In which I discuss the skinny volumes which accompany me on my travels, while the heavier volumes (like John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and Callum Roberts' The Ocean of Life) remain at home. Juliane Okot Bitek was inspired to engage with the Rwanda Genocide in response to Kenyan-American artist
At nearly one hundred pages long, it's unsurprising that this is the most complex of Mavis Gallant's stories I've read this year. It's neither the length nor the breadth of the story which complicates it, but the intricate arrangement of details, as readers are gradually immersed in the narration of
Rereading the Saga comics is definitely worthwhile. On first-reading, I was a little off-kilter, so engrossed in some panels that I missed others completely, only occasionally remembering to retrace my steps. Discovering wings or horns on characters who appeared humanoid at first glance was delightfully but consistently distracting. Readers are aware
How much of your reading is non-fiction? Does it fluctuate, or are you committed to reading (or not reading) it? When others were participating in non-fiction November last year, and actually reading a lot of the books that I'd been kinda-half-sorta thinking about reading, I realised that tending towards fiction
Many writers suggest that a motivation for telling stories is to set things in order, to make sense of what seems senseless. Little wonder that so many novels are preoccupied with loss and absence, abandonment and grief. In Melanie Mah's The Sweetest One, Chris (Chrysler) Wong thinks maybe she's cursed.
