what I’ve been reading lately:
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More in The Captive
Despite that early beauty, this book is shaping up to be sort of squirm-inducing: at the center of The Captive, even more than in previous volumes, is the narrator’s jealousy. It isn’t absolute—or, at least, he says it isn’t—but it’s consuming. It’s the in-between-ness that’s the problem, the hazy awareness, the knowing-but-not-knowing: “I should not
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Returning to The Captive
After just about a three-month-long break, I’ve picked up The Captive & The Fugitive again. I’m in Georgia on vacation right now, which means that my reading time is quiet time in the mornings or the evenings, not commuting time, which I think bodes well for getting farther along in this book than I did
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Ghostwalk by Rebecca StottSpiegel & Grau, 2007 (originally Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007)
I started reading this book the day after I learned that I might be taking another trip to Cambridge (England) for a few days for work in January. If this trip happens, it’ll be my third visit: the first time, in March 2008, I stayed for eight days, the second time, in October 2008, for
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Bird Eating Bird by Kristin NacaHarper Perennial, 2009
I like poems that are buildings of images; I like poems that are stories. Kristin Naca writes both those kinds of poems, and also writes lyrical poems, romantic poems, poems that play with language(s) and words. Sometimes the poems in this collection were too lyrical for me, or too language-focused, but others are just lovely,
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Never-Ending Birds by David BakerW. W. Norton & Company, 2009
The poems in this collection that I like best are the ones that intertwine the speaker’s voice with another voice, with quotes and descriptions from other writers: I like the layers of those poems, the interplay of voices and places and times, how now slips into then or vice versa. Like “Posthumous Man,” (ignore the
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Forgetting Elena by Edmund WhiteVintage International, 1994 (originally Random House, 1973)
Forgetting Elena starts out slow and strange; it’s unsettling and apt, the way it unfolds. It’s narrated by a man staying in a summer cottage with a group of other men. He seems new to the group and pathologically unsure of his place in it, or his place in the world, or just himself: he
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The Coral Thief by Rebecca StottSpiegel & Grau (Random House), 2009 (Originally Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2009)
In Paris in 1815, everything is changing. Napoleon is in exile, on his way to Saint Helena. France has a king again, and in Paris new streets are being laid, old buildings torn down. The freedoms, or illusions of freedom, of the Revolution are disappearing: Paris is no longer the place where any idea can
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The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma by Trenton Lee StewartLittle, Brown and Company, 2009
This is the third book about the Mysterious Benedict Society, a group of four very smart (and extraordinarily talented) friends who fight to keep a nasty villain from taking over the city/country/world. Like the first and second books, this one is clever and sweet and exciting (and yes, I stayed up ’til midnight to finish
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The Magicians by Lev GrossmanViking, 2009
Quentin Coldwater is seventeen, smart, and not particularly happy. Not that he has too much to complain about: “I am a solid member of the middle-middle class,” he tells himself. “My GPA is a number higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be” (p 5). But he can’t help