Year in Reading

December 21, 2012

A Year in Reading: Benjamin Anastas 0

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Reading the book from night to night is like sitting on the stands at poolside and watching her swim the 4X100 meter medley of a life.

December 21, 2012

A Year in Reading: Thomas Beckwith 0

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As always when I read Banville, I couldn’t believe his deftness — how easily, for example, he rolls off a pun; how well he understands the nuance of Latinate terminology; how aptly, above all, that he paints fate as a wolf at the door.

December 21, 2012

A Year in Reading: Jeet Thayil 0

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Early fame may have been his undoing. He produced three good books and then encountered a writer’s block that lasted 17 years.

December 20, 2012

A Year in Reading: Michael Robbins 2

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It’s hilarious and sad and all the usual things we say a work of literature is when we mean it seems to contain all of life.

December 20, 2012

A Year in Reading: Jane Hirshfield 0

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Both typography and images take the form of ransom notes, rubbings, recollections, glimpsed parts of an unfathomable whole. There is a story. What matters — as always, in matters of literature — is the penumbra around it in every direction.

December 20, 2012

A Year in Reading: Ellen Ullman 1

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It is the sort of book that makes you want to clear your day of obligations, sit down to read in the morning, break only for lunch and dinner, and come to the final page by sundown.