Published by Vintage, 2018, 625 pages. “A man in the boreal north lies on his back on the cold ground at dawn. ... [T]he spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they’ve lived …
Month: December 2021
The Promise: Damon Galgut
Published by Chatto & Windus, 2021, 304 pages. The Promise revolves around a white South African family—Manie and Rachel Swart and their children Astrid, Anton and Amor—and an unkept promise. Manie promises the dying Rachel that he will give their maid Salome the deeds to the house in which she lives. But once Rachel dies, …
My Life in Books
Photo: Vipman via Shutterstock This article was inspired by My Life in Middlemarch, a bibliomemoir by Rebecca Mead, which draws on her readings of George Eliot’s Middlemarch over the years. I loved the idea of writing memoirs that are intertwined with a book. But since there isn’t a book I reread regularly, I thought that …
My Life in Middlemarch: Rebecca Mead
Published by Broadway Books, 2014, 309 pages. “Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does …
The Best Books of 2021
Photo: Yulia Grigoryeva via Shutterstock It is already the end of 2021! The year has flown past. We haven’t been locked down quite as much as we were last year—we did manage to see friends and family—but Covid isn’t history yet, and no one is sure what the coming months will bring. As always, we …
Talking About Books 