Halfway into the month and I’m just sharing this month’s reading list! Truth be told, I’ve been slow to start this year with my reading, and I’m finally wrapping up some books I started back in 2017.
This month, I’d like to keep it real, keep it slow. In the past, I’ve sped through books that I wasn’t able to dwell in them for as much as I would’ve loved to. But since I’m off to a slow start, I’ll continue with keeping this kind of pace — live within the pages for a few moments, as they say.
I just finished The Diary of Anaïs Nin a few days ago and I’m still thinking about it. It wasn’t until I finished that I started researching more about the writer, and I think knowing how her personal life intertwined with her writing process was a startling point for me. More of these though on my upcoming review, but for now, she’s brewin’ in my mind.
Here are this month’s glorious picks:
Heartland (Amazon | Shop your local indie bookstore) by Ana Simo
Synopsis: In a word-drunk romp through an alternate, pre-apocalyptic United States, Ana Simo’s fiction debut, Heartland, is the uproarious story of a thwarted writer’s elaborate revenge on the woman who stole her lover, blending elements of telenovela, pulp noir, and dystopian satire.
Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton (Amazon | Shop your local indie bookstore) edited by Hardie St. Martin
“English-only edition of poems written from exile, prison, and on the run by the Salvadoran revolutionary whose life and word urged love as well as change. Selected from 10 of his collections including two posthumous manuscripts, but none are from Poemasclandestinos (1980). The vital force of the intimate, conversational Spanish challenges the translators. Introductory essays by Ernesto Cardenal, Claribel Alegrâia, and Hardie St. Martin recommend work for the classroom and the general reader” –Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.
Uncommon Type: Some Stories (Amazon | Shop your local indie bookstore) by Tom Hanks
A collection of seventeen wonderful short stories showing that two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor.
Debriefing: Collected Stories (Amazon | Shop your local indie bookstore) by Susan Sontag, edited by Benjamin Taylor
Debriefing collects all of Susan Sontag’s shorter fiction, a form she turned to intermittently throughout her writing life. The book ranges from allegory to parable to autobiography and shows her wrestling with problems not assimilable to the essay, her more customary mode. Here she catches fragments of life on the fly, dramatizes her private griefs and fears, lets characters take her where they will. The result is a collection of remarkable brilliance, versatility, and charm. Sontag’s work has typically required time for people to catch up to it. These challenging works of literary art–made more urgent by the passage of years–await a new generation of readers. This is an invaluable record of the creative output of one of the most inquisitive and analytical thinkers of the twentieth century at the height of her power.
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What are you reading this month? Share them with me and leave a comment below!
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