"If you just read one book this year, read this one." Perhaps more than any other book I've read this year, Monoculture makes me want to say that. Which is ironic: because Monoculture is about one story. (And I know how much you all love to read stories.) The premise
Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie's Aya de Yopougon Trans. Helge Dascher Gallimard, 2005 978-2-07-057311-7 (Available as Aya in English) Over the past summer, I was exploring library branches that I had never visited before and it was at one of those that I made Aya’s acquaintance.This new bookish territory not only took
As a child, I didn't enjoy the Ananse stories. I did read a lot of fairy tales and stories about enchantment;I liked the Uncle Remus stories, and I loved the Mouse Woman stories (anyone else in the Mouse Woman fan club?), but Ananse didn't do it for me. That may
November is the perfect time to re-read old favourites, so when Olduvai reminded me that Jean Webster's novel would fit perfectly into my epistolary Fridays, it wasn't long before I was re-reading. I first read this book the summer that I was eleven, the first summer in which I was
Adam Gopnik begins his second lecture on winter (first, here) by asking whether we remember that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein plays out in the northern, Arctic reaches. I didn't remember that: did you? Nonetheless, I don't have any trouble conjuring up the images that he describes in opening his
