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
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being: The Book that Wrote Itself for Me
The idea that a book is brought to life by its reader is not new. A writer pours all of the details and plot that they can into a work and then the reader comes along and makes it their own by keying into the things that matter to them and ignoring the things that […]
Latin America
Disappearing into a Good Book with Idra Novey
Even though nothing much seems to change these days, radical shifts are happening in the undercurrent of my moods and most of the books on my original pandemic reading list are things I don’t even want to face right now. Yes, I still wonder about small details in The Great Influenza, but I know I’ll […]
US & Canada
Finding Home in The Velvet Room by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Sometimes it’s hard to know what exactly made you who you are today, but one of the joys of motherhood for me is rediscovering the books that shaped me as I share them with my son. I first noticed this on re-reading Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel and finding the beginnings of my socialist […]
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
My Pandemic Reading List: Stage Four — Evaluation
When I last wrote about my pandemic experience in December, I was ready for transition. I was thinking about the after, even though we were very much still in the middle. I needed the hope, then, to get through to a time when this might be over. Now that my husband and I are both […]