what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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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…