the last book i loved
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Rhona Cleary: The Last Book I Loved, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch
Was there ever a place greyer, wetter or lonelier than Paris in the fall? For an Irish person, that’s a weighty question to consider. I guess that in some other incarnation of myself I might have found the glistening cobblestones…
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Traci Dolan: The Last Book I Loved, The Stone Virgins
One of the first things that became apparent while reading Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins was a gentle spiraling, a contracting of the scope of the novel, from the streets of Bulawayo to the small village of Kezi via the…
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The Last Book I Loved: The All of It
Have you ever read a book about a sensational event that isn’t sensational itself? That manages to transcend the shocking element to reveal a much more interesting and nuanced story, which then helps you begin to comprehend, even if not…
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The Last Book I Loved: Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond
I read Seek: Reports from the Edges of America & Beyond in a hotel room. Nowhere fancy: I was in Asheville, North Carolina, facing nothing more uncomfortable than bugs and frogs and humidity, the steady chatter of fat people plunking…
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Chris Huntington: The Last Book I Loved, The Brothers Karamazov
We were in the “international bookstore” of Xiamen, China, which is really a Chinese junk and bookstore but has half a dozen shelves of English books (such as Gossip Girl and 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). My wife found a Signet Classics…
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The Last Book I Loved: Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
I read Alice Munro’s books in benders. It usually takes me less than two days to finish one of her collections, and while reading it, I make and break promises to myself—to stop after this story, to take a shower,…
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The Last Book I Loved: Atlas of Remote Islands
Maps, at their best, are more than representations of the world. They are worlds unto themselves—endlessly explorable, enigmatic, complicated, and alive. I remember the first globe I owned as a kid. I liked to spin it on its axis, as…
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Carolyn Lang: The Last Book I Loved, You Shall Know Our Velocity!
The last book that I loved was You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers, which is about two friends, Will and Hand, who come into $32,000 around the same time one of their friends dies unexpectedly. They are devastated…
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John Knight: The Last Book I Loved, The Best of Roald Dahl
There are too many good writers for me to keep track of so, mostly for the sake of convenience, I categorize them: Koontz writes thrillers, Franzen does literature, King fills the world with horror, Snickett delights children. The problem is…
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Ylajali Hansen: The Last Book I Loved, The Driver’s Seat
It was in Crete that I first came to curse short skirts. Six of them — three cotton, two denim — I had with me in a navy blue American Traveler suitcase, which sat, for the duration of my three-week…
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Nancy Lili Gonzalez: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Network
Jena Osman’s The Network is the best freaking thing I’ve read all year! Talk about brain arousal, wow. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It gave me nightmares the way falling asleep in school only could.
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The Last Book I Loved: Troubling Love
According to Europa Edition’s website, Elena Ferrante, one of Italy’s most important and acclaimed contemporary authors, has successfully shunned public attention and kept her whereabouts and her true identity concealed. I understand. Troubling Love is a brilliant rendering of a…