what I’ve been reading lately:
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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”).
-
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.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…