what I’ve been reading lately:
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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)
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Wild Tongue by Rebecca SeiferleCopper Canyon Press, 2007
“Ah, it’s the feral/that interests me […]” Seiferle writes in “On the Island of Bones.” These are poems about desire, paradise, what is wild and cannot be tamed. Eroticism in red raspberries, in clams, in snapdragons. I find the poems that tell everyday stories to be the most solid, like “Eye Center” or “The Butterfly
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Swann’s Way by Marcel Prousttrans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence KilmartinVintage, 1989 (this translation originally Chatto & Windus, 1981)
I’ve been reading Swann’s Way slowly over the past month, enjoying Proust’s slow circling sentences (the kind you have to read twice because by the end you’ve lost track of where it started), enjoying the digressions, the flashes of humor in the dialogue, and enjoying, of course, all those sense-images (lilac trees, tisane, the light
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The Sweet Far Thing by Libba BrayDelacorte Press, 2007
In this, the last book in the trilogy that began with A Great and Terrible Beauty, there is much at stake for Gemma Doyle and her friends. This is a story of power, of using it poorly and using it well, of chaos and order, and of finding some balance, finding some path forward. As