For the first time in three years I am giving up on the Read Harder Challenge. Changing jobs in November (yay!) and the coming holiday bonanza has cut more severely than I anticipated into my reading time. I have knocked my review goal down to 75 from 78 and jettisoned four books from my to read list that would have completed this year’s challenge. (Expect to see some of them next year.)
The book I didn’t purge was this one, August. One of the challenges was to read a book set in Central or South America written by a Central or South American author. To me the easy choice was to expand my reading of works in translation, and somewhere in my travels I happened across August which is written by an author from and set in Argentina. Briefly the book is about a woman returning to the small town she grew up in, and while staying in the room of her deceased best friend coming to terms with herself and her life. While this book straddles the line with one of my least favorite tenses (first person present) it is really one woman confessing to her dead friend all the ways life is messing her up, and ruminating on what to do about them.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that Romina Paula is under 40. Everyone I know in our early to mid-30s either is or has recently struggled in some way with the various emotions and family landscapes that Paula explores in this work. I hope this book does well enough that some of her other works will be translated, I would love to see what one of her plays is like.
I’ll be giving the Read Harder challenge a go again in 2018 (the tasks are already up and I’m already a bit concerned with finding the right books for it and me), I just have to remember to make sure I pace myself better and not save so many for the last three months of the year.