It’s been a really long time since I spent the day in bed, although Sherry and I used to sleep until mid-afternoon quite often during our single-girl-on-the-prowl days. Yesterday during the Pathways wrapping brunch I somehow hurt my lower back, which also affected my hips, knees, and ankles. I was a hurtin’ unit, as they say in the north country of Vermont. After everyone left I took to the couch around 2 p.m., and moved only as far as the bedroom and bathroom for more than 24 hours. Food was delivered periodically by my enthusiastic servant (who has now told me that since she has an upset stomach I’m her servant). Ben took over my position as chauffeur, and drove Aliya to a birthday party (stopping on the way to buy a gift card) and her dance workshop. I missed two parties but I just couldn’t get vertical. I’m feeling a little better but I think I’ll have to pay a visit to Dr. Gensler, spine-adjuster extraordinaire.
Normally, I would have spent the 24 hours in bed catching up on work, but I couldn’t sit in a semi-reclined position to use my laptop. So I finished a GREAT book I’ve been reading. It’s actually the second great book in a row, so here they are in case your spouse is looking for stocking-stuffer ideas for you.
From Publishers Weekly: Stunning, wrenching and inspiring, the fourth novel by Canadian novelist Hill (Any Known Blood) spans the life of Aminata Diallo, born in Bayo, West Africa, in 1745. The novel opens in 1802, as Aminata is wooed in London to the cause of British abolitionists, and begins reflecting on her life. Kidnapped at the age of 11 by British slavers, Aminata survives the Middle Passage and is reunited in South Carolina with Chekura, a boy from a village near hers. Her story gets entwined with his, and with those of her owners: nasty indigo producer Robinson Appleby and, later, Jewish duty inspector Solomon Lindo. During her long life of struggle, she does what she can to free herself and others from slavery, including learning to read and teaching others to, and befriending anyone who can help her, black or white. Hill handles the pacing and tension masterfully, particularly during the beginnings of the American revolution, when the British promise to free Blacks who fight for the British: Aminata’s related, eventful travels to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone follow. In depicting a woman who survives history’s most trying conditions through force of intelligence and personality, Hill’s book is a harrowing, breathtaking tour de force.
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From Publishers Weekly: Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization. Separated from his family when Arab militia destroy his village, Valentino joins thousands of other “Lost Boys,” beset by starvation, thirst and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where Valentino pieces together a new life. He eventually reaches America, but finds his quest for safety, community and fulfillment in many ways even more difficult there than in the camps: he recalls, for instance, being robbed, beaten and held captive in his Atlanta apartment. Eggers’s limpid prose gives Valentino an unaffected, compelling voice and makes his narrative by turns harrowing, funny, bleak and lyrical. The result is a horrific account of the Sudanese tragedy, but also an emblematic saga of modernity-of the search for home and self in a world of unending upheaval.
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