Diversity Bingo
May 2021 Reading Recap
Still a lot of work on the back end of the blog, including on my “featured authors” pages (see the right column on the main Literature page and the introduction of my April 2021 recap post). So, contrary to plans, still no new posts in my alphabet blogging series in May. However, the time-consuming back end […]
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Graeme Kent: Devil-Devil
This book (and series) had been on my radar ever since I first started to put together reading lists for my Around the World project. A mystery set in the Solomon Islands, with a Lau policeman as one of the major characters — and set in the time period immediately prior to the end of […]
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Nora Ephron: I Remember Nothing
As already mentioned elsewhere, if at all possible I try to combine my Diversity Bingo and / or Around the World reads with my (Dead) Author Birthday reads: In January, that combination yielded Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, in February, Toni Morrison’s Sula, in March, Gabriel García Márquez’s El coronel no tiene […]
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Graeme Kent: One Blood
My experience with book 1 of the Ben Kella and Sister Conchita series was encouraging enough to move on straight away to the second book, which started vigorously enough with the death (murder?) of an American tourist — or was he? — in the tiny church of the Gizo Island mission where Sister Conchita has […]
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Katherena Vermette: The Break
Big sigh. Oh, this book had so much going for it. The Break is set in a uniquely Canadian — well, OK, Canadian and Canada / U.S. border region — community; that of the Métis, descendants of the union of European (mostly French) settlers and their Native American partners; one of three groups of Indigenous […]
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Nella Larsen: Passing
Nella Larsen’s Passing had been sitting on my TBR for a minor eternity; when I found that her birthday, too, was in April, I knew that I had laid my hand on another entry for this particular reading challenge. The novella’s title refers to an extremely light-skinned person of color’s “passing” from their community — […]
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Joy Harjo: Crazy Brave
Poet Joy Harjo is one of today’s foremost Native American voices; her recently-published memoir was thus a proximate choice for the corresponding entry in my quest to broaden my literary horizons. Harjo’s life story is that of many Native Americans of her generation: as far removed from the American Dream as you can be; socially […]
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Various Authors; eds: Lisa Allen-Agostini and Jean Mason: Trinidad Noir (Akashic Noir)
Trinidad Noir is the, well, Trinidad installment of the Akashic Noir series of short story anthologies looking at the “darker” side of the respective titular location. This can be a great way of sampling the fiction set in and / or written by authors from the place in question; and in terms of the quality […]
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Toni Morrison: Sula
I’d been planning to pair this book with Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, as an exercise in comparing an African American and an African coming of age story, but Nervous Conditions never materialized in my mailbox, so I’m going to have to postpone that reading experience to a later date. Which, perhaps, isn’t such a bad […]
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Zadie Smith: Feel Free
I’ve had several books by Zadie Smith sitting on my TBR for a minor eternity; oddly, when the moment came to finally pick one of them, I didn’t select one of her novels but this collection of essays — which didn’t turn out to be a bad choice, however, as the essays included here did […]
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Patricia Highsmith: Carol (The Price of Salt)
My record with Highsmith’s writing is a mixed one: I found the first Ripley novel (The Talented Mr. Ripley) morbidly fascinating and the sardonic put-down of the arts world in the second one (Ripley Under Ground) oddly amusing, and I obviously love any cat story of hers where a cat gets the better of a […]
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Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Sandwiched between two personal accounts by modern-day black American leaders — Kamala Harris’s The Truths We Hold and Barack Obama’s A Promised Land –, as my January book for this year’s (Mostly) Dead Writers Society Literary Birthday challenge, I went back to a fictional account set in Jim Crow America: the story of Jeanie Crawford, […]
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Barack Obama: A Promised Land
Probably the most-anticipated publication of the final weeks of 2020, and for once I not only rushed to read it but am also inclined to agree with the hype (at least, for the most part). This is the voice of the President Obama that we’ve come to know while he was in office, perhaps tempered […]
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Kamala Harris: The Truths We Hold
Harris wrote this book while still serving as a U.S. Senator; still, it also conveys quite a good picture of what kind of Vice President she will be — because it leaves little doubt about the kind of person that she is, and the things that motivate and drive her. The Truths We Hold: those […]
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January 2021 Reading Wrap-Up
I only finished eleven books in January, which isn’t a lot by my standards as of the last couple of years, even taking into account that two of the books were decidedly on the long side (all the more as I balanced out the two long books by two extremely short ones). But I decided […]
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Two New Blogging Projects
Coinciding with the official move of my blogging activity from my previous blog (https://themisathena.wordpress.com/) to this one — and to start into the new year — I have come up with two new blogging projects: 1. Diversity Bingo This is in support of my Around the World reading project, which hasn’t quite seen the […]
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