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
Now there is snow covering everything, and the cold is bitter even when the sun is shining, so I read this week’s story and lecture inside, under an afghan, tucked into the corner of one of the warmer rooms (saving the warmest for later winter months—like being in training,
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
Dirty Work by Eyal Press (2021) landed in my stack following an interview with the New York Times Book Review editor. Its subtitle—Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America—summarizes the content aptly, but doesn’t express how un-put-down-able I found this book. Most of the time, when
I’ve been to the islands in my summer reading this year: Norwegian, Atlantic Canadian, Jamaican, Greenlandian and Sri Lankan. Roy Jacobsen’s Ingrid trilogy landed in my stack thanks to a reading copy of White Shadow from Biblioasis, translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw. Partly because I liked the
