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      • Clear Out the Static in Your Attic: A Writer’s Guide for Transforming Artifacts into Art
      • Polska, 1994
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A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Book Reviews for Writers

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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.

Africa

Stories from the Portuguese: Reading Mia Couto Against António Lobo Antunes

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 […]

Asia

Ai Weiwei, The Bicycle Book, and the Art of the Tangible

I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in the world, reconceptualizing my career and the way I spend my time. Naturally, I’m turning to books, but I’ve also been slowing down, paying attention to moments and returning to old favorites. Recently, that brought me to The Bicycle Book by Bella Bathurst, but I […]

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

Small Things Like These, Getting to Yes, and Seeing “Now” Clearly

As I write this, the stock markets are tanking. The bluster and bluffing of one world leader is categorically destroying the financial value of markets around the world. Which made this an interesting week to read Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher and William Ury. It’s also an important time to reflect on Small Things […]

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

Silence and Speaking Up in Aflame and The Empusium

It feels like a natural day to reflect on silence as my husband is on a field trip with our son and I have the whole house (and garden!) to myself. It’s just me and the distant sirens on this hermitage (oh, the joys of opening the windows on a summery day). But I’ve been […]

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 […]

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My Books

Polska, 1994

Polska 1994

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic

Clear Out the Static in Your Attic_cover

Recent Posts

  • Ai Weiwei, The Bicycle Book, and the Art of the Tangible
  • Silence and Speaking Up in Aflame and The Empusium
  • Small Things Like These, Getting to Yes, and Seeing “Now” Clearly
  • Reading for Change in the New World
  • Seeking Myself in Dorfman’s The Suicide Museum

What I’m Reading

Isla's bookshelf: currently-reading

Birds of America
Birds of America
by Lorrie Moore
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc.
by Jonathan Lethem
The Souls of Black Folk
The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois
Bomb: The Author Interviews
Bomb: The Author Interviews
by BOMB Magazine
On Writing
On Writing
by Jorge Luis Borges

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