what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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Peterson’s Ultimate GRE Tool Kit by Drew JohnsonThomson Peterson’s, 2004
As an introduction to the test format, this book is OK, but it could be much better-edited: there are some errors, both in the text and in the practice tests. Example: on one practice test, the book says that the solutions of -x2 = 2x-15 are x=-3, 5 because in solving the problem, the author…
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. RowlingScholastic. 2007
Instead of talking about the book (so many good details! never mind the epilogue!) I’ll just say: if I had to spend a summer weekend sick with a cold, I’m glad it was this one, when really, I didn’t want to do anything anyway, other than re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and read…
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Secret Frequencies: A New York Education by John SkoylesUniversity of Nebraska Press, 2003
This is the third book from the American Lives Series that I’ve read: I might be on something of a literary nonfiction kick lately, memoir especially, the stories people tell about themselves and how those stories get told. This one is about the summer Skoyles was 16, 1965: living in Queens, learning Manhattan. It’s about…
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Count Karlstein by Philip PullmanKnopf, 1998 (originally Chatto & Windus, 1982)
So pleasingly fast-paced and funny. Hildi Kelmar lives in a village in the Swiss Alps, and works as a maid at Castle Karlstein. Her employer, Count Karlstein, is the guardian of his two orphaned English nieces and a thoroughly nasty individual, the sort who goes in for pacts with demons. It’s nearly All Souls’ Eve,…
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Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart LovelaceHarperCollins, 2000 (originally Thomas Y. Crowell, 1940)
As a child, I didn’t much like rural “old-fashioned” stories: I read a few Laura Ingalls Wilder books and thought they were OK, but couldn’t get through Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms or Anne of Green Gables and had never even heard of Betsy-Tacy. I think I appreciate the sweetness (& quaintness) of this story, which…