what I’ve been reading lately:
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The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Ecotrans. Geoffrey BrockHarcourt, 2005
Yambo wakes in a fog: he’s lost his episodic memory, though his semantic memory remains. He speaks in stock phrases and quotations; he remembers lines of poetry but not his own life. And so he returns to his childhood country house to try to remember who he is, digging through boxes of notebooks, records, and
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The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles DickensPenguin Books, 1980 (originally in Master Humphrey’s Clock, 1840-41)
When Dickens is sentimental or moralizing, things drag; it’s hard not to roll one’s eyes. I was trying to articulate, the other day, what I found off-putting about this book: the plot twists that feel manipulative, the way the characterizations are so black and white, morally speaking. But there’s plenty that’s good too: plenty that’s
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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