Currently Reading
The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt
I plan to finish The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt this week, at last! I came back from London with not only heavy jet lag but a bad cold that put me out of commission for three straight days after getting home, and I wasn’t able to read that much.
Thank goodness for audiobooks!
The Talking Drum by Lisa Braxton
Jungle Red Writers has a great interview with Hallie Ephron and author Lisa Braxton — Learning to Drum: Lisa Braxton’s The Talking Drum.
The author of The Talking Drum, Lisa Braxton is a Massachusetts writer who stunningly overcame the misfortune of having her first novel be released just as the pandemic hit. She has had numerous speaking engagements and the book has received several awards, including Shelf Unbound Best Independently Published Book of 2020.
It’s even set in a fictionalized version of my current hometown, so it’s a perfect fit for the February Massachusetts Center for the Book Challenge and also for Black History Month.
Recently Read
The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver
Shriver’s essential bugbear is that, taken to extremes, the concept of cultural appropriation prohibits the act of fiction writing itself: “If writers have to restrict their imagination to personal experience,” she has stated, “the only option left is memoir.” The grand irony of course is that The Motion of the Body Through Space is a novel drawn from the first-hand experience of a writer who monitors her frequency of star jumps and has been on the receiving end of a pasting for her views on diversity. Certainly it’s problematic – but few authors can be as entertainingly problematic as Shriver. — The Guardian
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