Midway through 2024, I enthused about Casey Plett’s On Community which includes a discussion of how Plett often feels the term is too slippery but it’s hard to find a suitable replacement. Sometimes I feel as though it means the opposite of what I want it to mean, or
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
Another voice-driven young woman’s story—Fatima Daas’s The Last One (2021)—held me rapt throughout. At first, I wondered if the repetitive variations on “My name is Fatima” that open each segment of the story would grate on me but, perhaps because the prose is arranged so that it’s almost-verse-like, it
Here’s a glimpse of some recent reads which lend themselves more to sampling, in a handful of reading sessions, than gobbling in longer periods of time. Not the books which require a sink-into-your-seat focus, the ones which afford the opportunity to window-gaze between pages. Recently I’ve been missing a
Even though I should have known better, I started to read Miriam Toews’ new novel, Fight Night, shortly before bed and then stayed up to finish it. Because Shiv’s voice is irresistible and the story of life with her grandmother and her mother was so hilarious and moving. But
