After reading more of Bolaño’s 2666 than I ever should have, I cleaned my bookshelves of all the to-read have-tos that I’ve held on to for far too long. And found myself without anything to read. Failure to read good books generally puts me in a state of existential crisis, so I decided to return […]
Book Reviews for Writers
The book reviews on this site bring together my love of literature, political science background, and experience living abroad in an attempt to understand the world. As a novelist, I also write about what these writers teach me about craft and how they influence my writing.
Asia
My Favorite Books of 2021
Now that Christmas is over, I can safely reveal which books I loved the most during this past year without ruining any gift surprises. Reading is always an escape for me, and in 2021 this escape was especially welcome. I found myself using books as a way to explore other realities in a way that […]
Latin America
Seeking Myself in Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum
It must have been fate that I finally opened Ariel Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum during the week of September 8. I’d asked for the book ages ago and then kept avoiding it because it looked thick and the title was… not where I was at. But I had forgotten why I’d wanted to read this […]
US & Canada
Ripe, Song of Solomon, and the Worlds We Build
On Thursday I asked our pizza delivery man his name. While we’ve had multiple delivery people and don’t order pizza that often, this particular fellow has been delivering goodness to our house two to five times a year for over two decades. We had a name for him (he looks like Penn Teller, so we’ve […]
Arabia
Contemplating Zoroaster’s Children by Marius Kociejowski
I’m always excited when I get a package from Canadian publisher Biblioasis. The books they publish (including Alphabet, The Tuner of Silences, and The End of the Story) are intelligent, creative, and well-written and Zoroaster’s Children by Marius Kociejowski is no exception. To call Kociejowski a travel writer is to do him a grave disservice. […]
Eastern Europe
Living Life through Nonfiction
After my lowest weeks, days I spilled over into tears at the slightest provocation, I started to think I might have cabin fever. I may have researched winter-over syndrome, wondering if there was something clinical. I’ve definitely read this article about the pandemic wall more than once. Recently, though, I realized that I’m profoundly bored […]
South Pacific
Crafting Emotional Honesty in In the Quiet by Eliza Henry-Jones
It’s not hard to trigger a newish mom’s “what would happen to my family if something happened to me” fears, but it is hard to sustain a quiet story over 350 pages. In In the Quiet, Eliza Henry-Jones does both so beautifully that not only did I feel immersed rather than manipulated, but I stayed […]
Western Europe
Satisfying a Craving for Craft with Warlight and The Reluctant Fundamentalist
I’ve been reading voraciously lately, hungry for the kind of craft that makes me sink into a book, that I can steal and learn from for my own. This binge put me eight books ahead on my reading goal for the year, but it wasn’t going to be satisfied until I found something really worth […]