D has our book club pick for November, and we got two choices: Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose or David James Duncan’s The River Why. We chose The River Why, because it was shorter. D is from the West Coast and was interested in a West Coast author, so his pick went there. I had never heard of the book, but saw its enormous ratings on Goodreads. I was sufficiently intrigued to get it from the library. Our narrator is Gus Orviston, the product of […]
A re-read that improved my experience
Something that has perplexed me as I’ve been gathering texts for my next research project has been the multi-cultural perspective within the dystopian or post-apocalyptic novel framework, besides Nnedi Okorafor’s (and even she veers more into Afro-futurism, which is fairly different, generically speaking). Thankfully, I remembered that I had read Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea two years ago for CBR7, and I decided it might be time to give him a second chance. Wow. I am so glad I did, because I think […]
A deeply enjoyable and complex tale by Margaret Atwood
What did I say when I was working my way through the Atwood canon? Cat’s Eye was one of the other few Atwoods I hadn’t read in my local library, until I realized that book club and my bookshelf books were calling. I’ll probably get to more Atwood in 2018 once I’ve finished reading the books I actually own. I have to confess, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Cat’s Eye as much as I absolutely did, but what else are you going to do when […]
A great Afro-futuristic novel, still good on the re-read
The first time I read Who Fears Death, I was grabbed by it. I was so compelled by Onyesonwu, our protagonist, that I didn’t have a critical eye for anything else. And that’s the beauty and frustration of a re-read. You see good things you didn’t see before, but your blinders also come off and you see other things that you missed on the first go. Sometimes, that means a formerly five-star book comes down a bit, and that’s the case with this one. I […]
An okay prequel.
I’m embarking on a new research project, and I’ve followed several ideas up by reading books that I think will fit this budding thesis. I had read Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death two years ago for CBR7, and I didn’t know until recent that she had published a prequel of sorts. I wasn’t sure if either of these books would fit my project so a read/reread was in order. I do very much like Okorafor’s concentration on Afrofuturism, about which I know relatively little. I’ll […]
A provocative journalistic investigation
I confess that my knowledge of Afghanistan has been fairly limited to the few things I’ve seen or read in the news or Khaled Hosseini’s body of work (well, add Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil to my fairly limited list). So when my library book club selected Jenny Nordberg’s investigative journalistic book, The Underground Girls of Kabul, I wasn’t sure what to think. But after I read, I felt that a new world and source of activism had opened up for me. While on an […]
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