I’ve mentioned my history with book clubs more than once. But I’m trying one more time, with #BecauseWe’veRead, because their inaugural choice, Assata An Autobiography was on my TBR list for literally two decades and this was the push I needed to finally pick it up. Their second choice was a book I’d never heard of, Black Skin, White Masks. But I’m working to fill in the gaps in my reading created by Eurocentric Jesuit education, so I continued with the Because We’ve Read curriculum.
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Because I’ve Read Black Skin, White Masks
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Book Report: Tómas Jónsson, Best-Seller
Here’s a first: I am writing about a book I didn’t finish. My fascination with Icelandic literature is well documented (I couldn’t even pick a link for that one – I have a tag for Icelandic authors on this blog.) So, when I saw Tómas Jónsson, Best-Seller by Guđbergur Bergsson in an article about books in translation, I immediately put it on hold at the library. But I just couldn’t get through it.
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A Bookish Saga
On my first trip to Iceland, I naively bragged that I had read all the sagas. My listener was too polite to do more than quirk an eyebrow. Of course, I had not read all the sagas. I had read that giant paperback Penguin Classics Deluxe collection, The Sagas of Icelanders, plus The Saga of Burnt Njál. At the time, I didn’t know that more was possible.
For English speakers outside of academia, the ten sagas and assorted short stories of the Penguin compilation remains definitive. But there is another. Read More
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Atlas of an Anxious Man
Is it an atlas of the man himself, or an atlas of the world as seen by the anxious man? Is the anxious man author Christoph Ransmayr, and why is he anxious? Atlas of an Anxious Man does not concern itself with the answers to such questions. This unusual piece of travel writing does not double as personal memoir or destination porn; we never learn what kind of trip the narrator is taking, and rarely discover why he has selected these particular destinations, what he is doing there, or who his traveling companions are. Read More
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The Little Paris Bookshop
There are two things I have to do whenever I’m near Leavenworth, Washington. I must eat at South, arguably the best Mexican restaurant in the state, and I must visit A Book for All Seasons. So even if the temperature hadn’t topped 100 F at our campsite overlooking the Wenatchee River this summer, sending us into town in search of air conditioning, I probably would have found myself browsing the warren of rooms in Leavenworth’s brilliantly curated independent bookstore. Read More