Latitudes of Longing by Shubhangi Swarup
Audiobook [12 hr] read by Vikras Adam
Oceans, glaciers, rivers, islands, mountains and valleys: all of these, as well as plants and various other life forms are as vital to this amazing novel as the vivid human characters. Told in four novellas, within a larger framework of eons, shifting tectonic plates, the universe as witness—the sun and moon quarrelling or falling in love, while on Earth the brief lives and loves of humans in South Asia. The comfort in feeling part of a larger whole.
What happens every few hundred years just happened yesterday and can happen again tomorrow.
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“When I ate it last, it was alphonso. Now it is shivaji. Who would have thought that even mangoes would change their identity after Independence.”
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Islands, intuitively speaking, made the perfect canvas for practicing the art of nomenclature. The heightened isolation would cause species to become endemic, sooner or later, demanding a unique name. The only exceptions to the rule were the British themselves. They had broken most laws of nature by leaving their island to multiply on others without losing any of their original characteristics, only their marbles.
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Billions of years pass […] Unable to sustain itself in the battle between hot and cold, life moves on to other places, while the sentimental few attached to the Earth choose extinction.
Misconduct of the Heart by Cordelia Strube
Audiobook [18 hr] read by Eve Passeltiner
A wise and witty Canadian novel about moving forward and opening your heart after experiencing trauma. Beneath day-to-day absurdities lie serious issues and the characters feel 100 per cent real.
I will post a longer review later in August.
When I look up from the logbook, Conquer, my head cook, throws a frozen steak at the wall.
“Jesús forgot to take the steaks out,” he growls. “I‘m going to have to fart on these fuckers before I grill them.”
“Jesús forgot to take the steaks out,” he growls. “I‘m going to have to fart on these fuckers before I grill them.”
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“War breeds war,” I told Pierce. “Every time you bomb civilians, terrorists are born.”
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“I‘ve made mistakes,” I blurt. “I keep making mistakes. With her. With him.”
“Good. At least you‘re making something. Make some more.”
“Good. At least you‘re making something. Make some more.”
If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha
Audiobook [8 hr] has multiple narrators: Frances Cha; Sue Jean Kim; Ruthie Ann Miles; Jeena Yi
After I got over the shock of the extreme plastic surgery considered commonplace by some of the young women in this novel set in contemporary Seoul, I settled in to get to know five fascinating people, told in rotating points of view. I loved this, partly because it deals with social issues like sexism, classism, gang violence, wealth disparity and crushing debt, and mostly because of the supportive friendships.
Sujin is still complaining about her eyelids. She's been unhappy about them almost the entire time I've known her, before and after she had them stitched. The doctor who performed the surgery was the husband of one of our teachers, who ran a small plastic surgery practice in Cheongju. About half of our school got their eyes done there that year because the teacher offered us a 50% discount. The other half, which included me, couldn't afford even that.
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Most people have no capacity for comprehending true darkness, and then they try to fix it anyway.
Greenwood by Michael Christie
Audiobook [16 hr] has multiple narrators: Raven Dauda; David Ferry; Christo Graham; Amy Matysio
Canadian eco-fiction and family saga, spanning a time period from 1908 to 2038, this kept me enthralled for 16 hours. Five narrators read the multiple voices, which include lumber tycoon, maple syrup tapper, carpenter, dendrologist and eco warrior. Some women choose trees above all else. Is a family line “just capitalist colonialist brainwashing, designed to sequester power in the hands of a few”? Chosen family reigns here.
Pity is a sentiment long lost to Everett Greenwood, extinguished by those ruined men he‘d carried during the war, by his brother‘s betrayal, by the scrabbling nature of life, like a bright coin dropped into a black lake. But here it is again, back from the muddy bottom, shining in his palm.
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If it‘s true that the United States was born of slavery and revolutionary violence, she muses while watching them working, then surely her own country was born of a cruel, grasping indifference to its Indigenous peoples and the natural world.
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Time is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates, in the body, in the world, like wood does, layer upon layer, light then dark, each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure.
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“Living is just a whole bunch of work,” Everett says, nodding his head. “The trick is finding some that you don‘t hate.”
Redhead by the Side of the Road by Anne Tyler
Audiobook [5 hr] read by MacLeod Andrews
I am just a little surprised that this is on the Booker longlist. It's a short, restful novel with a straightforward plot, rich characterization, and a hopeful resolution: sometimes that is exactly what is needed. There are no extra words here and it all comes together sweetly.
Accelerating, he dutifully pictured an egg beneath his gas pedal; braking he glided to an almost undetectable stop. And whenever some other driver decided at the last minute that he needed to switch to Micah's lane, you could count on Micah to slow down and turn his left palm upward in a courtly after-you gesture. "See that?" the guys at Traffic God would say to one another. "Fellow's manners are impeccable."
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Audiobook [12 hr] read by Shayna Small
I was totally swept up in this memorable family saga that spans the lifetimes of a pair of mixed-heritage twins from Louisiana, along with their daughters. There are many ways to reinvent ourselves: this topic fascinates me and it‘s beautifully done here.
The morning one of the lost twins returned to Mallard, Lou LeBon ran time the diner to break the news, and even now, many years later, everyone remembers the shock of sweaty Lou pushing through the glass doors, chest heaving, neckline darkened with his own effort.
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She hadn't realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.
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Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.
Vanishing Monuments by John Elizabeth Stintzi
I took in the gorgeous prose in small sips over the course of 2 months, rereading passages and flagging many of them. The non-binary author uses a fragmentary circular style to tell a rewarding story about memory and coming to terms with a difficult parent-child relationship. The central character illuminates their internal experience as a non-binary person, which may partly explain why I felt like this book was altering my brain.
I will post a longer review later in August. Meanwhile, I look forward to discussing this with my Feminist Book Club tomorrow.
Most monuments, eventually, make their memories stuffy. They make you think there is only one version of something you should remember. They make you think the past is clean and over.
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Beside the phone is the answering machine, which no longer has a tape in it. The phone is no longer plugged into it—a skull that nobody tells stories to anymore.
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We both loved our mothers so much, if only because we couldn‘t reach them or do anything to help them. We cared about them and watched them break themselves down.
The Swan Suit by Katherine Fawcett
A delightfully imaginative book of short stories, bursting with humour and magic. Each story has fresh surprises: a feminist retelling of Rumplestiltskin; a pig starts a wolf broth business; the devil gets distracted at a daycare; the life of eggs in a human ovary; the firing of a longterm employee that brings a whole new perspective to the term ‘deadwood.‘ Three stories about a witch are interconnected. The whole collection is fabulous!
By their third decade of marriage, sex simply didn‘t seem worth the effort. Like cooking risotto, she saw it as a messy nuisance with results that didn‘t justify all the stirring.
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The place is a disaster. Witches are terrible housekeepers and this one is also a hoarder. There are bags of bones and boxes of buttons. Food scraps and beeswax. Birch bark and bike parts. Crumpled silk and rotting milk. Under floorboards are mushrooms; in the drawer, a dead duck. As for the grimoire? Alas, no luck.
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[Witch, to her cat]: You looked like a goth girl who had fallen out of a canoe.
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One way for a witch to amuse herself, when the usual avenues of entertainment have been exhausted, is to have a child. […]
Everyone knows having a baby can be very, very good for getting a lady out of a rut, for breaking up routine when life begins to feel same old, same old.
Everyone knows having a baby can be very, very good for getting a lady out of a rut, for breaking up routine when life begins to feel same old, same old.
Tomorrow I will announce the start of a new project on my blog and I hope you all will come back to find out more.
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