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, rather the ones which afford the opportunity to window-gaze between pages or single-sitting reads. Like
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
Picking up yesterday's thread, the balance in Seçkin’s novel sways toward the personal, whereas the political scene in Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths (2021) is more prominent, despite all the attention paid to characterization—a network that grows increasingly complex as readers turn the pages. (And there’s at
Last year, I was inspired by a local artist’s desk calendar to explore a series of cities in my reading. This year I’ve been exploring migration and lives in motion: often involuntary, frequently devastating, sometimes inspiring. This sense of between-ness reminds me of this passage in a 2021 debut
Last week, I wrote about learning that Margaret Atwood has been a long-time supporter and admirer of Thomas King’s writing, a writer I’ve enjoyed reading for a couple of decades. And I teased that this week I’d be writing about someone whose books likely wouldn’t have landed in my
