what I’ve been reading lately:
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Captivity by Laurie SheckKnopf, 2007
In this slim (but not slight) collection of poems, Laurie Sheck draws from a number of inspirations: the notebooks of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Smart, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American captivity narratives. Poems who take their titles from phrases within them (“But couldn’t cross,” “This austere and fierce machinery”) are interspersed with poems called…
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The Penelopiad by Margaret AtwoodCanongate, 2005
The story of Homer’s Odyssey, retold: a feminist take that focuses on Penelope (who narrates, from the underworld) and the story of the twelve hanged maids (who are killed by Telemachus and Odysseus, after the slaughter of the suitors) . Clever, sometimes forcedly so, but well-written. The device of the maids-as-chorus, delivering interludes in varying…
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Italian Hours by Henry James, edited by John AuchardPenguin, 1995
Not as vivid as James’s fiction, but still enjoyable: pleasingly sinuous sentences, and impressions of light, of color, of landscape—ilex and cypress, canals and frescoes and dimly-lighted churches, the slower pace of travel in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
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Facing the Night by Ned RoremShoemaker & Hoard, 2006
This book is, as the subtitle says, “A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings”—but, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap. Rorem writes about music in his diary, and bits of those thoughts about music (and the state of it in America today) end up in his speeches, letters-to-the-editor, and program notes for his own pieces.…
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It by Inger Christensen, trans. Susanna NiedNew Directions, 2006
“Like Hesiod,” writes Anne Carson, in her introduction to this volume, “Inger Christensen wants to give an account of what is—of everything that is and how it is and what we are in the midst of it” (ix). Which seems promising, as does the structure of the poem: prologos, logos, epilogos, and within logos, three…