I missed my monthly reading roundup in February, so here are two months together. As you’ll see, they were dominated by one huge book: Marcel Proust’s seven-volume, 3,000-page masterpiece. But I managed to squeeze in a few more good books as well. The Ants Will Come and Tell Me by Lena & Daniel Platt I enjoyed this chronicle of a… Read More
As the Empire was falling apart, Britain had a problem: how to keep control of all its former colonies and their resources as they became independent. Acting in good faith was, of course, out of the question. Many of the leaders pushing for independence were talking of using their resources for the benefit of their own people, which went against… Read More
I love the writing of Jorge Luis Borges. Back in the early days of this blog, I was so deeply affected by reading his collection of ‘fictions’ that I broke my optimistic vow of reviewing every book I read. It seemed impossible to review a book so vast and varied—it would be like trying to catalogue the contents of one… Read More
Reading The US Antifascism Reader lately gave some useful context on this much-maligned but essential movement. It’s a collection of essays and speeches by historical figures from W.E.B. Du Bois to Franklin Roosevelt, Aimé Césaire to Barbara Ehrenreich, in which we see different approaches to combating the dangers of fascism.
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January wasn’t a great month, but I did read some good books. Here’s a quick roundup.
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What does it mean to be a woman? In the memorable novel Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami explores the question by looking at two key periods in the life of Tokyo writer Natsuko Natsume.
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As we all know, travel has become a lot easier in recent decades—at least for those of us born into relative privilege and possessing passports that allow us to travel widely. But the flip side of that is that often we don’t know the places closer to home. As Marco D’Eramo points out in his New Left Review essay Geographies… Read More
There’s a quote by Alice Walker that I love: “When I was a child, I read books for entertainment and information; I now think of books as lifeboats.” 2020 was a year when I reached for the lifeboats more often than usual, and they didn’t fail me. Sometimes I went searching for context on pressing issues like pandemics, racial oppression… Read More
In her preface to The Seat of the Soul, Oprah Winfrey writes: “The Seat of the Soul changed the way I see myself. It changed the way I view the world. It caused a profound shift in the way I conduct all my relationships, business and personal” Then there’s another preface by Maya Angelou, with more high praise for the… Read More