I had been looking for this book to become available in the US for more than a year when I learned that Kim Scott was visiting my small city in Virginia. It was wonderful to hear him speak and to be able to buy the book. I should explain that he was here at the invitation of the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, the only art museum in the US that is wholly devoted to Aboriginal art. One of...
It was the list of the 50 best memoirs of the last 50 years according to a recent article in The New York Times that took me to this book. I expect it to be my own Book of the Year. How this exceptional book came to be is a story in itself. Theodore Rosengarten went with his friend Dale Rosen to interview Ned Cobb about his experience in the 1930s as a member of the Alabama Sharecropper’s...
This collection of 12 short pieces are connected by Perth, the most isolated city in the world. I came to read it thanks to Reading Matters who returned to Australia after 20 years in London. Having lived on the east coast she was new to the area, so she picked up this book. I’m mighty glad she did. Much as I want to remember and write about all of the selections, I will focus on just a few...
Kim of Reading Matters made a list of eight great novels using the second person point of view. Who could resist that list? I was drawn to the title of this one when I realized these four seemingly random words capture the seasons. And I was ready for a low key book and this one seemed to be about a lonely man and his connection to a one-eyed dog. Ray does speak in the second person to his dog...
This 1973 Booker Prize winner is the story of a siege in a fictional town during the actual Indian Rebellion of 1857 when the East India Company controlled the country. The British inhabitants find it difficult to give up their social structures in the face of the attacks of the sepoys and deaths by cholera and starvation. Their dedication to various irrational beliefs they are unwilling to...
This short book by a well-known Latvian writer is on Reading Matters’ list of favorite books by women in translation. It is told through two narrative voices, a mother born in 1944, and her daughter born in 1969, alternating in short sections. The mother’s lifespan is roughly the same as the Soviet Union’s domination of Latvia, 1944-45 ending in 1989-90 with the dissolution of...
Having read Sally Rooney’s second book, Normal People, I was interested in moving back into her orbit. As I mentioned in writing about that book, while I was happy to accept her terms and live in that world, I was glad to get back to my own world of “normal people.” Frances, the narrator of this one is in college and along with her former girlfriend Bobbi, does spoken word...
This is Tilghman’s third book featuring the Mason family; the first Mason in this country was given a land grant in Maryland when as a Catholic, he fled England in the 1650s. The books are Mason’s Retreat and The Right-Hand Shore. Thomas and Beal appear in the latter book; they were close as children then fell in love and had to leave not just the Retreat, but the continent because he...
Anita Heiss compiled these 50 short pieces by Aboriginal people in Australia and has gathered a pleasingly varied anthology of voices. I read that some of the stories are by well-known figures, but they were all unknown to me. Some were successful in sports, some are musicians, some were quite young. I loved them all and grew addicted to the six readers. Many spoke of their parents’...
When I recently read A Life of My Own by Claire Tomlin, I learned that she is married to Michael Frayn. I so admired his book Headlong, I was moved to read this one. I was surprised by how disconcerted I was by this book, as I was expecting a light-hearted romp involving young boys playing spy games during wartime. The narrator begins the tale by describing the sensation he has each spring when...