Books worth reading
recent posts
about
Category: Uncategorized
-
This is the latest installment in Richard Ford’s series about Frank Bascomb. In the opening chapter, Frank reflects about “Happiness.” He has become old by now. Fate has it that his son, Paul, who is 47, has become sick with Lou Gehrig’s disease, a terminal neurodegenerative disorder (ALS), for which he was treated at the…
-
German original: Ruth Klüger. 1992. Weiter leben: Eine Jugend. 31. Auflage 2023. München: dtv. 284 pp. When page numbers are given in the text below, they refer to the English translation of the text. This book belongs to the genre of testimonies by Jewish people who survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz or another concentration camp.…
-
A novel that I briefly presented earlier (Adelle Waldman’s Help Wanted) was called a “workplace novel.” Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, in a sense, is also a workplace novel, though its choice of setting is even more unusual. Or has there been any previous novel on the international space station and its personnel? There are four astronauts…
-
This novel brings us back to a theme that was raised in other entries to this list of recommended books: Nazi Germany and its mass murder of Europe’s Jewish population (Anne Berest, Michael Frank, Margot Friedlander, Ruth Kluger). The Safe Keep is set in the Netherlands of 1961. Isabel lives alone in a huge house.…
-
This novel tells the story of three generations of an Afro-Brazilian family living on a plantation called Água Negra, located in the hinterland of Bahia, one of Brazil’s 26 states, located in its Northeast. Some of the black workers on the plantation refer to themselves as Quilombolas, a name for escaped slaves in colonial Brazil.…
Books worth reading 