I finished Dracula, finally. I liked it a lot but I felt like it lost steam as it went along. It's a classic- Bram Stoker codified the vampire story and it is truly chilling, but maybe it's that for me it's also so familiar. IDK, as the kids say. I'm glad I read it and I'd recommend it. Onwards and upwards.
I started Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, a multigenerational tale of a German plot of land and several houses and the people who inhabit it over a century. It also has its shocking moments, sharp like poking your fingertip with a needle. I'm loving it and she has a new book, Go Went Gone, that's getting a lot of buzz. A bookstore customer turned me on to her and recommendations like that are part of what I really love about being a bookseller.
On the nightstand are Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich's oral history of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Laurus, a novel of medieval Russia by Eugene Vodolazkin and translated by my friend Lisa Hayden. I lurve Laurus and am finding Secondhand Time moving and very enjoyable in a different way.
Finally at the gym I'm reading Souad Mekhennet's I Was Told to Come Alone, a riveting memoir about the Washington Post journalist's forays into ISIS and the Islamic fundamentalist world. Fascinating.
What about you? I'm probably going to really dig into Laurus during the holiday weekend- should be fun. Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers.
