When I graduated a few years ago I began to make a concerted effort to read fiction again, and in doing so re-ignited a deep love for literature that had long been suppressed. In university, I studied politics, gender theory, and legal theory, and I didn’t have much time or energy for any reading that wasn’t school-related. favourites are Peryton Books and Westgate), my consumer choices are clearly a bit more erratic. But when I stop in at the used bookstores (Sask. When frequenting my favourite independent booksellers ( McNally Robinson and Turning the Tide ), I often impulse-buy one or two new releases a month (this month it was Big Swiss ), as well as any writers that I don’t often see at my local used bookstores (like Baldwin, Ernaux, and Lorde). Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf / Absalom, Absalom! / A Streetcar Named Desire / Varieties of Exile / If on a winter’s night a traveler / Milkman / A Manual for Cleaning Women / Girl, Woman, Other / Big Swiss / Go Tell It on the Mountain / Exteriors / Your Silence Will Not Protect YouĪnd here are the books I purchased this month (used books are on the left, new books are on the right). I wouldn’t draw breath without my children.” Not you, not none of mine, and when I tell you you mine, I also mean I’m yours. “I have felt what it felt like and nobody walking or stretched out is going to make you feel it too. I knew she would be.”īeloved was a haunting work of unparalleled craft, inspired by a true story about a woman who escapes slavery with her children only to make the ultimate sacrifice to save them when the slavers hunt her down. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. She come back to me of her own free will and I don’t have to explain a thing, I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. On the horrific scars of slavery in the aftermath of the American Civil War (“definitions belonged to the definers-not the defined”), the bond between mother and daughter (“unless carefree, motherlove was a killer”), and the consequences of our choices. “If I've thought of my mother as callous, and many times I have, then it is important to remember what a callus is: the hardened tissue that forms over a wound.”īeloved by Toni Morrison (1987). On grief and reconciling faith with science. Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi (2020). “It is other people-anonymous figures glimpsed in the subway or in waiting rooms-who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us.” In which Ernaux shares her people-watching observations in the form of a private diary, but without the self-investigation present in other books (such as Simple Passion ). “It’s in those moments that he experiences most acutely the feeling of his own estrangement from these people he calls his friends.”Įxteriors by Annie Ernaux (1993). On loneliness and isolation, and the wounds we keep private and the ones we lay bare. “So she will walk on down that road, her back so straight in that old green coat, the strap of her handbag pushed back all the way to the elbow, thinking how much I have cost her and never remember the days when we were two throats and one eye and we had no price.” On a deep, fracturing relationship between young Black women and the consequences of their diverging lives as they reconnect in adulthood. In the cold prairie air of February, I was warmed by these five books: I fell further in love with Morrison’s craft and Taylor’s ability to convey devastating loneliness I fell for Gyasi’s meditations on grief and Ernaux’s ability to capture the essence of a stranger. This month, I finished five novels, from two writers that I hadn’t read before (Brandon Taylor and Yaa Gyasi) and writers that I have (Toni Morrison and Annie Ernaux).
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