Writing about my reading life. Reading is life. By Michelle Wuest
Title: The Music Shop
Author: Rachel Joyce
Date read: December 23, 2018.
Two Snaps.
A sweet story, and a lovely tour of music, complete with its own Spotify playlist. Thanks so much for the loan, Natalie Webb, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and listening to its accompanying music. Super cool!
Title: Bear Town
Author: Fredrik Backman
Date read: December 16, 2018.
Two Snaps.
Spent some more time in Fredrik Backman’s little hockey town in the forest. So many stories and thoughtful messages about family, friendship, community and telling the truth.
Snappy writing that sticks:
“The love a parent feels for a child is strange. There is a starting point to our love for everyone else, but not this person. This one we have always loved, we loved them before they even existed. No matter how well prepared they are, all moms and dads experience a moment of total shock, when the tidal wave of feelings first washes over them, knocking them off their feet.”
And…
“For me, culture is as much about what we encourage as what we actually permit.”
David asked what he meant by that, and Sune replied: “That most people don’t do what we tell them to. They do what we let them get away with.”
This book is so much more than a hockey story.
Title: Us Against You
Author: Fredrik Backman
Date read: December 2, 2018.
Two Snaps.
Such a wonderful story. Thoughtful, insightful, well written. Lines still tossing about in my mind. This is the fourth of his novels I’ve read, I’ve loved them all. Big thumbs up!
If you’re reading in order (unlike I), Bear Town comes first.
Title: Women Talking
Author: Miriam Toews
Date read: October 14, 2018.
Two Snaps.
Only the intro to this book can explain it and my engagement with it:
“Between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia named the Manitoba colony, after the province in Canada, many girls and women would wake in the morning feeling drowsy and in pain, their bodies bruised and bleeding, having been attacked in the night. The attacks were attributed to ghosts and demons. Some members of the community felt the women er being made to suffer by God or Satan as punishment of their sins; many accused the women of lying for attention or to cover up adultery; still other believed everything was the result of wild female imagination.
Eventually, it was revealed that eight men from the colony had been using an anaesthetic to knock their victims unconscious and rape them. In 2011, these men were convicted in a Bolivian court and received lengthy prison sentences. In 2013, while the convicted men were still in jail, it was reported that similar assaults and other sexual abuses were still taking place in the colony. Read about the true story and aftermath here.
Women Talking is both a reaction through fiction to these true-life events, and an act of female imagination.”
Yes, yes, yes. Well done, Miriam Toews!
Title: The Italian Teacher
Author: Tom Rachman
Date read: October 6, 2018.
One Snap.
I liked it. I felt sorry for Pinch, one of the main characters, throughout. There are lively and well drawn characters, but I wasn’t always connected to them or rooting for them or caring about them, I mostly felt indifferent.
