what I’ve been reading lately:
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Vanity Fair by William Makepeace ThackerayB&N Classics, 2003 (originally Punch, 1847)
Wit and cleverness and social climbing and downfall: an epic that’s “a novel without a hero,” just so much hypocrisy and dissatisfaction.
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Wickett’s Remedy by Myla GoldbergDoubleday, 2005
Such a pleasing novel, a story of Boston in the early 20th century, Boston in the influenza epidemic of 1918, bits of the past and bits of the present, songs and newspaper articles, how different people see the same events, and oh, streetcars and accents and imagining how streets were different a hundred years ago,
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Never Let Me Go by Kazuo IshiguroAlfred A. Knopf, 2005
Long highways connecting the countryside, connections between places, connections between people. The sense of a vague and shadowy world: a world the narrator doesn’t know, not really, and a world that the reader can’t know, either. This book is about love and sadness, the relentlessness of motion and distance, how the past is lost to
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The Last Treasure by Janet S. AndersonScholastic, 2005 (originally Dutton, 2003)
At first, this book, about a family that’s grown bitter and distant and how they begin to reconcile, seemed slow and flat. But things pick up as soon as 13-year-old Ellsworth is back in the town of Smiths Mills, where he and his distant cousin Jess set about hunting for the treasure that gives the
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Hidden Trapezes by Edward FentonDoubleday & Company, 1950
This is a sweet chapter book about a boy who’s from a family of trapeze artists. Robin, whose parents died in a circus accident when he was a small child, has been traveling the country with his uncle, moving when the circus does, staying in cheap hotels, never settling down. After an injury puts him
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If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents by Gregory RabassaNew Directions, 2005
After a discussion of translation and what a translator might or might not betray (the original words, the original language, the original author, the language being translated into, etc), Rabassa launches into his own career as a translator of books from the spanish and portuguese. His wit and word-play are pleasing, as are his discussions
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A Plea for Eros by Siri HustvedtPicador, 2006
Essays about place and memory and imagination and language, all-around pleasing, from the descriptions of New York, of Minnesota, of Norway to stories of word and wordplay. I suspect I would have enjoyed the longer essays on Henry James and Charles Dickens more if I’d read either of the works that are discussed the most
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Going Going by Naomi Shihab NyeHarperCollins, 2005
Florrie, the sixteen-year-old protagonist of this book, is pleasingly quirky. She only wears gray, and she loves history: not the history of wars and laws, but social history, daily history: the sense of the past of a place. She collects old postcards and wanders San Antonio, where she lives, noticing architectural details, riding hotel elevators,
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Lights, Camera, Amalee by Dar WilliamsScholastic, 2006
Amalee, who has just finished seventh grade, meets a grandmother she didn’t know she had, inherits a very large champagne bottle full of coins from said grandmother, and uses her inheritance to make a short documentary about endangered species. For her movie, Amalee interviews a cast of characters ranging from the “tai chi people” who
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Round Ireland in Low Gear by Eric NewbyPenguin, 1989 (originally William Collins Sons & Co, 1987)
Ireland by bicycle: wet weather, bogs, castles, ruins, roadside shrines, Guinness, et cetera. I appreciated the passages quoted from older guidebooks (and was charmed by the idea of Newby lugging books from 1912 around Ireland on a bicycle in 1985), but much of the history seemed too just-barely touched-upon; I felt like I would have