Book Chatter

Sunday Matters

Good morning! I am seriously excited about it being October. Some of our neighbors have already decorated for Halloween. I brought my stuff out at work but maybe this weekend we will get the house stuff up.

Right Now:

Grabbing a few chapters of Save What’s Left before heading out to hang with the students.

This Week:

No news from the doc. Nothing has turned up besides the five auto-immune issues but she says they are well managed through medication. So then why can’t I walk like a normal person? Could it be long covid?

Next weekend I visit my son in Seattle. That should be a nice break. He plans to take me to all the bookstores. One store has cats! He knows about my walking difficulties so we will do what we can at a very slow pace.

Reading:

I’m in a weird reading mood so I am reading my book club pick, The Marriage Portrait and dipping in and out of some review copies.

Watching:

The students at church mentioned a show on Netflix called Manifest. It has four seasons! I thought it was new. It sounds interesting. Maybe I will give it a go.

Have a great week. We had a short burst of heat again but now it’s supposed to really dip into cool temps. I am looking forward to it!

The Sympathizer
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Press,9780802124944, 2016, 384 pp.

The Short of It:

Thrilling, at times funny, but relentlessly fast-paced.

The Rest of It:

Many books have been written about the Vietnam war. We’ve all seen our share of movies too about the subject. The Sympathizer is different in that it’s narrated by a double agent. Building a life with refugees in Los Angeles, he also reports back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.

The story is told in jarring episodic bursts of storytelling. At one point, I had to go back to make sure my Kindle did not jump to another book because all of a sudden the characters are engaged in making a movie about the Vietnam experience. This was a very weird, surreal part of the novel. The portrayal of the events and how the the Vietnamese were represented was at once front and center, and also an afterthought.

The entire book is push/pull. Some events are highly detailed and graphic and then the author lures you back in through a comical interchange. It’s hard from me to describe the story because the frenetic energy of the storytelling keeps you moving forward even though you’re not sure what you just read! But, even though it seemed like work to keep things straight, I did enjoy the reading experience.

It should be mentioned that it’s won a ton of awards. Have you read it? There is a sequel out if you enjoyed this one.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

Chatting with friends about books and life…