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Stuff I'm Reading (3/1)

 *"Mercy Street," by Jennifer Haigh. A campus novel is any novel that has people coming out of broader society and meeting socially, over and over, in a small, quirky, non-domestic sphere.


Haigh's brilliant idea is to set her new campus novel at an abortion clinic. A counselor, Claudia, observes girls with enviable socioeconomic profiles; also, she observes girls who don't have a prayer. To relieve stress, she visits her drug dealer, who happens to serve (additionally) an anti-choice activist (an activist familiar to Claudia). I couldn't predict where all this was headed, and I enjoyed "being in Claudia's mind."


*Sandra Boynton: Boxed Best Sellers. Here is how one book begins: "Behold the armadillo, with his armadillo nose." I think that's not to be surpassed.


*"Oscar Wars," by Michael Schulman. It's not clear to me that anyone needs or wants 500 pages on the Academy Awards. (I know this book has blurbs, but good writing can still fall short, in some ways.)

That said, a small dose of Oscar trivia sends me reeling. You remember that Day-Lewis won for "My Left Foot," but do you recall that the actress playing his mother won, as well? And Harvey Weinstein was so upset when the "secret" of "The Crying Game" became common knowledge, he shipped the actor in question off to Egypt. ("No interviews!") Also, Weinstein wanted to sink "Schindler's List," so he ran ads for "The Piano" along these lines: "SAG BEST PICTURE." In tiny, tiny print, the ad would then say: "Runner-up."

It's also weirdly compelling to discover that Weinstein, Sr. encouraged his two boys to "be like Robert and Jack Kennedy." For some reason, this just leads me to keep turning pages.


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