what I’ve been reading lately:
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Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnonHarmony Books, 2007 (originally Random House of Canada, 2007)
I was familiar with the premise of Plenty before I started reading it: after learning that the food we eat generally travels between 1,500 and 3,000 miles before getting to us, two Canadians decided to embark on a year of local eating. For Smith and MacKinnon, “local” meant food that came from within 100 miles
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Proof by David AuburnFaber and Faber, Inc., 2001
Reading Proof, I thought of Rebecca Goldstein’s Properties of Light, though I don’t remember enough about the latter to properly compare the two works. Both share a similar central triangle: brilliant/mad father (a physicist in Goldstein’s book, a mathematician in Auburn’s play), brilliant/possibly unhinged daughter, plus a (male) student of the father’s who is the
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The Sea Egg by L.M. BostonHarcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967
L.M. Boston’s books are, without fail, a delight. I like how they don’t condescend, how, though they’re written for children, they use sentences with lots of commas and nested thoughts. Most of all, perhaps, I like how full of sensory detail they are: how light on water looks, how a stone feels in your hand.
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The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel SlaterGotham Books, 2006 (Originally Fourth Estate, 2005)
I picked this up at the library because it was so pleasingly thick, with wonderful color photos inside (something about the saturation of the color in these pictures really appeals). It’s a delight: Slater writes about food in a way that resonates with me. I like his focus on the daily ritual of cooking and
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I, Coriander by Sally GardnerDial Books, 2005 (originally Orion Books, 2005)
There’s something so satisfying about historical-fiction-meets-fantasy, and this book is especially lovely. It’s set in London in the mid-1600s, from the beheading of Charles I to the Interregnum and then the Restoration, and when I’d finished reading I felt sad to leave this imagining of London, the Thames winding through the city, the shouts of
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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapitrans. Mattias Ripa and Blake FerrisPantheon, 2003
Persepolis is a smart and poignant memoir of an Iranian girlhood, of life in Tehran after the Islamic Revolution and during the Iran-Iraq War. It’s a graphic novel whose balance of words and images struck me as just right (which is to say: it’s pretty text-heavy); the art is bold and black-and-white and totally satisfying.
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Circadian by Joanna KlinkPenguin Poets, 2007
These poems are concerned with daily rhythms of the title, but also longer ones: geologic, planetary, evolutionary time-scales. Birds recur throughout, often in sudden flight, like those in the second poem that “drop and lift off the roof,/aerial sweeps, or just bursts of/ feather, wings, claws […]” or the “sixteen waxwings in the juniper” in
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The King in the Window by Adam GopnikMiramax Books, Hyperion Books for Children, 2005
This book seems slow at first, dull at the very start, but then there’s a richness of detail that grabs your interest, a sense of life in Paris. And then the story properly starts. Oliver, who is eleven and an American living in Paris, finds himself at the center of a centuries-old struggle between good
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The Nature of Monsters by Clare ClarkHarcourt, 2007
I read a post about The Nature of Monsters over at A Work in Progress a few months ago, and that description of the bookseller’s shop that Danielle quotes was enough to make me want to read it. I like how gripping the story is, and the boldness of its heroine, and of course I
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Rebel Angels by Libba BrayDelacorte Press, 2005
So delightful: plot twists and suspicions confirmed and suspense and danger, but also Christmas balls and gaslit London streets and desire. I like how Bray plays with the idea of illusion and what it means or how it works; I like emphasis on choice, choosing well, the “I choose this” of the first book and