“On Beauty,” Zadie Smith
A few months ago, I read Smith’s “White Teeth” and loved it, so of course I snatched up one of her other novels, “On Beauty”, when I saw it in a used bookstore in Wales. It tells the story of an interracial family in New England and deals with the intersection of race, politics, love and university life in a small town. At times funny, heartbreaking, and relatable, this novel does not disappoint in its description of life in the United States and the relationship between the U.S. and its great mother Britain.
“A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” Rebecca Solnit
As I said in my last post, I was hoping that this next book by Solnit would be better. Well, sometimes you get disappointed and that’s that. After reading all 200 pages of this book, I can honestly say I have no idea what it was about. It seems to be a long soliloquy about subjects that range from blues music to Hitchcock films to immigrant life in the 1800s to who knows what else. From my perspective, there is absolutely nothing that ties all of these subjects together, although I’m sure Solnit would beg to differ, and probably could write a suitable defense in another 200 pages of nonsense.