what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Other City by Michal AjvazTranslated by Gerald TurnerDalkey Archive Press, 2009
The Other City is strange and wonderful, a book about seeing, a book about reading. It’s a slim novel, but one to read slowly: it’s full of images that I wanted to linger over. It starts normally enough: a winter day, an antiquarian bookshop, snow starting to fall outside, the smell and texture of paper.
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The Last Rendezvous by Anne PlantagenetTranslated by Willard WoodOther Press, 2009
The flap copy calls this a “Romantic novel in every sense of the word,” which it is: it’s a romance, a love story, and also a story set in the Romantic era, with protagonists who are part of the French Romantic literary/musical/dramatic scene. It’s the story of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, first an actress, then a poet,
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Doomsday Book by Connie WillisSpectra (Bantam), 1992
Earlier this month I read and really enjoyed Blackout, Connie Willis’s latest book, so I knew I wanted to go back and read this one, which is set in the same world. It’s Oxford in 2054 and the history department, which uses time travel to observe the past, is at the center of this story.
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Eunoia by Christian BökCoach House Books, 2009
The back cover gives a better summary than I could: “‘Eunoia,’ which means ‘beautiful thinking,’ is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels. This book also contains them all, except that each one appears by itself in its own chapter.” This is, as you might guess, both excellent and a little tedious, though
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The Happiness Project by Gretchen RubinHarperCollins, 2009
As I said in this post, happiness is the life goal that makes the most sense to me, more than success, more than achievement, more than, well, just about anything else. But how do you go about being happy? Some people would say your happiness is determined by external factors, and others would say it’s
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Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green & David LevithanDutton Books (Penguin), 2010
Will Grayson, Will Grayson is the story of two teenagers named, yes indeed, Will Grayson: both live in the suburbs of Chicago, and end up meeting one night. Their story’s told in alternating chapters, with Green narrating from the point of view of one Will Grayson, and Levithan writing from the point of view of
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The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press, 2010
The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag picks up a little more than a month after The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie leaves off, so it was good to read them consecutively. It’s summer in Bishop’s Lacey, the little village outside of which eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce lives with her father and two
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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan BradleyDelacorte Press/Bantam Dell (Random House), 2009
I don’t normally read mysteries, and I forget where I first heard about this one: I know that Danielle over at A Work in Progress mentioned it last year, but I feel like I read about it elsewhere as well. No matter: I finally got around to placing a hold on it at the library,
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Blackout by Connie WillisSpectra (Random House), 2010
The premise of this book is excellent: it’s 2060 and we’ve figured out time travel, so historians, instead of just spending their time in libraries and archives and museums, head back to the past to witness history first-hand. Of course, there’s the usual time travel question: can they influence events, and what’s to stop them