what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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Life: A User’s Manual by Georges PerecTranslated by David BellosDavid R. Godine, 1987 (originally published in French by Hachette, 1978)
This book is sprawling, encyclopedic, full of lists, and wonderful. It’s the story of the life of a Paris apartment building, but seen with the focus of an elderly inhabitant, the painter Valène, who’s decided he wants to make a painting of the building and the people who live in it. The opening epigraphs, by…
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The Sadness of Men: Photographs by Philip PerkisThe Quantuck Lane Press, 2008
Max Kozloff, in his introduction to this book of Perkis’s photographs, writes that these images are “pauses extracted from the current of ordinary viewing,” and also notes the way that often, what’s significant in a picture is “usually though not always set apart by a view through an aperture or enclosure” (p 9). It’s this…
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Hood by Emma Donoghue Alyson Books, 1998 (originally Hamish Hamilton, 1995)
Cara Wall’s at the center of this book, except her presence is also an absence: she’s dead, so her voice isn’t here, only in snippets of remembered conversations, or imagined ones. Her girlfriend reading the death notice she’s put in the newspaper: W A L L, suddenly, Cara, beloved daughter of Ian and Winona. How…
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Talking in the Dark by Billy MerrellPUSH (Scholastic), 2003
This book’s a “poetry memoir,” and for that, I like it, though sometimes it feels like too much narrative, not enough image. Merrell writes about childhood, growing up, coming out, falling in and out of love; much of the book is about relationships, whether romantic or friendly or familial. I loved, in the first section,…
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Fidelity by Grace PaleyFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008
I like Grace Paley’s poems, how conversational they are, and how the best ones are full of a strong voice, or a sense of place. I like the way her New York poems, like the one on page 15, which begins “a new york city man is,” are perfectly observed city-moments, this one a man…