A drought, an unwelcome surprise, and other bookish updates.
Photo: Girla Obscura
I’ve been having trouble concentrating on reading since, oh, November 9th. Anyone else have that problem? Happily, I’ve recently started reading – and listening to – books again.
The most stunning read was a nonfiction book called Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, by Svetlana Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. Continue reading
Thoughts on reading, writing and social justice from Lynn Kanter, author of Her Own Vietnam. Join the conversation!
For a while now, I’ve been writing about outrage. It’s time to get back to books, if only for a moment.
I needed a thick, engrossing novel that would erase the rest of the world, and I’ve found it in The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova. A young American woman named Alexandra Boyd flies to Bulgaria to teach English. The day she arrives, dazed with jet lag, she accidentally ends up with a piece of luggage belonging to an elderly Bulgarian couple and discovers, to her horror, that it holds someone’s ashes in an urn.
Start with a Story 