Bridge Across broken Time by Vera Schwarcz (nonfiction)
The description of this book got me, and so I bought it. The
book itself is actually less meaty (unless I’m just too dumb to grasp all the
meat!) than I was hoping for, but Schwarcz is a great writer. Her premise/theme
is quite interesting: as the Jewish daughter of Holocaust survivors, and a
scholar on China, she explores the role and nature of memory in both Jewish and
Chinese cultures as it relates to processing grief and times of national
crises. So far, I feel like I am reading poetry, but not getting as many
profound thoughts as I’d expected. We’ll see, though.
My Antonia by Willa Cather
(fiction)
One of my favorite books of all time is Willa Cather’s “Death
Comes for the Archbishop” (beautiful and slow, like a great poem, but
phenomenal in its theme of questioning how one must deal with/interact with
another culture in a way that “the other” can understand), so I have tried some
of her other books since reading my favorite.
I did not enjoy “The Professor’s House”, but I decided to read her most
famous work, “My Antonia”. It is the retelling of a life of an immigrant girl
(who grew up in the newly-settled West) from the perspective of her old
neighbor boy. Cather is a wonderful
writer, but so far the story has left me without an idea of its purpose. That
is why I am only halfway through. I would love for those of you who have read
and enjoyed it to give me some encouragement/reasons to plow through.
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