what I’ve been reading lately:
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Bluets by Maggie NelsonWave Books, 2009
I don’t know whether to call Bluets poetry or nonfiction: it is a book-length essay, but a poetic one; it’s a series of 240 “propositions,” like Pascal’s Pensées (from which the book takes its epigraph), each ranging from a sentence to a paragraph in length. Whatever you want to call it, I was enchanted by
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Paper Towns by John GreenDutton Books, 2008
After reading Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan back in May, I ended up checking out three John Green books from the library, wanting to read more of him, thinking I liked his literary voice. Looking for Alaska was OK: hugely readable but also a bit over-dramatic/too much of an “issues”
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Between Books/Reading Short Stories
I’m currently catching up on back issues of The New Yorker—I’m not quite sure how I got behind: I used to always be caught up! I used to see people reading old issues on the train and think, “really, you’re just reading that now?” But it’s OK: I don’t feel (too) bad about the fact
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An Abundance of Katherines by John GreenSpeak (Penguin), 2008 (Originally Dutton Books (Penguin), 2006)
Colin Singleton has just graduated from high school, but he worries he’s already past his peak: he was a child prodigy, but doesn’t really know what he’s good at, aside from learning languages and remembering facts and anagramming phrases, and he fears he won’t actually amount to anything. And to make things worse he just
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To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie WillisBantam Spectra, 1998
November 15, 1940: Coventry Cathedral is full of smoke and rubble, and Ned Henry is looking for the bishop’s bird stump, which is a Victorian vase, which he needs to find because Lady Schrapnell, who is rebuilding the cathedral in time for the 125th anniversary of its destruction, wants to know exactly what was in
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Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Phillippe ToussaintTranslated by John LambertDalkey Archive Press, 2010
“Every time I travel,” this book starts, “I feel a very slight feeling of dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft shiver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded
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Looking for Alaska by John GreenSpeak (Penguin), 2007 (originally Dutton Books, 2005)
Miles Halter leaves Florida at the start of his junior year: he’s headed for the Alabama boarding school that his father also attended, but it’s not really out of tradition that he’s going, and it’s not that he’s had a particularly traumatic high school experience thus far. I mean, he’s a nerd, and doesn’t really
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The Bride’s Farewell by Meg RosoffViking (Penguin), 2009
I’d read and liked three of Meg Rosoff’s books (and particularly liked two of them—What I Was and How I Live Now), so when I read Emma Carbone’s review on one of the NYPL blogs of The Bride’s Farewell, I knew I’d want to read it eventually. But I wasn’t sure I’d like it: after
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Silk Parachute by John McPheeFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Megan mentioned this book back in March, saying she’d read a review of it that made her think she’d like it, and wondering if I’d heard of McPhee. Since he writes for the New Yorker, and I’m one of those New Yorker subscribers who reads every single article, even if it doesn’t immediately seem to