literary style might seem over-the-top or pretentious or off-putting, especially at the start, when you don’t quite know what on earth you’re reading. But Catton’s writing, and the story, are engrossing enough that it worked for me. The book might be said to
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The Clash of Images by Abdelfattah KilitoTranslated by Robyn CreswellNew Directions, 2010
This slim volume, originally published in French in 1995 as La querelle des images, caught my eye at the library recently, though I hadn’t heard of this book or its author. Kilito, it turns out, is an author of both fiction and literary criticism; he’s Moroccan, and was born in 1945, near the tail end