The climate crisis erupts regularly in my reading, in unexpected ways. In Natsumi Hoshino’s manga series for children, Plum Crazy, named for the household’s first cat, even the cats heard a news report and pawed at the light switches to reduce their energy consumption. (My laugh came out more
Stories set in—and revolving around—Vietnam have appeared on BIP many times, like Marcelino Truong’s coming-of-age memoir in translation by David Homel: Such a Lovely Little War (2014; 2015) (his follow-up, Saigon Calling, brought the family to England). Also Robert Olen Butler’s Perfume River (2016) but to say much more
In the past few weeks, I’ve read a few books for this reading project; at this rate, I will easily read the 32 books I’m aiming for (representing the percentage of people in one American state, who voted in November 2020 on a bill which maintained the legal option to
Here's a glimpse of some current reads which lend themselves more to sampling, in a handful of reading sessions, than gobbling in longer periods of time. Although I no longer need to ponder the ratio of heavy to light volumes in my stack of current reads (because the COVID
Before I post about the new reading year, there are a few memorable reads from my 2020 log that I haven’t mentioned yet. Like Pourin’ Down Rain, Cheryl Foggo's memoir about growing up in 1960s Calgary, in a small and tight-knit Black community. When she was young, she heard
