Month: January 2008
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The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1, by Diana Wynne JonesHarperCollins, 2007 (originally 2001)
This volume comprises two previously-published books: Charmed Life, which I’d read before, and The Lives of Christopher Chant, which I hadn’t. I owned a paperback copy of Charmed Life when I was a kid, and read it over and over: it’s just the right combination of magic and cleverness and humor and excitement. Eric (Cat)…
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Wild Tongue by Rebecca SeiferleCopper Canyon Press, 2007
“Ah, it’s the feral/that interests me […]” Seiferle writes in “On the Island of Bones.” These are poems about desire, paradise, what is wild and cannot be tamed. Eroticism in red raspberries, in clams, in snapdragons. I find the poems that tell everyday stories to be the most solid, like “Eye Center” or “The Butterfly…
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Swann’s Way by Marcel Prousttrans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence KilmartinVintage, 1989 (this translation originally Chatto & Windus, 1981)
I’ve been reading Swann’s Way slowly over the past month, enjoying Proust’s slow circling sentences (the kind you have to read twice because by the end you’ve lost track of where it started), enjoying the digressions, the flashes of humor in the dialogue, and enjoying, of course, all those sense-images (lilac trees, tisane, the light…
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The Sweet Far Thing by Libba BrayDelacorte Press, 2007
In this, the last book in the trilogy that began with A Great and Terrible Beauty, there is much at stake for Gemma Doyle and her friends. This is a story of power, of using it poorly and using it well, of chaos and order, and of finding some balance, finding some path forward. As…