READIN

🦋 Three short reads

I feel like I give short shrift here at READIN to quick, intense reads, like it is mostly the books that take me a long time to read that I am moved to write about. (This is not always true, Costaguana was a pretty quick read -- but anyways.) Three books that I've devoured recently and found most satisfying, nourishing meals.

• Feeding on Dreams by Ariel Dorfman.

  His memoir on revolution and repression in Chile and principally on the paths of exile and seeking a home (and seeking a voice) that his life has followed in the decades of the dictatorship and the decades since.

• Golden Boy, Emerald Girl by Yiyun Li.

  Short stories about life in China and as an immigrant. Fascinating sense of dread and pointlessness. You can read the title story in the New Yorker.

• In the sea there are crocodiles by Fabio Geda and translated from Italian by Howard Curtis.

  Telling the emigrant story of Enaiatollah Akbari, his journey in his tenth through fifteenth years from Afghanistan to Italy by way of Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Greece. Akbari's encounters -- friends and strangers who help him survive and make his way to his home in Italy, soldiers and thugs and police who make his way more difficult, the family that ultimately decides to foster him and help him seek asylum -- are gripping, moving, haunting stuff.

(It is not until after mentioning these three in the same breath that I realize they share (very loosely) a common theme of homeland and exile. Not sure what to make of this...)

posted evening of Saturday, October 22nd, 2011
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you're going on a LONG trip? :O lol

posted evening of October 22nd, 2011 by tony hunt

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