what I’ve been reading lately:
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Up All Night: A Short Story Collection by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, et al.Harper Teen, 2008
While I enjoyed this collection of six short stories about nighttime epiphanies, by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, Patricia McCormick, Sarah Weeks, and Gene Luen Yang, I definitely liked some of the individual stories more than others. Part of it, I think, is the length factor, or the intended-audience factor: I like short short
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A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher BenfeyThe Penguin Press, 2008
The subtitle of this book—”Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade”—is more gossipy-seeming than the book itself is (though I think its gossipy bits, about Mabel Loomis Todd’s affair with Austin Dickinson, and Henry Ward Beecher’s possible affair with Elizabeth Tilton, are
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The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha HuntHoughton Mifflin, 2008
It’s 1943 and Nicola Tesla is eighty-six and living in obscurity in the Hotel New Yorker: in this novel, a snooping chambermaid whose father’s best friend claims to have just built a time machine befriends him; he talks to the pigeons on his windowsill; the ghost of Sam Clemens writes Tesla’s biography. The New York
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Paris to the Moon by Adam GopnikRandom House, 2001 (originally 2000)
It’s easy to be enchanted by a city you’ve never been, and Gopnik was enamoured of Paris before he’d so much as visited it. His first trip only served to solidify his ideas of the city’s charms: “The trees cast patterned light on the street. We went out for dinner and, for fifteen francs, had
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The Guermantes Way by Marcel Prousttrans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence KilmartinRevised by D.J. EnrightModern Library, 2003 (this translation/edition originally Chatto & Windus, 1992)
A central concern of this volume is the gap between what a name conveys to us and what the person who bears that name is really like: how the meanings of a name change from one time of our lives to another, and how all those successive meanings may hold little or none of the
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The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey by Trenton Lee StewartLittle, Brown and Company, 2008
This was the sort of book I am not sure if I would have liked as a kid (I can’t remember if I liked adventure-ish books or found them stressful or else just never really read them, other than A Wrinkle in Time), but that I totally enjoy now. It’s full of adventure and riddles
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The Penderwicks on Gardam Street by Jeanne BirdsallKnopf, 2008
In this sequel to The Penderwicks, summer vacation is finished and the Penderwick sisters are back in school. Their autumn is going along pleasingly…until their Aunt Claire visits them, and gives their father a letter from their mother, who had died several years before. The letter encourages Mr. Penderwick to start dating again, and the
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The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne BirdsallYearling, 2007 (originally Knopf, 2005)
This is one of those charming summery kids’ books where a family goes on vacation and has adventures: the ordinary-life kind, not the magical kind. The Cape Cod summer house where the Penderwicks usually go has just been sold, so, instead, the four girls, their father, and their dog end up at a new summer
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Tintin in the New World: A Romance by Frederic TutenThe Thing Itself and INPRINT Editions/Black Classic Press, 2005 (originally W. Morrow, 1993)
As its title says, this book features Tintin—yes, the character from the comics by Hergé—but not Tintin of the comics exactly, not quite. It’s a funny book, and satisfyingly allusive; the language is often overblown but it works. At the book’s opening Tintin is bored of Marlinspike, of the winter weather keeping him indoors, of
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In Praise of the Unfinished: Selected Poems by Julia Hartwigtranslated by John and Bogdana CarpenterKnopf, 2008
What I like about these poems are the moments of clear calm in them, like this line from the first poem, “Fortune-Telling from the Seabed”: “Transparent water reveals the clear constellations of pebbles resting on the bottom” (p 3), or “That August night it poured stars like glass” (p 20). Large parts of this collection