what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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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…