I have wanted to read this book ever since I read Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies last year. So for a recent roadtrip I downloaded the audiobook from my library and hit play. It was a post-work drive in the dark and I was so ready to switch off the book when I started. It […]
Tell the Wolves I’m Home: A Novel by Carol Rifka Brunt
I really need to pay attention to how books end up on my to-read list. Case in point? This one. Tell the Wolves I’m Home is the debut novel of Carol Rifka Brunt. It tells the story of two teenage sisters, lonely individuals in their own ways, who have a tumultous relationship. I wasn’t dazzled. […]
We Are the World, We Are Family
I get notifications from AP mobile on my phone. Beginning Friday afternoon I started to get notifications about the terror attacks in Paris. I finished work, and went to dinner. The notifications continued. We discussed it at dinner. “Did you hear what is happening in Paris? Hundreds held hostage at a concert. Suicide bombers at […]
Stromae Live in Concert in NYC
My cousins in Belgium tipped us on Stromae a couple years ago and then about a year ago told my sisters and I he would be coming to the US and that we must go to his performance. I bought my tickets for his Philadelphia September show back in February, only to learn in August […]
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Where do I even begin with this one? This is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel written by Junot Diaz, a MacArthur fellow of Dominican heritage who teaches creative writing at MIT. The novel tells the story of Oscar, a sorry-sounding overweight ghetto nerd and his family’s fukú haunted epic journey from Santo Domingo to New […]
Celebrating Mass with Pope Francis
When I went to Rome in 2008, I managed to attend a General Audience with the Holy Father, at that time Pope Benedict XVI. It was a one in a lifetime chance to pray with and receive blessings from the Holy Father, or so I thought. I barely saw him. He was a white speck […]
The Man In The Arena
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who […]
Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohammed
Jama is a naive market boy who travels from Yemen to Somalia to Djibouti to Eritrea to Sudan to Egypt to Palestine and eventually to Britain before he tries to make his way back home. Oops, I guess I should have given a spoiler’s alert. I’ll start over. It’s 1935 and we are in Yemen […]
Hello! We matched! :)
Hello KChie! We matched! 🙂 So read my Tinder alert. It came from a man I had mistakenly swiped “right” on less than 24 hours prior. If you don’t know, Tinder is one of many (online) dating apps where profiles consists of your first name, age, photos of your choice, and pages you’ve “liked” on […]
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
I was not impressed with Memories of My Melancholy Whores but this One Hundred Years of Solitude is thought of as Gabriel García Márquez’ masterpiece therefore I decided to give him another go. It was initially published in Spanish in 1967 and has been widely translated since. It is a metaphoric history of Columbia told […]