what I’ve been reading lately:
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Witch’s Business by Diana Wynne JonesGreenwillow Books (HarperCollins), 2002 (Originally published as Wilkins’ Tooth, Macmillan London, 1974)
“Frank and Jess thought Own Back Ltd. was an excellent idea when they first invented it. Three days later, they were not so sure” (1). That’s how this book starts, and reading those sentences, you know you’re in for a lesson-learning sort of book, but this being Diana Wynne Jones, it’s not too heavy-handed. Own
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The Locavore’s Handbook: The Busy Person’s Guide to Eating Local on a Budget by Leda MeredithLyons Press, 2010
Leda Meredith, when she talks about eating local food, speaks from experience: in 2007-2008 she embarked on “The 250”: a year of eating, “almost exclusively foods grown or raised within a 250-mile radius” of her apartment (1). I’m impressed. My own six-day attempt at eating foods from within a radius of about 200 miles from
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Waiting for the Weekend by Witold RybczynskiViking, 1991
Despite the title, and despite the fact that much of this book tells the story of how the weekend as we know it came into being, Waiting for the Weekend isn’t just about Saturday and Sunday and how they got that way. It also examines larger questions of leisure: what is leisure, anyhow? And how
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The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey NiffeneggerHarcourt, 2004 (Originally MacAdam/Cage, 2003)
It’s been a while since I picked up any of the books I picked for Emily’s Attacking the TBR Tome Challenge—I’ve only read three books from my list so far, and it’s already August! But after reading Fire and Hemlock I was in the mood for another novel, specifically another novel with a quirky romance
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Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne JonesGreenwillow Books (HarperCollins), 2002 (Originally 1985)
19-year-old Polly is supposed to be packing, getting ready for another year of college, but she’s been reading instead. As she reads, she pauses and realizes a funny thing: though the cover on the book, which is similar to a picture that hangs above her bed, is familiar, she’s sure the book used to be
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Irving Penn: Small Trades by Virginia A. Heckert and Anne LacosteGetty Publications, 2009
When I quoted a passage from Proust about the “litanies of the small trades”, Carol mentioned this book of Irving Penn’s photographs of workers in Paris (and also New York and London) from 1950 and 1951. I’d mostly known about Penn’s fashion work or portraits of celebrities and society people (I’m thinking of pictures like
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Dogsbody by Diana Wynne JonesGreenwillow (HarperCollins), 2001 (Originally Macmillan London, 1975)
What if the stars weren’t just distant balls of gas: what if each one had, or might have, a “denizen,” a being who inhabited its sphere? What if these denizens had their own lives, their own politics, courts, and jealousies? That’s part of the premise of this novel, which the flap-copy describes, sort of cheesily
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Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson LevineScholastic, 1997 (Originally HarperCollins)
I grabbed this book from the shelf on a whim on a day when I was headed to the beach: I wanted something that wasn’t heavy (literally or metaphorically!) and that wasn’t a book I cared about keeping spotless. Something that would be an interesting story, something that would be unlikely to make me want