The book I read was Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. The book describes Black and Latino boys’ experience with the criminal justice system and how it can limit the future of these boys. All the boys in the book are from Oakland and it is shocking how they are treated by …
Mysteries, police procedurals, and historical fiction are some of my guilty pleasures. The Informers (2009, originally published in Spanish in 2004) by the young Colombian writer Juan Gabriel Vásquez has elements of all three genres, plus it is beautifully written to boot. A Colombian journalist Gabriel Santoro writes a memoir of Jewish family friend Sara …
The Red Tree by Shaun Tan is a picture book– but don’t under estimate the world within! Tan is able to capture the attention of any reader by the ornate detailed illustrations. The phenomenal pictures in the book engulf you in a sea of emotions and the use of selective words fully illuminate the story. …
In The Whistling Season, Ivan Doig invites readers to visit a small farming community in Montana, about a hundred years back. There, we observe frontier ways of life, as these are inexorably yielding to encroaching modernity. This book portrays some of the important cultural origins of our times, in the form of a novel with …
I am reading A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit. The book, vaguely based on the premise that people today are rarely “lost,” explores the gray area between danger and stability. Consisting of nine short essays, it jumps across disciplines, pulling references from history, art, literature, Solnit’s dreams, and her friend’s anecdotes. I …
George Babbitt, a middle aged realtor, has all the luxuries of a successful middle-class businessman, but finds himself dissatisfied with life. Throughout the novel, Babbitt becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the social conventions that dictated his choices until then, but realizes it is too late for him to rebel, accepting the quiet dissatisfaction of his ordinary …
I’ve always had a soft spot for comics – I won’t try to pass off my appreciation of them as necessitating the medium’s place among high art, but aesthetically deserving or not, I will probably keep reading them. Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is one of the rare comics that can draw me in years …
I’m currently reading book #1 of #8 in a series of books by Jaden Skye that are part of her Caribbean Murder Series. Cindy and Clint are newlyweds spending their honeymoon on the picturesque island of Barbados. Less than a week into their trip Clint, an avid surfer, is found dead along the beach under …
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This past summer I read and really enjoyed a book titled, Wild by Cheryl Strayed. It is a memoir about a young woman who decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail through California, Oregon, and Washington State. This book is all about Strayed’s reflection on the life she had before her journey and contains flashbacks …
I’ve always enjoyed reading novels written in a powerful voice and in an unfamiliar version of English. For example, many characters in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies speak a hybrid of South Asian languages and English; some characters also use the lingo of sailors and opium traders. The world Ghosh writes about becomes wonderfully fresh …