what I’ve been reading lately:
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Notes from the Air by John Ashberyecco (HarperCollins), 2007
“Vetiver,” the first poem in this collection, is one of my favorites: the slow grace of it: image, image, image, motion, the shift from the first stanza to the casual “Well, it just kind of came apart in the hand” of the second (p 3). “The Ice Storm” is a poem in which to feel…
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The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World by E.L. KonigsburgAtheneum Books for Young Readers, 2007
Reading a kids’ book after reading Proust felt funny, and I’m not sure I have anything to say about this book, other than that I read it in two days and stayed up past bedtime to finish it. Parts of this book—the mystery of it, the friendship between children and an eccentric old woman—reminded me…
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Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Prousttrans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence KilmartinRevised by D.J. EnrightModern Library, 2003 (this translation/edition originally Chatto & Windus, 1992)
I’ve been reading Within a Budding Grove slowly over the past few months, in ten-page snippets on the train, sprawled on the floor, stretched out in bed. What I like best in Proust are the lyrical passages, the images, full sentences like this one: I encountered no one at first but a footman who after…
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Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon, trans. Luc SanteNew York Review of Books, 2007
I read this book in March but forgot to write about it at the time: it’s a collection of short news items by Fénéon, published anonymously in a French newspaper in 1906. They’re mostly police-blotter items, sometimes sad, sometimes funny, often worded in a clever or interesting way. On page 85, for example: “”M. Jules…
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Kusamakura by Natsume Soseki trans. Meredith McKinneyPenguin Books, 2008
Beautiful images: a “vast inkwash world of cloud and rain shot through diagonally with a thousand silver arrows,” the blue of a celadon plate, the yellow of mustard-blossoms. A journey in vignettes and inaction: a painter walks through the mountains, stays at an inn with a hot spring, flirts with the daughter of the innkeeper,…
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What I Was by Meg RosoffViking Penguin, 2008 (originally Puffin, 2007)
It’s the middle of the 21st century and East Anglia’s sinking into the sea. (But the coastline’s always shifted; there have always been ruins and layers beneath.) H, who is 100, thinks back to his own not-so-buried past: to his time at a boarding school on the coast, the year he was sixteen, the year…
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Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan St. Martin’s Press, 2006
This novel’s funny moments, and there are a fair number of them, are very funny. The narrator’s a slacker named Shane who steals saltshakers, temps at an insurance agency, sleeps with his landlord’s wife, is dating a woman who beats him up in bed repeatedly. He seems to spend a lot of time at his…
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Novel Pictorial Noise by Noah Eli Gordon Harper Perennial, 2007
These are poems concerned with creation, with music and art and language and form. There’s a playfulness to them, sometimes, with flip phrasing, end-of-poem rhymes, word-play. The paragraph-poem that starts with “A photograph” is perhaps my favorite: “A photograph. A photograph admits. A photograph admits space. A photograph admits space around its subject. A photograph…
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Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapitrans. Anjali SinghPantheon, 2004
At the end of Persepolis, a teenage Marjane leaves Tehran for Austria. Persepolis 2 starts in Vienna, where Marjane finds herself living in a boarding house run by nuns. Marjane’s time in Austria isn’t easy, and she ultimately returns to Tehran, only to find that life there remains unbearably repressive. I liked the first book…
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The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1, by Diana Wynne JonesHarperCollins, 2007 (originally 2001)
This volume comprises two previously-published books: Charmed Life, which I’d read before, and The Lives of Christopher Chant, which I hadn’t. I owned a paperback copy of Charmed Life when I was a kid, and read it over and over: it’s just the right combination of magic and cleverness and humor and excitement. Eric (Cat)…