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Tag: Anne Carson

All the Books that Blew My Mind in 2020, Part 1

So it turns out that 2020 was a pretty amazing reading year? I hadn’t really noticed because there were so many other things to occupy my brain, such as the quarantine and the election and the crumbling of American democracy, but in looking back at my reading spreadsheet I discovered that I had read a shocking number of books that needed a place on my Best Of list. There are, in fact, so many that it has necessitated me breaking this post down into two parts. This one covers my reading through like mid-June or something, and represents the number…

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Fixing the Great British Bake-Off: A Links Round-Up

Are you snappy with your loved ones? Incapable of focusing on a task, even by the unfocused standards of 2020? Well, don’t worry, because everyone else is in the exact same boat! It’s a horrible, leaky boat, and we all hate it here! Remember when there were nice things and we liked those things? How nostalgic I feel for the time of nice things, such as “seeing friends in different cities” and “going to the grocery store” and “not feeling miffed when I saw a stranger’s nose while standing in a building.” Hopefully by the time I do my next…

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Atul Gawande Saves the Day with Common Sense: A Links Round-Up

Welp, the end of another week is upon us. Is the weekend a punishment or a reward, or neither? What distinguishes our days, if we can’t even go to the goddamn library? (Oh my God I miss the library.) (I don’t want the library to reopen until it can do so in a way that’s safe for library workers; I just miss it.) I have a plan to mark the passage of time by making a new batch of frozen breakfast burritos. This seems fine, but do you remember the time Before when a person could go out to a…

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‘Tis the season for NPR Book Concierge!: A links round-up

Despite what I may say about the Millions Book Preview (and I do love the Millions Book Preview), the NPR Book Concierge is the true most happiest time of my bookish year. They’ve produced another good one this year, with more books by native authors than maybe I’ve ever seen before. Good job, NPR! Disney princesses reimagined as cement mixers. Here’s what’s going on at Tumblr. Period-tracking apps benefit men, and marketers, and medical companies–not women. What it’s like hearing Anne Carson lecture. This journalist went to a Scholastic book fair and didn’t find it as magical as she remembered…

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Review: Antigonick, Sophokles (translated by Anne Carson)

I have a tremendous literary crush on Anne Carson. This started when I read her book Nox, which is not only an elegy for her brother and a beautiful artistic object in itself, but also an elegant taking-apart-and-rebuilding of Catullus 101, itself a lament for a deceased brother. She has also been quite wonderful with Sappho, a poet I have always assumed I admire on the basis that Catullus worshiped her and I love Catullus so he’s probably right, and having read If Not, Winter, I see no reason to go back on my earlier assumptions about Sappho. Antigonick is…

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Review: Nox, Anne Carson

Yes, I bought it. I bought it, and it was amazing. Y’all talked me into it. I was stacking the deck, really, by asking for advice from a bunch of people who I know can’t stick to their own book-buying bans, let alone propose that others do so. It’s like when I call up Social Sister to ask her if I should buy a pair of cute shoes. To recapitulate, Nox is a version of the journal Anne Carson made after her brother died. They had been estranged for years, and she heard of his death several weeks after it…

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I WANT THIS. I WANT IT.

I went into Bongs & Noodles today, (the one in Union Square — yes, I know, why would you go to B&N if you are at Union Square when the Strand is right there? and the answer is, I had to buy some non-book items for upcoming birthdays), and as I was heading single-mindedly for the non-book items section, I beheld a display table of books from small presses. So I swung sideways and espied a book that was not so much a book and more of a box. A box by Anne Carson, called Nox. The reasons I thought…

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