This review of Crimson by Niviaq Korneliussen is my second post for Indigenous Literature Week. The first was a review of The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke by Tina Makereti. Five chapters. Five narrators. Five different experiences of being young Greenlanders trying to navigate the complex territory of gender and sexual identity. That’s the basic setup of Crimson by Niviaq… Read More
As part of Indigenous Literature Week, here’s my review of The Imaginary Lives of James Poneke by Maori author Tina Makereti. The violence of colonisation can take many forms. There’s physical violence, of course, in the form of land grabs, murder, rape, mutilation, and other forms of terrorism. There’s psychological violence: the colonisation of the mind of its subjects with… Read More
Spring is here: storks on the electricity poles, calves in the fields, and suddenly a million things to do around the house and garden. Full-time travel around the 50 countries of Europe was, in some ways, less consuming of time and energy than living in a small cottage in rural Serbia. In any case, after a cold, dark winter exacerbated… Read More
Alistair MacLeod was a Canadian writer who told stories about the rugged landscape of Cape Breton island in Nova Scotia and the rugged miners and fishermen who inhabited it. Marcie over at Buried in Print has embarked on a fascinating reading project covering all of his short stories over the next couple of years. I probably won’t be able to… Read More
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
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
This is a useful overview of the history of Serbia, starting in neolithic times and going right through to the present (it was published in 2018). The book starts by describing the early inhabitants of the territory now known as Serbia, including the surprising fact that it produced 15 Roman emperors, more than the city of Rome itself. Then we… Read More
Here’s a quick roundup of some good books I read this month, featuring Jorge Luis Borges, Anne Tyler and more.
Read More
After my quick trip to the UK last month, I’m back in Belgrade again. We made a few stops on our drive back across Europe, but it’s really not a good time to be travelling. It was, nevertheless, a great time to spend a couple of hours strolling around Venice with no crowds. Here’s the Piazza San Marco as you’ve… Read More