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Read more: The Sagas of Icelanders
This is a huge volume I started this summer and am still working through. It’s fascinating but A LOT. We’re going Iceland in October 2025, and this is one way I’m trying to immerse myself in the history and culture. The stories take place mostly in Norway and Iceland, from around 830 to 1030 AD; they were written down a few centuries later and according to the essay at the beginning of my edition, Jayne Smiley ranks these tales right up there with other world lit masterpieces, calling them “as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as…
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Read more: Pink Slime
by Fernanda Trías | Plucked from the staff recommendation shelves at East Bay Booksellers somewhat randomly. I devoured this slim, grim novel in two days. I can’t get the narrator or the boy she was caring for out of my head. My heart is all cracked and bruised from it. Set not in our pandemic but in an imagined one, where a red algae, swept off the ocean when the wind picks up, is gruesomely deadly and most everyone has moved away from the coast. So much is packed into these 200 pages. Memory, mothers & daughters, lovers, indecision, nostalgia,…
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Read more: Under this big blue sky
The sky is a heartbreaking blue today. It verges on cruel. An airplane, bigger than a speck, silent, floats in a sharp, straight line and disappears behind the umbrella overhead. A whole plane full of people with their own peeves and frustrations, their own private jokes and their own schemes. Going somewhere. In 999 of my thousand and one moods I hate the telephone. In a thousand of them I love a patio, sundrenched or starlit. An alcove open to rain or fog. A Greyhound bus, a cemetery, a mountain trail, a waterfront, a dimly lit bar that’s seen better…
If I Had a Book Club 