First up is Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, about a young gay man and his search for love on Tinder and in the nightclubs of Seoul. Ennui in a book is not my thing, but I certainly saw a side of life in Seoul I would never have encountered outside of this book.
I finally finished Go Back to Where You Came From by Wajahat Ali. I only know him from Twitter, and damn, what a life he's had! A great example of how we never know what trauma someone might be living with, and why we should treat each other gently.
Staying with that theme, I also read Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad. Shortly after graduating from Princeton and moving to Paris, she discovers she has AML, and moves home to go through the brutal treatments needed to kill the cancer. When she's semi-recovered, she takes to the road on a 100 day trip across the country and back, visiting with people who wrote her while she was in the hospital. Some of the quotes I highlighted:
"That is what literature offers--a language powerful enough to say how it is, " Jeanette Winterson wrote. "It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place."
They taught me that, when life brings you to the floor, there is a choice. You can allow the worst things that's ever happened to you to hijack your remaining days, or you can claw your way back into motion.
A quote from Stanley Kunitz's poem, The Layers:
I have walked through many lives
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was
though some principle of being abides,
from which I struggle not to stray.
And finally The Good Wife of Bath, by Karen Brooks, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Medieval history fiction with a feminist twist? Yes, please. There were plenty of similarities offered between our years of Covid and a world in which the plague had wiped out so many people that the world must change to function: lack of low wage employees meant better living conditions for serfs being one.
I also read A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson. I liked it a lot, but struggle to see how it is considered Booker Prize worthy. But I thought the same thing about Coda winning the Oscar for Best Picture, so maybe it's an ingrained prejudice against domestic stories? (Trying to be generous here!)
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