My Year in Books
My favorite books of 2009. Most of them were not published in 2009.
One Sunday while prowling my neighborhood bookstore I spotted a youngish father and his 11 or 12-year-old daughter looking for a book. This reminded me of how my mother used to take me shopping for books. My mother was a teacher, so reading was as natural to us as eating (and considered superior to watching television, which was usually turned off after a couple of hours so the set wouldn’t “overheat”). . .
My Year in Books in Emotional Weather Report, today in the Star.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
November 27th, 2009 at 21:38
I found Anatoly Kuznetzov’s Babi Yar in a bargain bin and brought it with me to read on a trip to China. His retelling — he called it a documentary novel — of his experiences as a kid in Nazi-occupied Kiev was compelling and told with objective restraint even though he lived through that hell. I was rooting for the Russians and cursing the Nazis til I realized that just a decade before, Stalin blockaded the Ukraine and starved to death eleven million Ukrainians. Kuznetzov’s praises for Stalin’s Soviets rang hollow after that.