what I’ve been reading lately:
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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]
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The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia by Laura MillerLittle, Brown and Company, 2008
I was reading this book on a Brooklyn-bound F train one evening, and could tell that a man a few seats over was staring at the cover. He scrambled for a pen and wrote the title down on the paper shopping bag he was carrying, then stood up at the next stop and stood in
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Now You’re the Enemy by James Allen HallThe University of Arkansas Press, 2007
Most of these poems center on, or circle around, the speaker’s mother. “I maul her into memory,” the first poem says, but warns us, too, that “no story is true” (p 3). There is strain and violence, violence against the speaker’s mother, and then her responding violence against the world. I think my favorite of
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The Little Stranger by Sarah WatersRiverhead Books (Penguin), 2009
This is the story of crumbling house in Warwickshire, the family who lives in it, and a doctor, whose first name we never learn, who finds himself increasingly entangled with the family’s affairs. It’s a story about class tensions, and also a ghost story, quite creepy and hard to put down, but at the same