What I’ve Been Reading Lately…

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“All Our Worldly Goods,” Irène Némirovsky

  Perhaps Némirovsky’s most well-known book, “All Out Worldly Goods” follows two families over three generations from the beginning of World War I until the beginning of World War II. For someone who herself lived in France during these wars and experienced them firsthand (Némirovsky died in Auschwitz), her narration is rather cold and detached from her characters, even though her tone throughout the novel is one of hope, but this may be because the full horrors of the second war were yet to be seen. Though almost all of her characters live (spoiler alert, sorry), it is easy to be ambivalent about their fate,  mainly because of the air of detachment throughout the novel as a whole.

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“Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life,” Shauna Niequist

  It is not often that I truly dislike a book and speed read through it just to be done, but this was definitely one of them. Niequist claims to want to celebrate life every day, and not to wait to experience life to its fullest, but her collection of anecdotes from her personal life only shines a brilliant light on her overwhelming privilege in this world. My favorite was a story titled “Broken Bottles,” which detailed her mission trip to Africa. She flippantly talked about her sadness for the fates of its people in one paragraph, and then in the next described “the most disorienting change of venue” as she left Africa for her vacation in the Caribbean. Please. Give me a break. I could go on explaining why this book drove me nuts, but I think that single example should be sufficient.

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