Over the weekend I read

Against Gravity, by Farnoosh Moshiri
This one was okay but not great. I don't recommend it. I don't think it added anything to my understanding of people or mental illness or emotions or refugees or any of the other subjects it purports to deal with.

Stranger Than Fiction : True Stories by Chuck Palahniuk
I was surprised by how much I liked this one. His essays are kind of like David Foster Wallace's crossed with Joan Didion's but then crossed with his own kind of peculiar hand.

a sizeable chunk of The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
Palahniuk raves about Hempel's writing in a way I have only rarely seen a writer rave about another writer. So I went out and got her recently published collected works. They're really intense and beautiful and my only problem with them is that they're so short. I really don't like short stories and these are really really REALLY short stories. But beautiful writing.

The Black Veil by Rick Moody
This was lovely and peculiar and many different things all at once. I really appreciated the fact that it is a memoir of his drug/alcohol addiction without being self serving or grotesque and also that the metaphor he chose and the Nathanial Hawthorne short story that reveals it are so apt without being stridently blatant.

and started A Border Passage : From Cairo to America--A Woman's Journey by Leila Ahmed
Just started this, so I can't really comment as yet. I'm wondering whether my favorite Egyptian book reviewer reviewed it. I can't wait to get home to find out.




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Breathe and know you're breathing