Monday, June 26, 2017

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday, and I'm reading too much.

Still working my way through Smoke, by Dan Vyleta, which is a great plot-centric thriller set in an alternative version of England in the nineteenth century, where people wear their feelings on their body through a smoke that rises from them when they have bad thoughts or do bad things. What's at the bottom of all this, and can anything be done to allow people to live without visible embodiments of their shame?

I started reading Edouard Louis's autobiographical novel The End of Eddy, translated from the French. It's about a young boy growing up gay in a working-class French village and the abuse and bullying he endures, as well as how the attitudes of his town shape him in other ways. It's entrancing and difficult and I highly recommend it.

Finally I am reading La femme aux pieds nus, by Scholastique Mukasonga, about growing up in Rwanda and trying to stay alive during the civil war. It's a memoir of her murdered mother whose body she never found and it's profoundly moving. I'm going to have to get in touch with Gallimard, the French publisher, to see if a translation would be possible because I'm loving it that much.

And on the bedside table is still The Making of Jane Austen, by Devoney Looser, which I expect to finish this week. Then I'll be taking a break from Jane books!

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