As anyone who participates in bookish events online knows, November is an exceptionally busy month for themed reading; if Margaret Atwood had been born in any other month, I’d’ve chosen another, but here we are. And, why choose Margaret Atwood as the subject of a reading event to begin
It’s hard to believe that’s already time for another Margaret Atwood Reading Month #MARM in November 2021. “Time is not running at its usual unvarying pace: it makes odd lurches.” (From 1996’s Alias Grace) For many, 2020 and 2021 have been challenging years; for many, looking ahead seems to
After just a few pages, I knew I was going to love Mateo Ashkaripour’s Black Buck (2021): smart, funny, relevant, incisive. A few chapters in, Buck says: “I should’ve known from the Middle Passage to never trust a white man who says ‘Take a seat.’ It could be your
This year I re-directed my focus away from a couple of years of determinedly reading from backlists (so that new books comprised only about 30% of my reading) back to freshly published and forthcoming books.* What I hadn’t anticipated was how delicately I would need to balance my library
Elissa Washuta’s White Magic (2021) is a personal narrative of searching and locating boundaries about her own self amid the context of colonization. (She is a member of the Cowlitz tribe.) Her writing is considered experimental but it passes for conventional prose at first glance; much of her
