what I’ve been reading lately:

A story told backwards; a story of how people came to be where (who) they are. The start of the first sentence: “So this, said Kay to herself, is the kind of person you’ve become: a person whose clocks and wristwatches have stopped […]” Elsewhere, Kay remarks that people’s pasts are “so much more interesting

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I read an advance reader’s copy of Suite Française in March: it only contained the first section of the two part book (it was meant to be five parts, like a symphony, but Némirovsky was deported to Auschwitz and died before finishing it). “Storm in June,” the story of the Paris evacuation in 1940 and

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“Scraps and fragments,” swallows and starlings, bits of Shakespeare, bits of Byron, bits of Keats. Little pieces of literature and history that surface, little pieces of emotion, of meaning. The shifts in perspective, what is spoken and what is felt. Each person playing a role, whether aware of it or not; art and connection and

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The myth of Atlas, re-told. Weight & destiny & choice: how things seem inevitable, but what if they’re not?

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A book full of wind and sea and salt. Silver, an orphan, is apprenticed to a lighthousekeeper to learn the trade, but of course, this being Jeanette Winterson, that’s only one of this book’s many stories. (There are always many stories, stories to hear and stories to tell.) There’s the story of Babel Dark, or

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