The Learners
Chip Kidd
Back in 2002 I wasn't yet officially, or perhaps consciously, interested in graphic design, but heard about Chip Kidd's first novel The Cheese Monkeys somewhere random and put it on my Christmas list. That one is about a guy who goes to a university to study art and ends up in an intense design class that involves lots of outrageous projects. This one picks up a few years later after he's graduated, as he sets off for his first job at an advertising agency.
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Bonjour Tristesse
Françoise Sagan
French and emo naïveté turned coquette frolicking around a rented villa on the Riviera—thematic pairings for an ideal summer read? Narrated by the precocious teenager not long after the events happened, it dramatizes her meddling in her "affectionate rogue" father's love life while pursuing her own sexual conquest on the side. There's something about Cécile's voice that is beguiling though she seems a little too self-aware, even with a few months (or so) of hindsight to work with.
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The Mother Garden
Robin Romm
Elissa was returning this at the library and told me I should read it, so I checked it out. This collection could be subtitled something like "variations on grief," as all of them involve a core theme of loss, whether imminent or realized. Most of the deaths involve sickness, especially cancer, mostly parents. Somehow they all capture something a little different.
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Difficult Loves
Italo Calvino
I'd only ever read Calvino's amazing Invisible Cities, but I wandered into the fiction c aisle the day I got my New York Public Library card and grabbed this collection. I guess I've always been worried of treading beyond Invisible Cities since it struck me so deeply. It's kind of a collection of stories, as a young Marco Polo entertains Kublai Khan with descriptions of various cities in his empire, but it also kind of defies categorization.
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The History of Love
Nicole Krauss
I kept hearing people talk about this book saying that Krauss wrote the same book as Jonathan Safran Foer (her husband), but she wrote it better. It's somewhat true, being a multilinear story steeped in the Holocaust and its lost histories and secrets, driven by clever, young people who go through great lengths to reveal them. But in Krauss's book, there is also the quirky, old man Leopold Gursky who escaped Nazi-occupied Poland for a lonely life in New York City, where he fears he is disappearing.
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Patrol : an American soldier in Vietnam
Walter Dean Myers
I often forget to post books like this that I read in passing, but I already know I'll want to recall this one later, so luckily I remembered enough to find it easily. Though it probably wouldn't be too hard to find, as there aren't many other picture books about soldiers in Vietnam (if any). Unfolding measuredly like a poem, the story follows a soldier on patrol in the forest who comes across a soldier from the other side. Both hesitate.
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The Children of Green Knowe
Lucy M. Boston
Elissa sent me this book a while back and I finally cleaned all my piles and found it again. It's a good Sunday afternoon read about a young boy Tolly who is at boarding school while his father and stepmother are in Burma. He usually spends his holidays at the school, but this year is sent to his great-grandmother, who lives in a castle-like house called Green Knowe.
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The Seas
Samantha Hunt
Early on something about this book reminded me of Among other things, I've taken up smoking, I think because both are set around the ocean in the northeastern part of the US. But any notion of similarities beyond setting dissipated quickly.
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Haruki Murakami
A friend told me about Cloverfield Press a while back — short fiction paired with art and letterpress-printed covers. Since I missed this Murakami story in The New Yorker (it's only online in a terrible, abbreviated version) and never finished Blind Willow Sleeping Woman, I hadn't read this one before. It's a lovely piece on loss, and this little volume is a great way to read it.
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Get Down
Asali Solomon
This is probably my favorite short story collection that I've read all year. I find the collections I enjoy the most are those where all of the stories are rooted in certain commonalities while each one retains a distinctive feel and focus, as if the collection constitutes an exercise in working out all the possibilities of those few specific themes.
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