what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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French Milk by Lucy KnisleyTouchstone (Simon & Schuster), 2008 (originally Epigraph Publishing, 2007)
In December 2006/January 2007, Lucy Knisley took a six-week trip to Paris with her mother to celebrate her mother’s fiftieth birthday and Lucy’s twenty-second. French Milk is Knisley’s travel journal from that trip, and it’s a pleasing combination of photos, text, and drawings (Knisley is a cartoonist). I love all the Parisian details of this…
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Blameless by Gail CarrigerOrbit (Hachette), 2010
(Spoiler alert: it’s hard to talk about this book without mentioning some key plot points both from this book and the previous one, Changeless. So if you haven’t read this series and want to be surprised if/when you do, you might want to stop reading now.) At the start of this book, Alexia Maccon, newly…
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A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel SparkNew Directions, 2000 (Originally Houghton Mifflin, 1988)
1954: Mrs Hawkins, 28, is a young war widow, who lives in a South Kensington rooming-house and works as a proofreader and “literary adviser” at a small publishing house. The publishing house is barely hanging on; when secretaries and clerks leave they’re not replaced, and everyone who’s left is doing multiple jobs. And it’s not…
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Changeless by Gail CarrigerOrbit (Hachette), 2010
Changeless is the sequel to Soulless (which I wrote about here), and it starts out much better than that book did. The dialogue’s much smoother (fewer clunky surrounding phrases like “she stated”) and I grinned right away at the opening scene. Alexia, our sleeping heroine, wakes up to the sound of her husband shouting, and…
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Soulless by Gail CarrigerOrbit (Hachette), 2009
I first read about this book in the Goodreads newsletter last November; I was reminded of it again in the spring by this post over on A Work in Progress, but it’s taken me until now to get around to actually reading it. Before starting, my impressions of things it had going for it were…