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
Treading Lightly While Traveling through Haiti in Maps Are Lines We Draw
What does it mean to leave no trace? This laudable goal of many a traveler can go awry when we get caught up in the “what does it mean” and forget that “leave no trace” is meant to apply to the outer environment and not to ourselves. In reading Maps Are Lines We Draw: A […]
US & Canada
All of My Friends Are Publishing Books!
The cliché about MFA programs (and arts degrees in general) is that the percentage of graduates who are still practicing a decade later is pretty poor. I’m delighted that my classmates appear to be the exception as the (then tiny) writing program at Goddard College in Port Townsend is where I first met the authors […]
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
Olga Tokarczuk’s “House of Day, House of Night” and the Beauty of Not Knowing
Bless the books that find you at just the right time in your life. I first started hearing about Olga Tokarczuk and House of Day, House of Night this past fall, received it for Christmas, and started reading it the weekend after my grandfather (Djiedo) died. The book so perfectly met me where I was […]
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
Eight Minutes in Rome with The Pope’s Left Hand by Friedrich Christian Delius
Phillip Lopate once said, “The reason I read nonfiction is to follow an interesting mind.” The best nonfiction example I’ve ever seen of this travel is Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” in which she goes out in search of a pencil and we learn everything there is to know about everything she sees along the way […]