This makes an interesting companion piece to the last novel I read, Homegoing, as it, too, is about two sisters who grow up in completely different worlds. Here, we have…
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Homegoing
June 20, 2021Phenomenal storytelling–I was mesmerized by the very balanced structure of the text. There’s an elaborate family tree at the front of the book that I kept returning to, as I…
Sleeping on Jupiter
June 2, 2021I liked this book, and I read it rapidly. I did think that Manil Suri’s review in the NYT was unfair. Roy did not leave as many loose ends in…
The Mother-in-Law
May 20, 2021Another neighborhood book club pick that provided a pleasant escape from reality while also reminding me to be grateful for my reality. My mother-in-law is the best, and I’m pretty…
A Gentleman in Moscow
May 14, 2021Initially, I thought: how could a book about a man confined to a hotel for life have enough plot or character development for 450 pages? Yet this turned out to…
Leave the World Behind
April 19, 2021I took this novel’s advice and left my world behind one recent weekend. My family and I enjoyed a long weekend at a friend’s beach house. The long drive there…
Books I Did Not Finish
September 5, 2020For the Summer 2020 edition of Things I Started and Stopped, I’ve got three books. First up is Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. When this book first came out…
Last Bus to Woodstock
August 18, 2020[spoiler alert!] A little surprising, a little disappointing. We’re fans of the British TV series, here, so I thought I’d better see how Colin Dexter originally depicted Inspector Morse and…
The Great Believers
August 16, 2020Ambitious novel set in two different time periods–1980s Chicago during the AIDS crisis and 2015 in Paris–with characters, timelines and plots that converged, but sometimes in confusing ways. The novel…
So You Want to Talk About Race
July 6, 2020Like many well-meaning and awkward white people who want to be better allies in anti-racism, several of my colleagues and I have formed a reading group to do some self-educating.…