Well, a lot, I guess!
Libby makes it super easy and now I’m equipped with a NOLA library card too. The list is lengthy so I’ll start with some memoirs.
Not quite intentionally, I read three memoirs of escape from North Korea:
Every Falling Star by Sungju Lee, The Hard Road Out by By Jihyun Park, Seh-Lynn Chai, and Sarah Baldwin, and While Time Remains, by Yoenmi Park.
I found the first two especially compelling, with often hard-to-read details about hunger, cold and deprivation, executions and delusion. Sungju Lee writes for the YA audience but the book is beautifully written and includes the Dickensian years he spent living in a boy gang on the streets, stealing and fighting to stay alive. The third turns into a right-wing polemic and so I felt pushed away by the writer, who also suffered undeniable horrors only to be swept into another form of scolding, right-wing delusion in Europe and America.
A Heart that Works Rob Delaney was an unexpectedly compelling read, because I didn’t know Delaney’s story going in. He writes about losing his young son to cancer in the most direct, funny, angry way I’ve ever read. This is the book on loss and grief we needed (in companionship with Didion’s Magical Thinking).
As a Top Chef fan, I enjoyed Savor, a visit into Fatima Ali’s short but passionate life as a Pakistani-American cook before losing her life to cancer.
Wrong Side of Murder Creek Bob Zellner was also an unexpectedly interesting and complex read; Zellner was a Freedom Rider in the 1960’s, and he writes humbly and deftly about supporting the Black civil rights fighters including John Lewis, his beatings and arrests and flights for his life in Georgia and Mississippi and Louisiana.
The last memoir I’ll mention is Lost to the World by Shahbaz Taseer, a tale of kidnapping, torture and a decade of survival. Powerful. It reads like a thriller.
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