By total coincidence, my hold on Angry White People came in the same week that Jo Cox was assassinated in England, apparently for her support of Britain’s presence in the EU and other liberalish political agendas. I heard the name “Nigel Farage” for the first and second times in this book and the news (respectively? not respectively? I don’t remember). The real reason I put a hold on it in the first place was that I’m interested in what makes people choose one belief over another one. I try — I do try — to ground my own beliefs in…
43 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
Two things to know about Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material: I don’t like comic (by which I mean humorous) (by which I mean that “funny” is a primary selling point in marketing materials) (actually it is sort of hard to describe exactly what I mean so never mind) novels. I’ve been wanting to read this one for years. So the thing is that I don’t care about comic (humorous?) novels or book awards, with a primary exception that I care very much about the Costa Book Awards. This is not, as catty persons have suggested, down to my excessive fondness for…
28 CommentsOr, that time I was deceived into reading more of Black Widow than I cared about (two trade paperbacks of it) because the art was so beautiful. I really cannot say enough about Phil Noto’s art. It’s dreamy and watercolory, and if I had one takeaway from this book aside from “please stop perpetuating harmful myths about domestic violence” (about which more later), it would be that I need to find every comic Phil Noto has illustrated and put it straight into my brain pan. Further investigation on the Marvel website has revealed that Phil Noto draws like he’s running…
11 CommentsMy A+ year with African literature continues in José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, translated by Daniel Hahn. When I first heard about this book, I believed I squawked at Whiskey Jenny, “Look, ooh, oh, look at this! It’s about an Angolan woman who walls herself up in her house during the Angolan fight for independence! Sounds amazing!” and Whiskey Jenny was like, “….Does it?” I get her point. When you read a lot about nations fighting free of colonialism, there are patterns of violence and oppression that repeat themselves in exhausting, predictable ways. Police oppression, warring ideologies, journalists…
10 CommentsMount Pleasant was translated from French by Amy Baram Reid, but don’t let that put you off. If you are a fan of Salman Rushdie and the way he writes about Indian myth and history, Patrice Nganang’s novel of colonial Cameroon is going to be right up your alley. There are stories that must be told just for the story itself, just for the story. This was one of them. A historian called Bertha comes to Cameroon to speak to a 90-year-old woman, Sara, who was given to the sultan Njoya when she was only a small child, to be…
11 CommentsI don’t know what to say about the hate crime against queer people of color in Orlando this past weekend. I won’t say the killer’s name because we know that intense coverage of these guys inspires copycats do to the same. Instead I want to link to NPR’s article about the people who were murdered. Here also is a round-up from NPR’s Code Switch of responses from queer Latinx folks. The element of the fantastical in The Boxcar Children is their coherence to a Protestant work ethic. I am THE MOST susceptible to this kind of sadness. Just read enough…
8 CommentsHappy Wednesday, friends! Or more likely, sad Wednesday, because I have to report that there will be no podcast today. Whiskey Jenny and I had an amazing one planned, where we talked about Captain America: Civil War with a fabulous guest star — but life intervened. We are still hoping to talk about Captain America and review Simon van Booy’s Father’s Day and many other awesome things, but it will just have to wait until life is happening slightly less aggressively. Look for us in August! (Everything’s fine! Just a busier summer than either of us anticipated!)
1 CommentTry not to collapse from shock, but here is one more person assuring you that Louise Erdrich’s latest book, LaRose, is really quite good. It begins with a tragedy: Landreaux Iron goes hunting a deer and shoots a child instead, the five-year-old son of his best friend Peter Ravich. As the Ravich family begins to crumble, Landreaux and his wife decide to give their own five-year-old boy, LaRose, to the Raviches in restitution. The story unspools from there, telling the story of LaRose’s Ojibwe family and the many LaRoses who have come before him, as well as the stories of…
27 Comments