Month: February 2008
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What I Was by Meg RosoffViking Penguin, 2008 (originally Puffin, 2007)
It’s the middle of the 21st century and East Anglia’s sinking into the sea. (But the coastline’s always shifted; there have always been ruins and layers beneath.) H, who is 100, thinks back to his own not-so-buried past: to his time at a boarding school on the coast, the year he was sixteen, the year…
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Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan St. Martin’s Press, 2006
This novel’s funny moments, and there are a fair number of them, are very funny. The narrator’s a slacker named Shane who steals saltshakers, temps at an insurance agency, sleeps with his landlord’s wife, is dating a woman who beats him up in bed repeatedly. He seems to spend a lot of time at his…
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Novel Pictorial Noise by Noah Eli Gordon Harper Perennial, 2007
These are poems concerned with creation, with music and art and language and form. There’s a playfulness to them, sometimes, with flip phrasing, end-of-poem rhymes, word-play. The paragraph-poem that starts with “A photograph” is perhaps my favorite: “A photograph. A photograph admits. A photograph admits space. A photograph admits space around its subject. A photograph…
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Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapitrans. Anjali SinghPantheon, 2004
At the end of Persepolis, a teenage Marjane leaves Tehran for Austria. Persepolis 2 starts in Vienna, where Marjane finds herself living in a boarding house run by nuns. Marjane’s time in Austria isn’t easy, and she ultimately returns to Tehran, only to find that life there remains unbearably repressive. I liked the first book…