what I’ve been reading lately:
-
Venice from the Ground Up by James H.S. McGregorHarvard University Press, 2006
I read about this book in a post on Harvard University Press’s blog, and I was immediately won over by the old map and by that first paragraph. The book as a whole is pleasing, but not quite as pleasing as that first paragraph made me hope it would be. It’s a very well-produced book,
-
Grief Lessons: Four plays by Euripides, translated by Anne CarsonNew York Review of Books, 2006
I like the lucidity of Carson’s prose, the framing essays around these plays, and the prefaces to each one: the sense of knowledge and ease and also a sly smile when she writes things like “The first eight hundred lines of the play will bore you, they’re supposed to.” The four plays: Herakles, Hekabe, Hippolytos,
-
District and Circle by Seamus HeaneyFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 (originally Faber and Faber, 2006)
I like the rhythm and shape of Heaney’s poems, the solidity of them. Especially pleasing: the first-day-of-school details of “The Lagans Road,” the three parts of “Out of This World.”
-
The Lights Go On Again by Kit PearsonViking, 1993
This is the last book in the trilogy that begins with The Sky Is Falling, and it’s as pleasing as the first one was. As the war in Europe comes to an end, Canada’s “war guests” start to return to England. Norah and Gavin wonder when their turn will come: Norah’s excited, but Gavin, who
-
Looking at the Moon by Kit PearsonViking, 1991
This is the second book in Kit Pearson’s “Guests of War” trilogy, and it’s pleasing, but less exciting to me than the first. Gavin is still wonderfully charming and quirky, and I like the historical details, the sense of time and place, but Norah’s now thirteen and feeling all topsy-turvy and falling in love with
-
Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala O’FaolainOwl Books, 1999 (originally New Island Books, 1996)
Each chapter in this memoir felt perfectly paced, and pleasingly varied: family history, personal history, untangling the past, details of daily life in Ireland and England: Earl Grey and lemon cake at tea, conversations in Dublin pubs with poets. What O’Faolain writes about men and women (about patriarchy, about the rise of feminism) is interesting
-
The Sky is Falling by Kit PearsonPenguin (Viking Kestrel), 1989
The flap copy of this book notes that Pearson is “a librarian as well as a writer,” which might be part of why the book includes so many pleasing library-ish and book-ish moments. The novel is the story of two British children who are evacuated to Canada during WWII, and while parts of it are
-
Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece by Patrick Leigh FermorNew York Review of Books, 2006 (originally John Murray, Publishers, 1966)
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s prose is wonderfully precise: it seems like each word has been carefully chosen from a rich and expansive vocabulary, and the result is a collection of essays where the tone of each seems perfectly suited to its subject matter. There are shepherds and monks, mountain-top monasteries and bus rides in the middle
-
The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories by Susanna ClarkeBloomsbury, 2006
This is a beautifully designed volume: the pink flowers on the otherwise dark cover, the wine-colored endpapers, the elegant type, the rough edges of the pages. The stories it contains are clever and pleasing and good for quiet autumn or winter evenings: “On Lickerish Hill,” (a reworking of the Tom Tit Tot story) and “Mrs.
-
Brookland by Emily BartonFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
Absorbing, beautiful, detailed & precise in descriptions of everything from emotional states to the mechanics of bridge-building to the many herbs and spices that can be used to flavor gin. And the sense of place, the 18th-century New York family names that linger as place-names, street-names: Joralemon, Sands, Boerum, Schermerhorn, Luquer. I found myself daydreaming