Fall Reading Challenge Update

September and October picks!

September 15, 2024

Like this last burst of summer before the oaks outside my window don their autumn fringe, I’ll keep this one short and sweet.

Love from London

September Reading Challenge Pick

Theme: Published under duress

My pick: Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak

Dictators come for the artists first, and of those who spin gold with their talent, the written word comes under particularly harsh scrutiny. The Iron Curtain may have kept them locked inside, but the heavy censorship under the USSR didn’t stop brilliant literary minds from spinning masterful works.

Truth be told, there are many, many books that have been published under duress. Smuggled across borders to be published in other countries because the leaders of the author’s nation would murder them if they knew. Or published in faraway places because the author themselves is exiled. For Latin American authors, that literary city is la Ciudad de México. For Eastern Europeans, it was a multiplicity of Western European countries. One such book is Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, smuggled out of the USSR and published in Italy in 1957.

The story is the account of a doctor, Yuri Zhivago, as he lived through the Russian Revolution to World War II. Let’s just say Pasternak was more candid about how awful those years were on people due to the choices of their government. For this book, his mistress served a 10-year sentence in a gulag. And she was sent there while newly pregnant with Pasternak’s baby.

October Reading Challenge Pick

Theme: Your local indie bookshop or librarian recommended it

My pick: Crooked Plow, by Itamar Vieira Junior

Crooked Plow took the literary world by storm within the past year. It was shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize and won several Portuguese awards, but it came to me through the little bookshop on the corner in my neighborhood back home, to whom I am most loyal. And even if it never won a thing, even if all the marketing and the press and the eyes went away, Itamar Vieira Junior was onto something with this story.

The plot opens with two little girls living in a rural area of Brazil, so rural the two girls don’t see a road wide enough for two cars until they leave their province to go to the doctor. After one of them (a mystery as to which one it is—it is left to the reader to decide) cuts out her own tongue with a sacred knife they found after getting into their Grandma’s belongings.

If you read that and thought magical realism! You are correct. This little number reeks of the stuff and here I am in the cover ready to hop inside the page.

The overarching theme is portraying life for Afro-Brazilians in a country that literally did not count Black people in the census for years. This is a story of a people that made their own way with what was available to them and even made something from nothing.

When the Muse visits again, here I’ll be. Until then, I wish you a story you need at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place, as exactly the right version of yourself you need to be in order to receive it.

-S