Mother Daughter Widow Wife and The Life to Come
Someone asked me the other day how I select the books I read. I had to think about that, actually. Because truthfully, it’s just sort of a whim thing. I’m a greedy book acquirer, thanks to the library, so I’m often trying to read many books at once.
This is what I am reading now: Mother Daughter Widow Wife by Robin Wasserman and The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser. I am done with neither (wow, my attention has been shot this week), but here’s how I chose them: Mother Daughter Widow Wife was recommended to me by a friend. It’s an interesting look at both memory and cognition as well as power dynamics, particularly within an academic setting. (A story circling around the Harvard Anthropology Department came out at the same time I picked this one up at the library.) I found out about The Life to Come because of my weekly scroll through Twitter. A bookseller in Dublin did a little “shoutout” of Australian novelists, and de Kretser was mentioned. The Life to Come is more a collection of interwoven novellas or stories, and they touch upon a large swath of subjects including Sri Lanka, posh Aussies, and what it means to be a writer. Mother Daughter Widow Wife could easily be made into a movie (in fact, Wasserman is a television writer); The Life to Come would perhaps be too convoluted for that. Both authors create rich characters who stir readers’ emotions.
Stirring readers’ emotions: I guess that’s what I’ve been thinking about during a painful news week. There’s a time for reading to explicitly inform oneself (even through fiction), and sometimes you read simply because it makes you feel.
So how do I choose my books? Like I said, no rhyme or reason. But when I do read — no matter what it is — my gut reaction is to think: What am I feeling? And how is this random piece of fiction somehow, in some small roundabout way, connected to our bigger world? With these two, I’m not sure. But I’m still feeling — and that’s how we know we’re human.
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