what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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A String in the Harp by Nancy BondMargaret K. McElderry Books, 1984 (originally 1976)
A time-travelling magical book, set in Wales, full of a sense of place and a sense of history and altogether pleasing because of that. At first, I wasn’t sure if I could get past the sometimes stiff dialogue, but the story soon grabbed my attention, as did the landscape, the sea and the rivers and…
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Figgs and Phantoms by Ellen RaskinE.P. Dutton & Co., 1974
Raskin’s books are always smart and lots of fun, full of wordplay and absurdity. This one, which is about a teenager who’s embarrassed by her eccentric vaudevillian family, wasn’t as endearing to me as The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) or The Westing Game, but it was still quirky and pleasing. Also, I…
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The Story of the Amulet by E. NesbitDell, 1987 (originally T. Fisher Unwin, 1906)
Adventures in time and in space, this time: ancient Egypt, Babylon, Atlantis. In this book, Nesbit’s politics are more obvious than in the previous two (the children visit a future utopian London, where the Thames runs clean and children choose their own areas of concentration in school, and workers are no longer poor and miserable).…
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The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. NesbitPuffin Books, 1994 (orginally T. Fisher Unwin, 1904)
This is the second book of the trilogy that begins with Five Children and It, and this one is my favorite. The children find an egg wrapped inside a cheap carpet that their mother’s bought, and the egg turns out to be a phoenix, and the carpet turns out to be a magic carpet. Adventures…
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Five Children and It by E. NesbitBooks of Wonder, 1999 (originally T. Fisher Unwin, 1902)
Part of what is so pleasing about E. Nesbit’s books is the way that her children navigate through the world, and the world they navigate through: in this book, a summer-holiday-world of adults and sand-fairies and magical events and not very many other children. And, of course, I’m smitten with the British-ness of this story,…