4.5 stars. I’d been eyeing this fictionalized account of the Lizzie Borden story for a while so when it was long-listed for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction, I snagged a copy from my library. After reading it, it’s easy to see why it was longlisted. Schmidt is not fucking around with her prose. See What I Have Done is an incredible piece of writing, especially considering that it’s Schmidt’s debut. This is definitely a work of fiction, but there are huge overlaps with actual […]
“These are the frail, imperfect ways of ordinary human beings in the teeth of a great epidemic”
I finished reading this book a week ago today, and I’m still not sure how to write about it. I found it deeply moving, but it may still be too soon to put my thoughts and feelings into words, and anything I write here can only scratch the surface. Jonny Steinberg has packed so much into the 326 pages of Three-Letter Plague (published in the U.S. under the title Sizwe’s Test). He writes about his own literal and figurative journey to try to learn how […]
Never Give Up!
Longitude is one of the greatest kinds of books – the kind that makes the reader passionate about something I’ve never heard of or previously had an interest in. Not only that, this entertaining non-fiction gem taught me a few major life lessons. The book, as the title implies, is about longitude. Specifically, it is about how the world tried to figure out where in the world they were sailing, literally. Solutions ranged from the practical (reading the stars) to the mystical (using the pain […]
A Good Book to Finish Coming off the Heels of Holocaust Remembrance Day
This World War II biography is written about Jan and Antonina Zabinksi. Jan was the Warsaw zoo’s zookeeper. Before the war, he and his wife lived in a villa at the zoo and enjoyed a home filled with strange and exotic pets, (besides the animals in the zoo, of course). It wasn’t unusual to see a hawk hopping throughout the house, or a baby lion being nursed. But what was once a beautifully strange and fulfilling way of life turned to a life of survival […]