Posts tagged as:

books for grownups

Algeria: Of Dreams and Assassins; Malika Mokeddem, 1995

August 20, 2011

My childhood and adolescence would have been a hellish and unending imprisonment without the marvelous complicity of this language that I read in [i.e., French]…. For me, the desire to write is very old; it dates from adolescence…. For me, writing is an existential need. For a woman it is the best means of affirming [...]

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Albania: The Accident; Ismail Kadare, 2008

August 19, 2011

Oh summer. Reading goes on, late at night, tucked into a day away, early in the morning, but between comings and goings, writing grants and writing lists, baking birthday cakes, organizing kids’ complex summer schedules, and all the rest that pours abundantly down upon us in the mad, brief abundant season of New England summer, [...]

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Peru: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter; Mario Vargas Llosa, 1977

June 4, 2011

Once again, of late, the quantity of books on the property has far exceeded the available shelf space, a dreadful and recurring problem. The books with no home make their way to the floor of my studio, spilling out in an ever-rising sea of books. Probably best to avoid flood metaphors in difficult times such [...]

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Read Around the World, cont.

June 2, 2011

Geez, I just typed in all the countries in the world, more or less; that is, recognized by the UN or by a whole bunch of countries, according to Wikipedia, or recognized by me for obvious literary reasons (Palestine).
Daunting.
Daunting, at any rate, to imagine finding literature from so many island nations, including the ones I’ve [...]

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Afganistan: The Kite Runner; Khaled Hosseini, 2003

May 29, 2011

I see already, here at the starting line, that the Read Around the World project will mean I am sometimes writing about books I don’t admire wholeheartedly or recommend unreservedly. This goes against my policy here of only writing about what I love, only praising. Life is short, and I know how long it takes [...]

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Read Around the World

May 20, 2011

Two things I’ve wanted for a long time came into my life this week, an electric kettle* and a world map shower curtain. Examining the latter is surprising (look how long and skinny the Red Sea is!), mystifying (just what, exactly, is going on down at the tip of South America?), and inspiring. Specifically, it [...]

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Rosy’s t-shirt wedding dress (Oh happy day!)

April 24, 2011

Wedding dress by Juno Lamb, with block prints by Kit Brown, from a pattern by our pal Megan Nicolay in her fun and fabulous book Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-Shirt, and advice and workshop space from Chris Clyne. I made a variety of tops; Megan is wearing the one intended to go [...]

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3 ways of looking at Notre Dame

April 14, 2011

I’m not sure it’s possible for me to take a photo in Paris that isn’t in some way a cliché. The city has been photographed probably as much as any place on earth, and by many of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. (To see many wonderful photos from the neighborhood of Notre Dame, [...]

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Life, death, and French

February 2, 2011

A month seems long enough to be silent, a strange month turning on the multifarious spokes of the wheel of life. Death, coming to people we think too young to die—we, with our secret hopes of long, fulfilling lives, of seeing our grandchildren and great-grandchildren be born. And birth, which can come earlier than it [...]

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Father Christmas; Raymond Briggs (1973)

December 16, 2010

Oh, I love Raymond Brigg’s Father Christmas—a nice counterpoint to ‘Twas the night before… My kind of grumbling, irascible, oft-tippling, animal-loving, snow-hating, gourmand bachelor Santa Claus. In brightly colorful, detailed drawings and a few choice words Briggs takes us through Father Christmas’s long day and night leading up to Christmas, and sees him through his [...]

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