10/13/2021
“Brotherhood” by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is the most compelling novel I’ve read this year. I read the first half as if I was reading a book for the first time; it felt as if the writer was expressing a story so powerful he called it fiction just to get it out, to me, to us.
I woke up this morning feeling wistful. It’s the third week of August. Where did this summer go?
Are we feeling the relief? Relief that we can see George Floyd’s face, his profile, that awful image of him under Chauvin’s knee – and feel some accountable closure to such a brazen murder?
Go ahead, ask me what I’ve been doing lately…
…
The movie we watched is Nomadland directed by Chloe Zhao.
My personal goal is to write this in one day. Sometimes my thoughts and ideas fly and dip like ‘always soaring never landing’ albatrosses – but do you know what happens to people who pursue albatrosses? They end up in the drink. Which is where more of my writing ends than you’d think.
How many feelings have you cycled through since the Inauguration? I’ve been the Lance Armstrong (without the drugs or cancer) of ups, downs, responses, relief, and outrage.
I read that the Twitter word trending last Thursday morning was “slept.” As in “I slept well last night for the first time in four years. How about you?”
I heard part of an NPR / Fresh Air interview with writer Ayad Akhtar so I borrowed the book from the library and read it.
“A powerful, rollicking adventure that takes us across America and deep into one person’s life-and-death experience.”
Carl Zimmer, one of America’s foremost science writers
...
Outpedaling ‘The Big C’: My Healing Cycle Across America
Outpedaling "The Big C": My Healing Cycle across America Elizabeth McGowan Bancroft Press (Sep 6, 2020) Hardcover $28.95 (268pp) 978-1-61088-514-0
I just finished reading “Red Dust – A Path Through China” by Ma Jain. It is a remarkable book that asks more questions than it answers.