Sunday Caught My Interest

Last day of Spring Break and our few days of sunshine seem to be departing for rain. I loved having the teenagers in and out of the house. A few times the freshman dropped by the house to pick up youngest for a run. It a look into the past for me when eldest was a senior and youngest et. al. were the freshman. Now youngest’s crowd is trying to figure out where they are going to go to college – decisions need to be made. Eldest is trying to avoid the Zombie apocalypse at WWU as it is Humans vs. Zombies over there. I think he is still human but I am sure he has lots of zombies gunning for him. I picked up Diana Morton’s The Distant Hours at the library yesterday and had a good wallow in bed this morning with it and a contented orange furball. And I am almost finished with A Good Scent from A Strange Mountain: Stories by Robert Olen Butler. I have a new stack of library reads so I don’t know what I will pick up next.

Here is what caught my interest this week:

Eva from A Striped Armchair is such an eclectic reader and this week she cast her focus on a non-fiction examination of the history of malaria called The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years by Sonia Shah. Shah, an investigative writer covers the history of the disease , its effect on history and society, efforts to eradicate it, as well as current policies and efforts. Eva writes, “Shah manages to cover a wide variety of aspects related to malaria, from historical to contemporary, from individual to broader picture, from scientific facts to policy analyses. And she does it all with style; the book never loses its readable, fascinating tone.”

A post from Kerry at Hungry Like a Woolf sent me to Kinna Reads who reviews a book by Luis Bernardo Honwana called We Killed Mangy-Dog and Other Mozambican Stories (1964). Kinna writes, “His writing style is sensitive and delicate and each character, whether human or animal, is deeply rendered.  His descriptions are vivid and his prose is poetic.” The quotes she includes in the review are incredible, for example:

The pigeons flight is essentially practical – it sacrifices the grace of a pirouette or the sweep of a curve to the necessity of arriving more quickly.  No one remembers seeing a pigeon intoxicated by the caress of the wind, as often happens to the swallow; no one can affirm that, like the vulture, the pigeon indulges himself in the sensual pleasures of gliding through the dense blue space with his wings unfurled; surely too, no one ever heard of a pigeon spending a whole morning combing his stomach for lice, fluffing out his chest, smoothing his feathers, as the lazy secua goose does.

Kinna is from Ghana, West Africa and I am definitely  bookmarking her blog to follow.

I like mysteries and Jen from Devourer of Books reviews one with an interesting twist. Lisa Lutz (author of the Spellman comedic crime novels) wants to write a book with a collaborator and chooses her ex David Hayward (a poet) so in Heads You Lose we get both the mystery (a body shows up on a northern California marijuana farm run by two siblings) and the increasing snarking back and forth between the two authors. It sounds like a whole lot of fun.

Gavin from Page 247 begins her latest review with, “A short book, just 72 pages, made up of brief pieces that read like prose poems.  It is as if I had up and read bits of paper that were scattered about, and by reading them, learned of the life of a Palestinian girl, the youngest of nine sisters.   Through everyday occurrences that gather weight and substance, in language that is ordinary and yet eerily dreamlike, Shibli tells the story of the tragedy that is modern-day Palestine.  It is beautiful.” Who could resist – Touch, a novella by a young Palestinian author Adania Shibli. I immediately went on a search and this is going on the inter-library loan list.

After reading Hygiene and the Assassin, I have been interested in other books long listed for the International Foreign Fiction Prize 2011 – luckily for me Lizzy of Lizzy’s Literary Life reviews Juli Zeh’s Dark Matter which is published in the United States as In Free Fall. This novel seems a little hard to describe – there are two are two friends, Oskar and Sebastian, brilliant physicists who have moments of contention in their relationship both personal and professional. There is a televised debate, a kidnapping, a surprising twist, detectives and both philosophical and metaphysical questions for the reader to ponder. What drew me to order this one was the lines quoted from the epilogue:

As you take off towards the north-east, Freiburg looks less like a city than a carpet of colours flowing into each other.  A shimmering rainbow mass.  No one can say whether he is a part of it or it is a part of him  A mosaic of roofs on which the morning sun lavishes its golden tones.  The quicksilver ribbon of the Dreisam winds its way through.  You can float the bluish air like it’s water. The mountains call the birds home.  The birds report their news.

It went something like this, we say.

One of my favorite Book Group reads was Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels – it solidified my love of poets writing prose simply because Anne Michael’s prose was so beautiful. I did not know she had written a second novel, The Winter Vault. I found a description of it at Curled Up With a Good Book. In The Winter Vault, Michael’s explores the destruction of Warsaw, the flooding around the St. Lawrence and the effects of the flood that takes place when they built the Aswan Dam. Now I am torn – should I read her second novel or experience the pleasure of reading Fugitive Pieces again.

Happy reading!

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