Diana Vreeland Memos: The Vogue Years by Alexander Vreeland
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What a personality! And not a single exclamation point as she guided Vogue with inspiration and verve, sending instructions and thanks to Beaton, Avedon, her editors, her friends. Stunning photos although the memos become repetitive over 300 pages.


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Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala is a devastating portrait of grief but also it is a picture of love and living on after tragedy. Her family (husband, two sons, her parents) were lost to the tidal wave which hit Sri Lanka in 2004. Each is portrayed vividly and engenders a start and a smile as these recollections become more bearable.  There are poetic descriptions of nature such as her trip to Sweden where she is “on the deserted shores of a lake of ice, surrounded by naked birches sheathed in frozen fog, each branch glowing like a stag’s antlers in velvet in that mellow light” and .on her return to Yala where the wave hit, she sees “the sea eagles that had thrilled”  her son, “bold in this desolation, they sailed low, sudden shadows striking the bare ground,” or a boat trip to see the blue whales: “a foamy mass heralds the head that rises to the surface, its shape an ancient arch.”  She parses out fond recollections of growing up in Sri Lanka, her family, their culture including the food they ate (curries, shrimp pastes, fruit, fish), her father’s library in their house, her mother’s sari collection, their  vacations, friends and servants. She writes evocatively and I was compelled to keep reading despite the sadness and pain.  The end of the book, seven years after her loss, grants a whiff of hope as she is able finally to recall joyful moments with her missing loved ones in her new home in New York City which has given her “the distance for which I can reach for my family…travel[ing] back and forth to London and Columbo, rediscovering us.” The book was on several “best of 2013” lists and now goes on mine.


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Artful by Ali Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Smith is a genius and her essays/talks on time, on form, on edge, on offer and on reflection but also a love story sent me immediately to buy the book as I handed in my library copy. Starting right off, she quotes Dickens from an old orange Penguin edition of Oliver Twist, then the myth of Achilles, Alice in Wonderland,The Golden Bowl, Jane Austen from an obscure title Jack & Alice. Ozi e vizi a Pammydiddle which I can only find on here in Italian, Walter Benjamin,Joseph Conrad,José Saramago.  I can't stop. I'm scurrying all over the house looking for copies of every book mentioned, placing library orders,expanding my swollen To Read list like the crazy bibliophile and avid poetry reader I answer to.  Who is Gordon Mackay Brown?  GR doesn't know but I must find out. And I haven't even touched on her exquisite prose and wonderful mind, linking literature, art, movies, music. It is all here.


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Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sylvia Townsend Warner has written a beautifully crafted tale of a 19th C wealthy, landed and slightly smug Englishwoman who spurns her adulterer husband, loses her children from smallpox and flees to France. There she finds herself stretching her feminist inklings to forge a new life with her husband's ex-mistress and embraces the revolution of 1848 happening around her. As Minna, her new companion, says "Though you may think you have chosen me..or chosen happiness,it is the revolution you have chosen." My commonplace book at the ready, there were abundant quotations to jot down, some outright humorous, but mainly the clear thinking and revolutionary story of a woman's transformation which propel the reader along. Townsend Warner was a contemporary of Woolf and Mansfield and equal to them in her writing. We read this book for a book club and the conversation flowed hither and yon.


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The Children Act by Ian McEwan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Very much a McEwan story with stalker?, bits of arcane knowledge of the law, marital agonies and all but I was absorbed throughout, particularly with his main character, the woman judge, and the way he got inside her head.


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10:04 by Ben Lerner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Just put down Ben Lerner's 10:04 which is the semi-autobiographical story of a young author who is on sabbatical from college teaching and may or may not have Marfan's Syndrome (which Lincoln had). He is trying to impregnate his best friend, Alex,not his "girlfriend," but a platonic friend whom he met in college. She is 36, unemployed and wants to have a child and he is elected as good father material. The plot rambles through Brooklyn on their walks and Manhattan to the fertility clinic. He acts as big brother to an 8-year-old Latino boy named Roberto. He sells a book contract for a strong six figures ( “about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held.”) and flies to a residency in Marfa, Texas where he hibernates, walks, writes a poem rather than his novel. The themes of walking and of art and poetry run through the book, along with his fear of a dissecting aorta, another symptom of Marfan's. He watches the movie "Back to the Future" during two threatening hurricanes (Irene & Sandy) which is where the title originates. The language challenges: he does not cry but has a "lacrimal event." He suffers proprioception, a sort of unconscious awareness of the body's internal stimulii to external events. And I experienced the usual challenges of reading in bed, unwilling to get up and look up the words because I am smitten with the story, the writing, the references to Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Robert Creeley, the obscure National Book Award winner William Bronk, the teaching/writing couple whose "house [was] so full of books that it seemed built of books," movies like The Stranger with Orson Welles, the exhibit of the Institute for Totaled Art (rescued from an insurance company warehouse). It is a book which is worthy of its challenges and I will be first in line for his next one. I loved it. Slate reviews it expertly here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/bo...
Or bookforum here http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/021_...


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The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another beautifully written book about an Iowa clan over the last decades of the 20thC.  Thompson's ear for dialogue is flawless and I found myself reading aloud passages to my nearest at every opportunity.


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