Tracy Franz’ memoir, My Year of Dirt and Water chronicles the year her husband, Koun attends intensive training in a cloistered temple to become a Zen Monk. Alone with only intermittent access to Koun during his residency, Franz is left to navigate the foreignness of an unknown culture as well as the foreignness she feels in herself. The book is structured in a set of running diary entries broken up by seasons, chronicling both the linear time of Japan’s holidays and climate, as well as […]
How the Other Half Lives
I revisited this book for class, and while the language and visceral imagery remained the same this time as it did on my first read, I was struck this time by just how much the theme of education ran through this story. For a general recapping of the story, here’s the amazon blurb: “Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the […]
Stick With This One, It’s Worth It
This is my first ever experience reading a book before print, and it took a little while for me to get into this one, but once I was in, the payoff was worth it. Never Anyone But You follows Suzanne and Claude (Luci) from falling in love as teenagers in the early 1900s through the many different Paris art movements post World War I, onto their Nazi resistance during World War II, and their final years on the small isle of Jersey. In truth, the first […]
Sometimes A Book Stays With You
I would never have picked this book up on my own, and as much as it’s an emotional roller coaster, I’m actually very happy my book club decided to read this. On a craft level, this book is incredibly accessible. I blew through it in two days, and literally thought about the characters every minute I wasn’t reading. It’s emotional, painful, with moments of brilliant love, and at its core, it’s the story of humans enduring the worst and still pressing on. A Thousand Splendid […]