what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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Proust, again: The Captive
After a several-month break from Proust, I’ve started reading The Captive and am reading slowly,—even more slowly than I usually read Proust, now that I am bicycling to work a few days a week and therefore don’t have 35 minutes of reading-on-the-train time built in at the start and end of my day. I will…
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Al Capone Shines My Shoes by Gennifer CholdenkoDial, 2009
I read Al Capone Does My Shirts back in 2005; this book’s the sequel to that one and picks up where the first left off. Moose Flanagan is still living on Alcatraz, playing baseball and hanging out; his autistic sister Natalie is about to start at a new school, and Moose is trying to figure…
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Darwin: A Life in Poems by Ruth PadelAlfred A. Knopf (Borzoi), 2009 (Originally Chatto & Windus)
This book is full, pleasingly so: marginal notes alongside the text, the poems themselves full of quotes from letters and memoirs, both Darwin’s and those of his friends and family. (Padel herself is Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter.) I like the places in this book, the sense of place, whether city or country—the description of Darwin’s father’s estate…
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Thames: The Biography by Peter AckroydDoubleday, 2008 (originally Chatto & Windus, 2007)
This book is rambling and fragmented and sometimes repetitive (like when Ackroyd mentions the 5000-year-old yews at Southwark on one page … and then mentions them again on the next page, without a difference of context or the addition of any new information), but it’s full of interesting facts and historical tidbits and images. One…
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The London Scene: Five Essays by Virginia WoolfFrank Hallman, 1975
I first read this book back in 2006, saw it again at the library recently and thought, quite correctly, that it’d be satisfying to re-read. The start of the first essay, “The Docks of London,” made me think a little of Proust: the magic of names, the magic of place names especially. Woolf writes that…