August 2018 Review The Schaumburg library chose this book for a communitywide book for the fall, and thus it is also on my book club list. I read it five years back but decided to give it another go to have a refresher before the discussion. This go round, I “read” the audio format. First of all, I am SO PUMPED to live in a place that picked such a book to foist on the community. What an enlightening and refreshing book. It’s almost a […]
And yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer’s voice is a singular one, solitary.
If I were to rate this book, I would give it two stars. As far as the writing goes, it’s more or less fine. It’s amatuerish because of the nature of the project. Jhumpa Lahiri is writing in Italian, a language she’s learned late in life and exploring as a kind of project, and this is the translation of a speech given at a conference. It reads like someone giving a speech in a language that they learned late in life. It’s limited in its […]
“You remind me of everything that followed.”
This was a really beautiful story. I would highly recommend listening to the audio version if you can. The narrator’s accent was amazing. I could have listened to it all day. “In so many ways, his family’s life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another…They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and […]
A Vivid, Gorgeous Read
I really, really enjoyed The Namesake, and it completely deserved my first five-star ranking of 2017. It’s about the son of Indian immigrants and his experiences growing up in America, and how his name shapes the man he becomes. I wrote about deciding on the stars it needed and what I liked about it here! A sidebar: I’m here to give this a shot again in 2017! I wrote a few reviews in early 2016, but eventually tapered off because I found it so difficult to […]