what i'm reading

I finished Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness. It's very good. The book is funny, sad and hopeful. It has some profound things to say about religion, love, forgiveness and hope, and it says all of them through the story and characters, not through preaching. A really nice book.

I'm about to start The Darling, by one of my favourite authors, Russell Banks. When I blogged earlier about A Complicated Kindness, I mentioned I am attracted to novels with teenage narrators. Banks wrote one of the quintessential teenage-narrated novel, Rule of the Bone. ROTB is the child of Catcher in the Rye and the grandchild of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter in a very conscious way. Banks's novel Cloudsplitter, about the radical abolitionist John Brown, is his masterpiece. I've read several other books by him, too. I don't know anything about The Darling, but I'm expecting good things.

Don't you love the library?

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