When I think about novellas I’ve enjoyed this year, I recall Poulomi Sanyal’s Colour Me Confounded (2017) and Kerry Trautman’s Irregulars (2023), their settings soaked with the ambiance of their main characters’ workplaces, whether a boardroom or a diner. And I think about Helen deWitt’s The English Understand Wool
Not that anyone reading this needs convincing, about how diverse the offerings are on library shelves, but just imagine the dramatically different reading moods each of these four books requires! All of these books were already on my TBR, but the Toronto Public Library Reading Challenge gave me the
Sometimes I add a very specific book to my TBR list, complete with ISBN and the source of the recommendation or the reason for my curiosity. Sometimes there’s a name added to the list, with no context or details. That’s how it was with Dunya Mikhail, so I started
Past the mid-point of the reading year, I notice that there are some books I finished reading some time ago, lingering. Just, around. Left in innocuous places as though I just finished reading them there. Finally, when I found a place for Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s novel (on the shelf
It occurred to me to keep The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu as a novella for November. But when I was rushing to leave the house one afternoon, and returned because I’d forgotten my wallet, I slipped TEoKN into my bag on a whim. So, naturally that’s what I read
