Best Books I've read so far this year:
Fiction: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Thumbs up also to Juan Gabriel Vazquez's "The Informers", Francis Spufford's 'Golden Hill" and Joseph O'Neill's "The Dog". The new William Gibson was disappointing.
Non-fiction: "Learning from the Germans" by Susan Nieman, about what the US can learn about memorializing slavery and Jim crow from the way Germany remembers the nazis, is *fucking great*. I enjoyed Kingfish: The reign of Huey Long, by Richard D. White - probably not a great book, actually, but it was a story I did not know well and so learned and enjoyed a lot. Maria McFarland Sanchez-Morneo's "There Are No Dead Here" is an excellent book about the fight against drugs and paramilitaries in Colombia (good background if you happen to be watching Narcos, too, which turns out to be more historically accurate than I'd expected).
Fiction: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Thumbs up also to Juan Gabriel Vazquez's "The Informers", Francis Spufford's 'Golden Hill" and Joseph O'Neill's "The Dog". The new William Gibson was disappointing.
Non-fiction: "Learning from the Germans" by Susan Nieman, about what the US can learn about memorializing slavery and Jim crow from the way Germany remembers the nazis, is *fucking great*. I enjoyed Kingfish: The reign of Huey Long, by Richard D. White - probably not a great book, actually, but it was a story I did not know well and so learned and enjoyed a lot. Maria McFarland Sanchez-Morneo's "There Are No Dead Here" is an excellent book about the fight against drugs and paramilitaries in Colombia (good background if you happen to be watching Narcos, too, which turns out to be more historically accurate than I'd expected).
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