what I’ve been reading lately:
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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.”…
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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…