what I’ve been reading lately:
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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,
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The Wings of the Dove by Henry JamesMiramax Books, 1997 (originally The Bodley Head, 1902)
James’s sentences are often exquisite: sentences as long as paragraphs, sentences full of commas, phrases nested like Russian dolls. His style forces me to slow down, to re-read passages, and I appreciate his pacing, his rhythm. Even the long slow middle of the book, a period of waiting for Kate and Merton and Milly, and
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What Happened to Lani Garver by Carol Plum-UcciHarcourt, 2002
This story of small-town narrow-mindedness is unsettling, upsetting, but also well worth reading. Growth & progress & learning to be real.
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The Voyage Out by Virginia WoolfBarnes & Noble Classics, 2004 (originally the Duckworth Press, 1915)
Woolf’s first novel is full of luminous detail, perfect descriptin: a boat moving along a river, a thunderstorm, the way night falls or morning breaks. Familiar themes of aloneness, the inadequacy of language, the difficulty of communication: but here that’s all combined with the disconnect between the sexes, which makes this book feel frustratingly dated