what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Error World: An Affair with Stamps by Simon GarfieldHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009 (originally Faber and Faber, 2008)
At the start of this book, Garfield writes very much as a man, or maybe what I mean is that he writes from a certain place of cultural masculinity that is quite foreign to me, a separate spheres sort of world that I don’t normally much think about. I wonder how much of my inability…
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Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table by Ruth ReichlRandom House, 2002 (originally 2001)
For the first chapter, the tone of this memoir annoyed me: too pat, and too much dialogue, which I find a tricksy thing in nonfiction. It’s too distracting: I’m sitting on the R train reading and wondering if she really remembers what her first husband said on that day twenty-three years ago, if she wrote…
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Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris AndersonHyperion, 2009
I got a free advance copy of this book via goodreads, and was excited to read it even after reading Malcolm Gladwell’s not-too-enthusiastic review in the New Yorker, and the plagiarism accusations in VQR (which I got to via TeleRead), and even Virginia Postrel’s review, in which she calls Free “a successful business speech between…
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The Winner of Sorrow by Brian LynchDalkey Archive, 2009 (originally New Island Books, 2005)
Before starting this book I didn’t know much about William Cowper, just that Veda Hille uses bits of Light Shining out of Darkness in a song called “Cowper’s Folly.” Also, back in April, someone taped the whole text of “Light Shining out of Darkness” to a column in the Canal Street subway station, and despite…
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Never Mind the Goldbergs by Matthue RothPUSH (Scholastic), 2005
Hava Aaronson is seventeen and feels like she’s never fit in: “I guess I was just born different,” she says on page 1, which sort of made me roll my eyes and wonder if I was really in the mood for a YA novel after all—and maybe I wasn’t—but I kept reading. Hava’s an Orthodox…
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The Printer’s Devil by Paul BajoriaLittle, Brown and Company, 2005 (originally Simon and Schuster, 2004)
Mog Winter is the printer’s devil: “the youngest apprentice in a printing shop,” (or, in this case, the only apprentice), and an orphan who lives in a small room above the shop in Clerkenwell, not far from the New Prison and the stinking River Fleet. Despite the long hours and low pay, Mog’s job has…
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Letters to a Stranger by Thomas JamesGraywolf Press, 2008 (originally Houghton Mifflin, 1973)
Letters to a Stranger starts with the quiet dream-like images of “Waking Up”: “curls of dark grass,” “a lake of dark petals” (p 5). The poems continue full of quiet, full of dreams and death. There are some exquisite bits early in the book, like “a few perfect flakes of snow/When the season is just…
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Seven Notebooks by Campbell McGrathecco (Harper Collins), 2008
The flap copy of this book calls it “a season-by-season account of a year in the life of its narrator,” and says it’s “not a novel in verse, not a poetic journal, but a lyric chronicle,” all of which sounds promising—though really, it was the cover that caught my eye when I saw this book…
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Antoine’s Alphabet: Watteau and His World by Jed PerlAlfred A. Knopf (Borzoi), 2008
If I were to see a painting or sketch by Watteau in a museum, I’m not sure if it would catch my eye. I might look at it and think, “people, yawn,” and move on. I tend to like abstract art or minimalist art, art that is about color or shape, or else I like…
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The Rider on the White Horse by Theodor StormTranslated by James WrightNew York Review Books, 2009 (translation orginally 1964)
Until the last story, which is the title story and the last that Storm wrote, I wasn’t enraptured by this book. Each story had its satisfying bits, but mostly they were too self-consciously stories, too concerned with doomed love, too nostalgic. But I liked this, from “In the Great Hall,” the last bit especially: [she]…