Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh. I don't have much to add after last week's, except apparently this is a sequel? Why do I keep doing this. I feel like it stood alone, though. Reading GoodReads reviews of it was an interesting experience, and I think it's because magic realism as a genre is still not particularly well understood in the Anglosphere. Because this is exactly that—reality-grounded fiction with magical/supernatural elements, highly specific characters that the reader cannot superimpose their own personality onto, literary prose, and sharply defined politics. Which, in today's genre-stratified North American market, at least, confuses the genre readers and frustrates the literary readers. Naturally I absolutely adored it.

Currently reading: LaRose by Louise Eldrich. I'm at the part of the book now that deals more directly, rather than obliquely, with generational trauma—colonization and settler violence, residential schools, and plague. Of course I was not so silly to think that the accidental shooting death of a young child on page 2 would mean that the book was going to get any less brutal. It's an absolute masterpiece. Every single turn of phrase is a sparkling gem of prose.