This is the second of my (at least!) ten African authors in this year’s Cannonball. I picked this up based mostly on the title and the fact that I hadn’t read anything by an Ethiopian author yet. But this book is not about Ethiopia, really–it’s about being an Ethiopian in America or, more specifically, one hapless immigrant’s experience. The story is told in first person by the main character, Sepha Stephanos, who fled Ethiopia after the revolution seventeen years previously. He met up with an […]
We Need New Names
I recently moved to Malawi, so as part of this year’s Cannonball I’m going to include at least ten books by African writers. Last year I started with Chinua Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart and then picked up Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and then the superb Half of a Yellow Sun, which was one of my favorite books of last year–seriously, go read it immediately. We Need New Names received a lot of praise (NPR’s Great Reads of 2013, NYTimes’ Notable Books of the Year, finalist for […]
The Lifecycle of Software Objects #CBR6
I wasn’t much into sci-fi until I met my other half. He has introduced me to a few of his favorite authors and I have grown to appreciate the genre much more over the last few years. Neither of us had read any Ted Chiang, whose name always pops up in sci fi discussions, so together we read his collection of excellent short stories, Stories Of Your Life And Others, which I highly recommend. At 150 pages, The Lifecycle of Software Objects is the longest […]
Fiat.Luxury #CBR6 #2: Middlemarch
I picked up Middlemarch as part of The Toast’s Middlemarch book club, since I somehow had gone 31 years without reading any George Eliot. So much has already been said about this book that it’s difficult to know where to start with my humble review! I enjoyed this novel immensely. It’s rare that an author describes so many characters in such loving, realistic, and sometimes harsh detail. Although I related to some characters more than others, there wasn’t a single one I couldn’t relate to […]
Fiat.Luxury’s Review #1: The Purity Myth #CBR6
Feminism and modern evangelicalism, and the tension between religion’s “ought” and human reality, are some of my favorite topics (hence my blog) so I was excited to finally pick up The Purity Myth. I expected to find a book that succinctly examined our cultural and subcultural obsession with the virgin-whore dichotomy, the use and misuse of “purity” in modern evangelical and American culture, and the political and personal consequences of our preoccupation with virginity. I was not disappointed. The writing is strong, the argument is convincing, and […]
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