I finished reading this book a week ago today, and I’m still not sure how to write about it. I found it deeply moving, but it may still be too soon to put my thoughts and feelings into words, and anything I write here can only scratch the surface. Jonny Steinberg has packed so much into the 326 pages of Three-Letter Plague (published in the U.S. under the title Sizwe’s Test). He writes about his own literal and figurative journey to try to learn how […]
A Personal View into Life under and after Apartheid
In an effort to try to get into Audio books, I crowd sourced the FB group for recommendations, and this had a large number of glowing recommendations. I quite liked it, and it helped that I had a three hour drive to complete when I started the book. I still struggle a bit with focusing on audiobooks when not in a car so I may have missed a few minor details but overall, I really enjoyed this book. I remember vaguely learning about South Africa […]
Hating, after all, was just a drier form of drowning
The Woman Next Door concerns two elderly women, neighbors and antagonists for the past twenty years or so, since shortly after the abolition of Apartheid, in an upscale suburb of Cape Town. One is black, the other white. Circumstance forces them to turn to each other for help. I picked this book up in Cape Town last fall, wanting to buy at least a few books by South African authors I hadn’t heard of. I thought I knew where this story was headed. Old white […]
Laugh, Learn and Cry with Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime: Stories from A South African Childhood, was my first audio book. I was determined to hear his narration and found the CD version at my local library. My car still has a cd player, so Trevor kept me company during my first week commuting to a new job. All I knew of Trevor Noah was he replaced Jon Stewart, grew up in South Africa and was a comedian. I had no idea what to expect from his book to be honest. […]
I Will Carry You Home in My Teeth
I’m an introvert, and if there’s one thing I hate it’s interacting with people I don’t know. So when I finished reading Born a Crime while on an airplane, and found myself fighting the urge to wake up the woman next to me and tell her how great it was, I knew this book must be pretty special. Born a Crime is the story of Trevor Noah’s childhood growing up in South Africa. Trevor’s father is white, and his mother black. Since he was born […]