what I’ve been reading lately:
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…