2015考研英语阅读理解精选20篇(第九篇)

　　The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz . 　　Within seconds of being invited by the Conan Doyle estate to write a new Sherlock Holmes novel, Anthony Horowitz was off the starting-blocks, piecing together a plot as involved and involving as the best of the originals. All the old familiars are here: Lestrade, Wiggins, Moriarty, the warmth of 221b Baker Street and the freezing fogs outside. At the centre, however, is a crime Conan Doyle would not have contemplated, and, chronicling it after Holmess death, Watson becomes unaccustomedly wistful. The text is pot-holed with typos, but Horowitz rides through them with panache. 　　The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach . 　　You may need to bone up on baseball to enjoy this, but its actually about friendship, failure and coming of age. Set in a college on the shores of Lake Michigan, the story revolves around a student team preparing to exchange the security of the baseball diamond for the complexities of the real world. When their gifted shortstop is afflicted with the sports equivalent of writers block, all their lives begin to unravel. Harbachs prose is sharp-eyed but big-hearted. Over 500 pages, he immerses you in his imaginary campus, provoking nostalgia for youth, and relief that its over. 　　SHORT STORIES 　　We Others by Steven Millhauser . 　　Millhauser, a Pulitzer prize-winner, is drawn to the surreal and uncanny, blooming on the fringes of ordinary lives like growths of mold. His title story is narrated by a ghost who, yearning for companionship, breaks the heart of a lonely teacher. Another, the inspiration for the film The Illusionist, follows a magician so good at creating illusions that he becomes, himself, illusory. In a third, a giant shopping mall seduces, then enslaves, an entire town. Behind his courteous prose, Millhauser seems to be holding something back, like a doctor soft-pedalling on grim news. 　　FINANCE 　　Boomerang by Michael Lewis . 　　Following The Big Short, and again exercising his twin passions for high finance and human folly, Michael Lewis shifts his focus from America to Europe on a hilarious journey of financial-disaster tourism through the countries that gorged most grossly through the credit boom. Lewis enables you to see the wood and the trees, so while getting to grips with European debt you also form a mental gallery of bizarre vignettes: the governor of Icelands Central Bank holed up in his office writing poems; or Irelands Bertie Ahern exclaiming, on the collapse of Lehmans, They had testicles everywhere! 　　MEMOIRS 　　Blue Nights by Joan Didion . 　　What greater grief can there be for mortals, Euripides asked, than to see their children dead? Joan Didions only daughter, Quintana Roo, died in 2005, two years after Didions husband John Gregory Dunne, mourned so memorably in The Year of Magical Thinking. Here, her grief is just as forensically examined, but all the more devastating for being tinged with guilt. Quintana was adopted, and troubled. Were the two connected? Didions feel for the material worldfabrics, food and flowersassumes a terrible poignancy as she contemplates oblivion. 　　Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson . 　　The question was asked by Wintersons adoptive mother. Mrs Winterson, as her daughter chillingly styles her, is the star of this artful memoir, comic but appalling, a frugal, religiose tyrant who dispensed End Time commandments and hoarded Royal Albert china. Jeanette, born Janet, self-invented, racked by rage, asks her own questions. Why is she so bad at loving? Why did her real mother give her away? Was Mrs Winterson perhaps not normal herself? How does a mind work with its own brokenness? Her answers are tentative, but fierce, funny, harrowing.