As someone who reads a lot--both fiction and nonfiction, although a lot of what I read is in the form of journal articles and snippets of books rather than whole books--I'm viewing pandemic isolation as an opportunity to read more of what's around the house. I own a lot of books, from childhood favorites (mostly in boxes behind my chaise for lack of shelf space) to books inherited from my father (maybe I should reread Art Buchwald's "I Am Not a Crook" or finally embark on War and Peace) to library books to a haul of books recently acquired at the AWP conference.
Here's what I've finished in the past month or so, and maybe you'll see something you'd like to order.
Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization, by Jan Alexander. Two young women, one an aspiring writer from a remote Chinese village and the other a New York grad student studying China, find themselves accomplices to the immortal Monkey King, who has a plan to make China (and later the world) kinder, more poetic, and less hyper-capitalist. I really enjoyed this novel.
A Strange Scottish Shore, by Juliana Gray. This is the second book in a series, which I didn't realize when I brought it home. But it's a wild and unexpected mixture of historical novel and time travel. While it would have helped to have read the first book first, I still quite enjoyed this.
The Book of Anna, by Carmen Boullosa. This is another novel full of unexpected turns. Here we've got the children and servants of Tolstoy's famous character Anna Karenina, alive in 1905, when Russia nearly had a revolution. Everyone knows which people were invented by Tolstoy versus which ones were not; no one mentions being invented by Boullosa, however! Bombs, shootings, paintings, and dresses all play important roles, as does a long fairy tale attributed to Anna herself.
Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly, by Adrian McKinty. This is a police procedural mystery (but hardly an average one) in a series set in Northern Ireland during the bloody 1980s. If you like mysteries, and don't require them to be cozy, this series is worth looking into.
Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice. By a First Nations Canadian writer, this is a post-apocalyptic tale about a small First Nations band in northern Ontario who have just begun to get used to having reliable electricity, cell phones, and video games when suddenly electricity is diesel-generator-only and contact with the outside world ceases except for the arrival of a few refugees from the city.
Strangers in Budapest, by Jessica Keener. Sorry, I didn't like this one, but you might. A youngish couple (not really all that young but they've just adopted a baby) move to Budapest in the 1990s with entrepreneurial ambitions. Hungarian friends from back home ask them to check up on an elderly American in Budapest. Things get kind of disturbing for Annie, the wife. The third-person narration keeps the reader trapped in Annie's naive and neurotic point of view except for brief excursions into the old guy's cynical and angry point of view. This really irritated me and also eliminated any real uncertainty about what would happen. I think the reader is supposed to like Annie and sympathize with her feelings, but the better I knew her, the more I despised her. And I don't usually mind reading about neurotic people.
Oh, and right now (among many other things) I'm rereading The Diary of Anne Frank. It just seemed like a good time for that.
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