the last book i loved
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Bob Sommer: The Last Book I Loved, You or Someone Like You
The last book I loved was You or Someone Like You by Chandler Burr. A wife and mother living the Beverly Hills good life, Anne leads book groups for directors, screenwriters, producers, and actors. It’s not that she planned to…
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Dave Eggers: The Last Book I Loved, Destiny Disrupted
I’m in the middle of Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes, and it’s incredibly illuminating. Ansary pretty much covers the entire history of Islam in an incredibly readable and lucid way. I’ve been recommending this…
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The Last Book I Loved: C. Max Magee, Paper Trails
A collection of newspaper columns might sound like pretty dull fare, especially 30-year-old columns. But Pete Dexter’s punchy, combustible, wry, and sometimes goofy pieces are irresistible. Paper Trails, released in hardcover in 2007 (but never released in paperback and now…
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Joseph Cervelin: The Last Book I Loved, The Informers
Brett Easton Ellis offers social observations, morbid humor, and compounding degrees of separation and decadence. If his story cycle The Informers were a Choose Your Own Adventure book, here are some outcomes: – You take your disenfranchised son to Hawaii,…
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Tess Bryant: The Last Book I Loved, The Sea, The Sea
Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea has, despite my initial wariness about reading the journal of a lonely bitter man, worked its way into being the last book I loved. This story of the arrogant and sexist Charles Arrowby…
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The Last Book I Loved: Hunts In Dreams
In the end, Hunts In Dreams is not a particularly deep book. But it’s rich, strange, comforting and sad all at once.
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Julie Greicius: The Last Book(s) I Loved, The Lost City of Z and All the Names
Years ago, when I was an archaeologist, I learned my favorite concept in the broader field of anthropology, or any field for that matter: “imperialist nostalgia.” It’s the yearning we feel for something we ourselves have conquered or destroyed, a…
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The Last Book I Loved: Honored Guest
One of my favorite books is the story-collection Honored Guest (2004) by Joy Williams.
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Rebecca Steinitz: The Last Book I Loved, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
The last book I loved was Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey. I hadn’t loved a book in a while, but I thought I might love this one because it is a Persephone book, and I also quite…
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Chris Corrigan: The Last Book I Loved, The Little Prince
I read The Little Prince with a broken heart and deep new scars from recent chest surgery. The surgery didn’t remove the cracked and sad organ from beneath my ribs, but rather cut off the two useless mounds of flesh…
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Tye Pemberton: The Last Book I loved, Remainder
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder was a bit of a darkhorse darling when it first arrived on the scene, enjoying attention from everyone and their mother, the latter of whom rightly celebrated it and nearly exhausted it, marking it as possibly “one…
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Binnie Kirshenbaum: The Last Book I Loved, A High Wind in Jamaica
Stories about pirates and orphans were my childhood favorites. Pirates, orphans, and those ever-so-enviable children–Madeline and Eloise–who lucked out with distant, absent, or dead parents: Pippi Longstocking, Huckleberry Finn, and Peter Pan, were winners for featuring distant parents and pirates.