When I first started reading A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, I thought I’d sit and read it in one long sitting. But I quickly realized that wasn’t right. The whole essence of the book was wandering. So instead, I decided to read each essay somewhere new.
Read my piece for Book Riot about how magnificent it was to read a book in pieces across the globe—from under redwoods outside San Francisco to the very end of the Americas in Argentina—letting myself wander, and explore.
Can you give a little more detail about the extent of the animal cruelty in People from my Neighborhood? I want to know so I can tell if I can handle it or not.
Asked by Anonymous
I didn’t fully recall, so I went back and skimmed the book. It’s not at all extensive! Details below.
In the first few chapters, there is a mention of dog death (very fleeting, death of a pet), and a mention of a man chasing/kicking at chickens.
But the main thing is the story “The Crooner,” which describes attempts to poison a dog who bites people and is very mean. Eventually a dog is hit by a truck (not on purpose). If you want to avoid reading about it, I recommend skipping the chapter.
Welcome to the beautiful Broadway Books, a women-owned local independent bookstore in NE Portland. I visited with an old, beloved friend who I first met at another cozy, lovely bookstore. I walked away with a copy of iconic soccer star Christine Sinclair’s new memoir and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman.
Something Will Happen, You’ll See by Christos Ikonomou, translated by Karen Emmerich, is a collection of quiet, richly sad short stories about a series of people in Athens struggling under the weight of the Greek economic crisis.
I was taken aback by just how sad these stories were without being just depressing—they stayed compelling, inventive, just with that lingering grief and hopelessness in the background of it all. A man waiting for someone who doesn’t get off the ferry, someone protesting the workplace-neglect death of his friend, a teen kid tries to protect his neighborhood from violence, a woman’s partner leaves her and she makes halva in the aftermath. I couldn’t put this collection down. It dug deep into the political and social violence of the economic crisis and failing social systems, by portraying these mourning, dreaming, hoping people just trying to survive. I’m excited to read more Ikonomou in the future.
For more Greek books in translation, check out the link in my bio!
Content warnings for violence, rape, suicidal ideation, substance abuse, ableism, animal cruelty, and homophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist language.
Why I Killed My Best Friend by Amanda Michalopoulou, translated by Karen Emmerich, is a vivid book about the personal and societal politics of power. Maria is an anarchist and activist who teaches children in order to pay the bills—when a wild child appears in her classroom, somehow she just knows. Her former best friend Anna is the girl’s mother.
This novel is a rich diary of the friendship between Anna and Maria that reminded me of Elena and Lila in Ferrante’s Neapolitan saga. The friendship is rocky, toxic, and often painful, because Anna is overpowering, overbearing, always taking the spotlight, always taking what’s Maria’s. The book has an undercurrent of sapphic sexuality. Michalopoulou looks into the relationships that support us and the ones that we can’t let go despite them dragging us down.
The two girls are extremely politically engaged, and Michalopoulou is able to run political commentary through their story that touches on similar politics of power to their own tangled relationship: issues of colonialism, oppression, classism, and feminism.
I really enjoyed this book and what it had to say about the tangled braid of friendship and the politics of power it reflects.
Content warnings for sexual harassment, disordered eating, g-slur, suicide, homophobia, sex shaming / misogyny, racism, violence.
When many of us think of Greece, we think of Homer. But there is a thriving population today speaking in Greek—Greek that is not Homer’s Greek any more than our English is Shakespeare’s English. And modern-day Greece is haunted by much different ghosts.
In my latest piece on books in translation, I gathered 10 great books in translation from Greece—books that dwell on economic hardship, politics and violence, friendship, and much more.
It should surprise none of you that I loved Powell’s City of Books. One more famous bookstore checked off my bucket list!
I walked away with Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea and a signed edition of Silvia Moreno-García’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau—plus a souvenir or three.
Gallant by VE Schwab was a perfect Halloween weekend read. Olivia Prior has grown up at the harsh boarding school Merilance, watching ghouls that no one else can see wander down its corridors, sneaking into the hallways at night. Now she’s called by a mysterious letter to “come home"—and arrives at what turns out to be a mansion named Gallant where no one expects her, where a garden holds a mysterious wall with a door that must stay closed at all times. The only problem is that her mother’s journal tells her explicitly: she’ll be safe, always, but only if she stays far away from Gallant.
I always love Schwab’s easy, flowing writing style, and this was no exception. I loved the design of this book, with its inked illustrations and grey pages. It reminded me in many (favorable) ways of reading Inkheart for the first time: that old, classic young-adult tale of shadow and scare, of a young girl working to find her place and learn what she can do. It sometimes felt straightforward but always held steady, poetic and rich, with a deathly villain and his ghostly generals—an easy, eerie read perfect for marathoning on a cold autumn night.
Content warnings for violence, suicide.
Selva Almada doesn’t miss. In Brickmakers, translated by Annie McDermott, she writes about two rival families who hold a deep-seated grudge against each other: the book begins with Pájaro and Marciano, two sons of the two fathers, both lying in the mud after a fair, bleeding out due to their wounds.
If you can, avoid reading the blurb on the back of this one, as I personally think it gives too much away. What you need to know is that this is a book about toxic masculinity, the way violence and abuse are handed down from fathers to sons, about homoeroticism, queerness, and homophobia, and about a harsh kind of rural life that takes a tough toll on the people living it.
It is a fast-moving novel that jumps around in time. It was hard to put down as I carried it through Ushuaia, on some of my worst and best days. It’s harsh, dark, and sad, and you’ll want to read it in one vivid sitting. Almada’s writing continues to be superb.
Content warnings for violence, domestic emotional/psychological/physical abuse, animal cruelty and death, homophobia.
My read of The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, was technically a reread, but I had forgotten much more about these stories than about the ones in Ficciones, and so the collection contained more surprises, which was fun to dig into.
I carried this book with me to see the penguins (it’s a Penguin Modern Classic, so that was fun), and read most of it in Tierra del Fuego national park, finishing it in a dark moody bar in Buenos Aires that I think Borges would have really liked. The poor book is completely beat up, particularly because I had to shove it into a sweatshirt pocket when it started raining during our penguin visit.
I really enjoyed many of the stories from “The Aleph” (1949), including “The Immortal,” in which Borges thinks about what it would look like for people to really be able to live forever, and “The Zabir,” in which a mysterious object stalks a man.
And since I wrote my thesis on Borges, “The Maker” (1960) holds a lot of gems. In its small vignettes and tales, Borges writes in his spiderweb-y, twisting way about what it means to create and try to write something into existence, whether it’s possible to reproduce something that exists in the world, of legacy and immortality through writing.
It was fascinating good stuff, and again—I could write another three theses on this man’s work! But I promise you don’t have to be in that frame of mind to enjoy his weird little tales—you can also just dig in, and muse, and wonder, and enjoy.
Content warnings for sexual assault, mental illness, gaslighting, violence, false accusations.
