what I’ve been reading lately:
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Middlesex by Jeffrey EugenidesFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
Clever & sprawling; I loved all the detail and sense of place (Smyrna, Detroit) and cultural/familial history, plus all the Homeric turns of phrase (someone drives a “wine-dark Buick”).
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A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba BrayDelacorte Press, 2003
Delicious: silk and velvet and mystery, magic and power and desire. Victorian boarding school! Transgressiveness! I picked this book up at breakfast this morning and just kept reading, and now am all impatient to start the sequel.
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The Waves by Virginia WoolfHarvest Books, 1978 (originally Hogarth Press, 1931)
A book to read slowly, in sips. One image, then the next, then the next: how jarring it is at the start, to step into one character’s thoughts, then another’s, then another’s. The tension between aloneness and connection, or the balance. How time passes. The poetry of place: the sea, the garden, St. Paul’s with
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Leon and the Spitting Image by Allen KurzweilGreenwillow Books (HarperCollins), 2003
If the first day of school is any indication of things to come, fourth grade is not going to be a good year for Leon Zeisel. The class bully is as mean as ever, and, what’s worse, the fourth grade teacher is a scary woman with a penchant for sewing. For Leon, who’s still clumsy
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The Art of Travel by Alain de BottonPantheon, 2002 (originally Hamish Hamilton, 2002)
Really smart and pleasing: I’ve so loved reading this book on my train rides to and from work this week. de Botton examines the motives and logic of travel: why we leave home, and what leaving home might teach us. The book is nine chapters, each covering a place or places and each with a
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Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdel-FattahOrchard Books (Scholastic), 2007
Smart and funny and sweet book about Amal, an Australian-Palestinian high school junior who decides to wear the hijab full-time. Amal’s smart and independent, good at debate (and therefore also good at quick reactions to the stupid things people say to her based on the assumptions they make about her and her faith). Generally speaking,
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The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee StewartLittle, Brown and Company, 2007
Clever and compelling: smart kids, puzzles, and peril—a bit of The Westing Game, a bit of The View from Saturday, and lots of excitement. The illustrations by Carson Ellis are totally charming, especially the last one, all stars and snow and rooftops.
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Frail-Craft by Jessica FisherYale University Press, 2007
A sense of being adrift: this sense persists in Fisher’s poems, and in a satisfying way. Louise Glück writes, in the foreword, that “the poems move like dreams or spells […] succumb to movement as though it were desire” (xi). There is dream-logic and dream-motion, from the very first poem, “Journey,” on. The book begins
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Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny UglowFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 (originally Faber and Faber, 2006)
Smart and well-researched and thoroughly enjoyable, if sometimes scattered: why is it that we get a detailed description of how letterpress printing works in the prologue, but don’t learn the names of the tools engravers use until page 238? Still, I was happily engrossed in the story of Bewick and his world: the streets and
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L’Ile Noire by HergéCasterman, 1984 (originally 1956)
I never read any of the Tintin books as a kid, so this was my first excursion into the world of Tintin et Milou, Dupond et Dupont, and the various bad guys Tintin and Milou manage to outsmart. Reading in French is very slow going for me, lots of pausing to consult my dictionary or