I’m surprised at how much I’m enjoying it! It is very well written, I can see and feel everything being described - it is very vivid.
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Thank you. Too many books, too little time, so I figured, the more I read at once, the more I can get to lol. I don’t have a problem keeping the stories straight as they’re fairly different from each other. I also write notes about them as I read them, which helps. I just read them in circle - sometimes I’ll do 30-60 minutes per book, sometimes a certain number of pages before moving on to the next one. Once I’m done with the book for the day, I put it on the bottom of the pile and read the next one in pile.
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Wrapping up Raja Shehadeh’s “What Does Israel Fear From Palestine?”. The book reads more like a position paper than a book nevertheless it is an interesting perspective. I realize there are at least two sides to every story but Shehadeh’s point of view is not one we are likely to hear in the US. I like to understand as many sides as possible before forming my own opinion. For this reason I found this book enlightening.
Hi @Anne_Glasgow - You’d asked about Looking at Women Looking at War. I got my review in yesterday and it’ll be published here in a couple of weeks, but a couple of comments. The book is the author’s war diary as she describes her transition from novelist to someone who investigates war crimes. Interspersed with her first-hand experiences are the stories of other women who gave up their normal everyday lives to fight in the war. A lawyer, for example, fights on the front lines, while another uses her talents as a translator to help evacuate people at a train station.
I felt like it was a five-star book, but it was definitely a different kind of reading experience. The author was killed by a Russian missile before she finished compiling her manuscript, and had only finished about 60% of it. Her husband and friends completed it from fragments of documents they found in her effects, literally piecing together bits into the outline she left behind. The first third or so is relatively complete, but the text gets increasingly disjointed as the book goes along. Some chapters have just a bunch of unconnected, unfinished sentences, others are completely blank other than the editors’ notes.
The end result is something that feels, well, stunning (literally). There’s an immediacy to it that I don’t know that I’ve encountered elsewhere. The book is not so much read as discovered, kind of like something from an archeological dig.
I recommend it, as I said (and I learned a LOT from it), but it does present readers with challenges.
I’m not sure how much that makes sense (it’s kinda late here) but my full review (2/26 ezine) will likely be more coherent (our editors are amazing).