what I’ve been reading lately:
-
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha PesslViking, 2006
“Gotta tell us if we’re in a comedy or a mellow drama or a whodidit or what they call a theater of the absurd,” drawls a convenience store employee toward the middle of this book, continuing: “Ya can’t just leave us standin’ on stage with no dialogue.” […]”It’s a whodunit,” Blue van Meer answers, asks
-
The Sea, the Sea by Iris MurdochPenguin Books, 2001 (originally Chatto & Windus, 1978)
“Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit”: this on the second page of this book, and of its narrator’s diary, but of course nothing goes as planned. Charles Arrowby, fancying himself Prospero, can’t really give up power (or the illusion of it): the playwright-director can’t stop scripting scenes, moving people one way and
-
Prep by Curtis SittenfeldRandom House, 2005
I read this book quickly, both because it was pleasing and because it made me a little anxious: knowing that something would go wrong, feeling, along with the narrator, the potential for embarrassment around every corner. As much as the phrase “in this moment” (or “in that moment”) is used (and it’s used a lot),
-
Gone to New York: Adventures in the City by Ian FrazierPicador, 2006 (Originally Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
Frazier’s observations of New York are detailed and rich: the long essay on Canal Street (the candy-factory-turned-loft that Frazier lived in, the army-navy surplus store his landlord ran, the sounds of car horns and the colors of the sunset) is especially excellent, as are the essays about Queens and Brooklyn. Part of what I like
-
Sea Room by Adam NicolsonNorth Point Press (FSG), 2002 (Originally HarperColllins, 2001)
In this pleasingly broad book, Nicolson delves into the geological, natural, and social history of the Shiant Isles, 600 acres of rock and sheep-grazing grass in the Outer Hebrides that Nicolson inherited from his father, who purchased them after his mother (Vita Sackville-West) noticed an ad for them in the newspaper. The Shiants are not
-
Dog Years: A Memoir by Mark DotyHarperCollins, 2007
I’ve been reading this book on the train and finding myself getting a little teary from the tenderness and sweetness and sadness of it, how Mark Doty articulates sorrow and hope and the joy a dog is/has/brings to people. As usual, Doty’s writing is detailed, vivid: he conjures such clear images of his beloved retrievers,
-
The Glass Age by Cole SwensenAlice James Books, 2007
A book about “what it is to see, and what it is to look through” (p 7). Swensen writes about window-glass and canvas: Pierre Bonnard’s paintings, Caillebotte’s “Young Man at His Window,” Alberti’s De Pictura, Hammershøi’s paintings of doors and light. Light and surfaces: where perspective draws the eye, or curiosity: a small object in
-
Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life by Wendy MassLittle, Brown and Company, 2006
It’s a month from Jeremy Fink’s 13th birthday when a mysterious package arrives at his apartment. Inside, there’s a locked wooden box with four keyholes; the box is engraved with the words “The meaning of life: for Jeremy Fink to open on his 13th birthday.” Jeremy recognizes the engraving as the unmistakable work of his
-
The Mislaid Magician or Ten Years After by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline StevermerHarcourt, 2006
Another excellent romp featuring Cecelia & Kate, and the magical England in which they live. The year is 1828, and a German magician/surveyor has gone missing near Leeds, while investigating a new railway line. Lord Wellington asks Cecelia’s husband James to look into the matter, and Cecelia travels north with him to see what’s going
-
The Last Time I Saw You by Rebecca BrownCity Lights Books, 2006
These short stories have a distinctive voice: wry narration, strings of synonyms: “I willfully purposefully doggedly […] pursue follow chase desire” (p 28), parenthetical asides. There’s a preoccupation with the past, with remembering and misremembering: in the title story, every concrete detail slips and shifts, the story is one “maybe” after another. (If the facts