what I’ve been reading lately:
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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…
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Lucy Rose, Here’s the Thing About Me by Katy KellyDelacorte (Random House), 2004
When eight-year-old Lucy Rose’s parents separate, she and her mom move to Washington D.C., where her grandparents live. What follows is a pretty standard story, told in the form of diary entries, of getting used to a new place, making friends, and having child-sized adventures. Lucy Rose is smart, and her voice is really endearing,…
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Affinity by Sarah WatersRiverhead Books. 2002 (originally Virago, 1999)
Perfectly faux-Victorian, the twists & turns of the mind & of prison corridors, allusive and delicious and dark. A story told in the form of diary entries, secrets and private thoughts.
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How I Live Now by Meg RosoffRandom House, 2004
Intense & amazing; one of those books I liked too much to say anything intelligent about.
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The Night Watch by Sarah WatersRiverhead (Penguin), 2006
A story told backwards; a story of how people came to be where (who) they are. The start of the first sentence: “So this, said Kay to herself, is the kind of person you’ve become: a person whose clocks and wristwatches have stopped […]” Elsewhere, Kay remarks that people’s pasts are “so much more interesting…
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The Great Good Thing by Roderick Townley Atheneum, 2001
A book about fairy-tales, stories, memories and dreams, family-history—and how all these things live on, or don’t. I was charmed from the opening lines: “Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn’t get to live it very often.” Clever and sweet and pleasingly book-ish.
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Bellini in Istanbul by Lillias BeverTupelo Press, 2005
Archaeology as metaphor, excavation: bringing things to the light, brushing off the sand and dust. I am, generally speaking, a sucker for poems about art, poems about seeing, and so it’s not surprising that I enjoyed this collection. (The last poem, “Blue Guide to Istanbul,” was perhaps my favorite: descriptions of blue objects, small &…
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“Storm in June” by Irène Némirovsky Translated by Sandra SmithKnopf, 2006
I read an advance reader’s copy of Suite Française in March: it only contained the first section of the two part book (it was meant to be five parts, like a symphony, but Némirovsky was deported to Auschwitz and died before finishing it). “Storm in June,” the story of the Paris evacuation in 1940 and…