what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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Please by Jericho BrownNew Issues (Western Michigan University), 2008
When I saw Mark Doty read at The Center, someone asked him, after the reading, if he could recommend a few other poets—this was one of the books that he mentioned. There are three sections of poems in this book, with each section titled after a button on a stereo, though obviously they’re also words…
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Averno by Louise GlückFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
Megan said she read this book in one sitting at the best bookstore in Chelsea and loved it, so I decided to get it from the library, and am glad I did. At the start of this book we learn this: “Averno. Ancient name Avernus. A small crater lake, ten miles west of Naples, Italy;…
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Dismantling the Hills by Michael McGriffUniversity of Pittsburgh Press, 2008
These are poems from a world I don’t know, the Pacific Northwest of small towns and the lumber industry: paper mills and logging roads, slash piles, steam donkeys, choker setters, the narrator and his father bucking timber. It’s desolate beauty or sometimes just desolation, staying, stuck. “I could say I left town for both of…
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Fire to Fire by Mark DotyHarper Perennial, 2009 (originally HarperCollins, 2008)
I saw Mark Doty read at The Center last month and was reminded how much I like him, and why—his work is so full of observation and exquisite description and shining moments and everyday wonders. This collection of poems, which includes new work and selections from previous books, is just what I want to be…
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Interior with Sudden Joy by Brenda ShaughnessyFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999
I wanted to like this book more than I did; I wanted more from it, or maybe just less opacity. There are moments where the play of words, the rhythm of them, feels perfect, and there are images that coalesce, but much of this collection stayed vague, just out of reach. Even so: I probably…
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Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine L. BorgmanThe MIT Press, 2007
Last month I saw Christine Borgman speak at Columbia, courtesy of the Scholarly Communication Program. After the talk I decided to read her book, which covers much of the same territory, in greater detail. Borgman starts by saying that “The Internet lies at the core of an advanced scholarly information infrastructure to facilitate distributed, data-…
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The rest of Sodom and Gomorrah
The rest of Sodom and Gomorrah, after the long middle section, carries on swimmingly: it’s that usual Proustian mix of beautiful observed detail plus funny observed society-life plus jealousy and falling in and out of love and acting more or less foolish about it. There is much about sleep and time and memory and habit:…