Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory is a remarkable and taut exploration of prejudice, history, and of course, memory. The book’s narrator and namesake, Memory, is an albino woman on death row in a Zimbabwean prison who is encouraged by her new lawyer to write her story for an American journalist who may be able to help win her freedom. Memory writes of the stark everyday life in prison and of the circumstances that have brought her there. But to fully explain, she must begin […]
I don’t want to review this book, Part 2: The Remix
My appetite for Nisi Shawl’s Everfair has gone up and down since I first heard of it. It came highly recommended by multiple sources and ticked off so many intriguing boxes: a speculative, steampunk alternative history of an African nation by a woman of color. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. After I bought it earlier this spring, I noticed the Goodreads collective rating was on the low-ish side, and I’m not always as immune to popular opinion as I like to think I am. It […]
“These are the frail, imperfect ways of ordinary human beings in the teeth of a great epidemic”
I finished reading this book a week ago today, and I’m still not sure how to write about it. I found it deeply moving, but it may still be too soon to put my thoughts and feelings into words, and anything I write here can only scratch the surface. Jonny Steinberg has packed so much into the 326 pages of Three-Letter Plague (published in the U.S. under the title Sizwe’s Test). He writes about his own literal and figurative journey to try to learn how […]
More like cutting my heart….
Oh hello there. Well CBR9 was a bit of a bust for me, in that life got crazy and I read exactly one book in Nov/Dec. ugh. But let’s give it a go again! I’m starting off this year with a book club pick, Cutting For Stone…and yeah, it was great. After an unfortunate reading hiatus, and a crazy holiday, this was a great book to get lost in. Marion & Shiva are identical twins born to a nun in Ethiopia at the missionary hospital […]
Laugh, Learn and Cry with Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime: Stories from A South African Childhood, was my first audio book. I was determined to hear his narration and found the CD version at my local library. My car still has a cd player, so Trevor kept me company during my first week commuting to a new job. All I knew of Trevor Noah was he replaced Jon Stewart, grew up in South Africa and was a comedian. I had no idea what to expect from his book to be honest. […]
The breath of longing
So much has been written about this book here on CBR, I almost had no choice but to read it. But I wasn’t in the right frame of mind when I finally got it from Overdrive. It took me days to get into it, and I read multiple books in between the early chapters. But I stuck with it because the premise was very good, and it has received near universal praise (both here, and in the broader literary world). Sticking with a book that […]
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