what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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Mr. Dimock Explores the Mysteries of the East by Edward Cameron DimockAlgonquin Books, 1999
This book, subtitled “Journeys in India,” is a series of clever and chatty vignettes about Indian culture and life on the Indian subcontinent. Dimock is at his best telling funny stories: the one about the monkey who gets into the house and amuses itself at Dimock’s wife’s dressing table; the one about the difficulties of…
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The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea by Mark HaddonVintage, 2006 (originally Picador, 2005)
The first poem in this collection uses, as its title, a phrase from near the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (“Go, litel bok”); Chaucer is quoted again in the fourth poem (which includes the line “our litel spot of erthe that with the see embracéd is”). Much of the book is similarly allusive (translations/reworkings…
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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…