Tracy Franz’ memoir, My Year of Dirt and Water chronicles the year her husband, Koun attends intensive training in a cloistered temple to become a Zen Monk. Alone with only intermittent access to Koun during his residency, Franz is left to navigate the foreignness of an unknown culture as well as the foreignness she feels in herself. The book is structured in a set of running diary entries broken up by seasons, chronicling both the linear time of Japan’s holidays and climate, as well as […]
A truth universally acknowledged: dating is hard.
I enjoyed this book immensely but I have some issues with the style and also with the ending. Still, I heartily recommend it if you want a light, fun read that tells a story from a point of view many of us are not familiar with: a thirty something Muslim woman who is devout and modern at the same time. Sofia Khan works in publishing. She’s newly single and her sister is getting married. Her parents worry that she will never find a husband and […]
Dear Nobody
Mary Rose grew up in the 1990s. A time where the book reminds you that you documented your life in a diary instead of on social media. In Dear Nobody, we read from Mary Rose’s diary, in which she titles each entry with “Dear Nobody.” In her diary, we see her struggle with illness, abuse, arrests, addiction to alcohol and drugs, and rape. Through the diary, we see Mary Rose struggle with relationships. After moving to a new town, she struggles to make new friends. […]
Before the fictional Atticus Finch, there was the real Sister Blandina
At the End of the Santa Fe Trail, originally published in 1932, is the diary of a nun, a Sister of Charity, named Sister Blandina (born Rosa Maria) Segale who spent 20 years, from 1872-1892, as a Catholic missionary and educator on the frontier of the American West. She was only 22 when she was sent to the small post in Colorado known as Trinidad. She eventually went on to posts in Santa Fe and Albuquerque before returning to Trinidad and then back to her […]
Portrait of an Art Monster Marriage
Dept. Of Speculation is 46 pithy chapters that take up only 180 pages, composed entirely of short, aphoristic paragraphs and quotes that vaguely tell the story of a woman’s journey through adulthood. The characters are nameless: the wife, the husband, the daughter. The narrator, the Wife, starts as an aspiring Art Monster, and changes as she falls in love, gets married, has a daughter. The wife waxes poetic (or, aphoristic) about life’s catastrophes, from having a colicky baby, to a cheating husband, to a battle with bedbugs, […]