This Week in Books: 12th Edition

     Travel Finds

    Now that I am officially retired, I have been traveling a bit. When I travel, I visit bookstores. And when I visit book stores, I buy books. 

    So I have added a few to the stack.

    

     Beasts of a Little Land, by JuHea Kim. I found this book in a quaint little bookstore inside a great vegetarian/vegan friendly resturant in Washington called Busboys and Poets. If you're ever in Washington, go there. (There are several locations; the one I vited is on U Street.) The food is wonderful. The bookstore is delightful, with a great selection you won't find elsewhere. Like the one I bought. It's about an impoverished Korean hunter, a Japanese officer, a young courtesan, an orphan boy, and a tiger. It "unveils a world where friends become enemies, enemies become saviors, heroes are persecuted, and beasts take many shape." It spoke to me. I am ready to listen.

 

    We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, by Finan O'Toole. Ireland has changed dramatically in the past quarter century, and this book says it will explain why. O'Toole is a newspaper guy, one of the premiere historians of Ireland, as well as a political commentator. I have read some of his stuff. It's quite good. I am hoping this book will further enlighten me.

    Poguemahone, by Patrick McCabe. This is a strange one, from a place called Greedy Reads in Annapolis, Md. It's a book-long, free-verse telling of a family's history. It is compared to Ulysses -- both the original Greek myth and the wee story by James Joyce. It was called "a drinking song (and) punk libretto." So let's rock.

    This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I found this at after words, a fun used book store somewhere in Chicago. I am not familiar with the authors, but a random science fiction novel is always a good buy, and this seemed to fit the bill.

    A Passage North, by Anuk Arudpragasam. This was shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, which is a good enough reason for me to pick it up at Half Price Books. That required little travel, because it's within a few miles of my house.

    Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo," by Zora Neale Hurston.  Another book that's been on my to-buy list for a while. I recently did an Almanac of Story Tellers article on Hurston and was intrigued by the books she wrote, this one in particular. It's written in dialect, and said to be hard to read. It's been on my list since, and when I spied it at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, I picked it up.