Continuing yesterday’s talk of remembrance reading, while I reflect on other reading from 2025 and possibilities for reading this year. The first of his books published in his mother tongue (Gikuyu), Weep Not, Child is the second novel by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (b. 1938), who
Just when my thoughts were etching a loop as I struggled to describe Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I came across this Joy Williams quotation*: “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” That is, indeed,
From these ten books alone, anyone might conclude that “we” have a lot of antiques and tigers, typewriters and troubled sisters, and that we all wear sandals with socks in Canada. (I am not a fan: if it’s cold enough for socks, it’s too cold for sandals.) Moving from
I can’t tell whether I enjoyed “Airborne” for its own sake—hanging out with these older women who’ve been friends for so long—or because it resonated so strongly for me with the new memoir by her longtime friend, Canadian writer Susan Swan, which I read this summer, Big Girls Don’t
We have spent three-quarters of this hefty novel in the company of Iris, inhabiting her orbit as she navigates her memories. Even the disruptive excerpts from Laura’s novel feel familiar now. We’ve grown comfortable with those two unnamed lovers, and the ceaseless shift of settings (always a new rented
