The Skinny: January Reads
The best thing about a new year? Digging into your to-read list with renewed ambition! Here are two fantastic reads to get you started: Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann and The Muralist by B.A. Shapiro! The former is a collection of four short stories and the latter is a woderful follow-up to Shapiro's The Art Forger. I read Forger back in the college and fell in love with the way that Shapiro intertwines history, art, and her own spunky style of narration. Below are few thoughts on both books!
Thirteen Ways of Looking Colum McCann, 256 pages
The collection's namesake kicks off this set of stories and sets an interesting landscape: Judge Mendohlsson (now in his old age) goes about his final day unaware that it will have a bloody end. Suspects include his son, his wiatress, his caretaker Sally, and Dandinho (his favorite restaurant's head waiter). The story shines a lot of light on the profound & intimate consequences of even our smallest actions.
What Time is it Now, Where You Are? follows as a writer tries to come up with a good NYE story that's due for a magazine. It's interesting to read writing about a writer who is trying to write (confusing sentence to read, even more confusing sentence to write). I think this story shines a really great light on how writers formulate their stories and slowly mold their characters - deciding which elements stay, which elements go, which details to mention, and which things to keep hazy for the reader.
Sh'khol is probably the most heart-wrenching of the lot - a story about the sorrow a parent experiences when they lose a child. It felt incredibly personal and harrowing as I read it. The story's name, itself, is foreign, but McCann does a wonderful job of bringing all the feelings surrounding such a traumatic experience to the surface. To me it was a wonderful commentary on how language can carry so many different connotations - for example, there are plenty of experience and/or feelings that have no proper term in English, but do so in other languages.
McCann rounds out the lot with Treaty, about a nun who comes face-to-face with her rapist and captor many years after the crime was committed. The man is now heading a commitee for peace. As she searchs for meaning and grace of the horrible things that happened in her past, she confronts this man and forces him to acknowledge what he's done.
The Muralist
B.A. Shapiro, 352 pages
Disclaimer: I haven't finished yet! I wanted to include this in January's book review to motivate me to read at LEAST two other books this month. This novel switches (predominantly) perspectives between its two female protagonists - Alizee Benoit and Danielle Abrams. Alizee was a painter for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) right at the beginning of the second world war. Her extended family (aunt, uncle, cousins, etc.) lived in France and Belgium when Hitler's Nazi Germany began taking over different parts of Europe. As she struggles to get her family visas and continue painting murals for the WPA, she makes the acquaintance of one Eleanor Roosevelt. Fast-forward a few decades and her great grand niece, Danielle, is working at Christie's auction house and trying to uncover more details about her great grand aunt's art and life. The story is told with wonderful narration that keeps a steady (and fairly quick) tempo.
I'm hoping to do more of these book reviews at the beginning of every month! Next on my reading list: City on Fire by Garth Hallberg, The Marriage of Opposites by Alice Hoffman, Our Souls at Night be Kent Haruf, The Architect's Apprentice by Elif Shafak, Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J Ryan Stradal, and Ghettoside by Jill Leovy!
