what I’ve been reading lately:
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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
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Tanglewreck by Jeanette WintersonBloomsbury, 2006
Lighthousekeeping is the story of an orphan named Silver. Tanglewreck is also the story of an orphan named Silver. It’s a story about duty, hope, multiplicity, possibility. Possibility: the Silver of Tanglewreck as the Silver of Lighthousekeeping, elsewhere in the multiverse? “There are Lighthousekeepers and Lock Keepers, and Housekeepers […] and there are Timekeepers.” (p
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Black Swan Green by David MitchellRandom House, 2006
A few weeks ago, I read this post about reading on the Harvard University Press Publicity Blog, which led me to this post in the Boston Globe’s “Brainiac” blog, which, in turn, led me to this piece by Lindsay Waters in the Chronicle, which contains the following quote. I have increasingly come to believe that
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The Sea by John BanvilleAlfred A. Knopf, 2005 (originally Picador, 2005)
Light and place and atmosphere: weathers and seasons beautifully described. This book is full of unusual words, elegant turns of phrase. Not much action, but the past: what we remember and how memory is true or false, the things we don’t see at all or the things we see wrongly, or the things we see