It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

I started two new books over the weekend. In the nonfiction realm I started

People Who Eat Darkness: The Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo- And the Evil that Swallowed Her Up, by Richard Lloyd Parry, a true crime account about the disappearance and murder of a British woman named Lucie Blackman who traveled to Japan as a 20-something to work. So far I'm enjoying it a lot although it is pretty bleak for obvious reasons. I spent time abroad as a young woman and can relate to what must have driven someone like Lucie to try her hand at an adventure. What happened to her was a horror and a tragedy. The book came from Powell's as part of a Christmas gift of books from my husband.

In the fictional world, I decided on Vernon Subutex, by Virginie Despentes. This is a French book that my husband read and recommended, first in trilogy, about a man who loses the record store he's been running for the past 20 years and becomes homeless. I bought the book fairly recently, in 2020 at McNally Jackson which is one of my favorite NYC indies. I don't remember why Jeff decided to read it- he doesn't usually go for small press translations or realistic fiction- but he did and when I asked him to choose my next read he picked it off the shelf. I've read Despentes before and I liked the book I read, Apocalypse Baby.

I'm still on How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish in audioland, and will be for a while. It's very interesting.