For a writer, I sure am behind on my reading. In a previous post I talked about why that was—between school and then editing for a living I just didn’t have it in me to look at any more words—but over the past few months I’ve developed a ravenous hunger for fiction.

I realized I have a lot of catching up to do. Because the books I’ve been reading are at the very least a few years old, and most of them over a decade, I’ll spare the review and just give a few impressions, in the hopes that you too will pick them up and love them as I did.

I’m still not sure why I picked up Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, but it was definitely the book that “broke the seal”. It’s one of those books that, when you’ve finished reading, you just want to re-read immediately. It’s the story of four characters, unknown to one another—a man fetching water for his family, a man seeking food, a sniper, and the titular cellist—who must make their way in war torn Sarajevo. The language itself is relatively simple and spare, almost matter of fact, which is pivotal to its impact in telling the story. It points to the banality of conflict, but also to how the most quotidian of activities, juxtaposed against the backdrop of war, becomes completely horrific. It’s also the acceptance of this horror, and the fact that the characters remembered a time before conflict and have hope for a time without it in the future, that also gives the reader hope and engages her completely in the story.

In keeping with the war theme, albeit unintentionally, I read Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. Whereas the language in Cellist was spartan, Fugitive Pieces was like having your brain dipped in caramel—deep pleasure to wade through and come out sticky at the end. It’s a work that describes the persistence of memory and quiet survival in the face of loss. Each of the characters have incredible detailed inner lives in which they each try to measure impacts, the hows and whys of their grief, while attempting to carry on “normal” lives. It’s a book of hushed tones and darkness, which turns into heat and light.

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