April-ish reading
May. 1st, 2026 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
microbieI forgot one book in last month's roundup, and I'm going to include a book I finished today.
Carthage: A New History, Eve MacDonald
I was excited to hear about this book, so Brent bought it for me. I don't think that there's really much new compared with Carthage: A History, by Serge Lancel, but MacDonald's book is about 1000 times easier to read than Lancel's. It also helped to skip over Hannibal's military campaign. The part that was new to me was a bit more about Carthage after Rome destroyed it in 146 BCE--about 100 years later it was the most important Roman city in north Africa. Well worth a read for ancient history fans.
The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)
I sort of lost track of Ferrante after the My Brilliant Friend series, but she has not been idle. This was a bit of a slog for me (definitely Literature), and I just don't have the attention span after work. It didn't help that the protagonist is not very likable. Admittedly, most teenage girls are probably annoying. Her parents split up because her father declares that he's in love with his best friend's wife, so she's navigating that as well as her own hormones. To make matters worse, her own best friends are the children of her father's best friend, and they move to a new apartment with their mother and her father. There's some lovely prose in here, and the city of Naples is probably the most interesting character in the book. I might have gotten more out of it if I had been less tired, but it may also just not be that good.
Mornings in Jenin, Susan Abulhawa
This was part of my library's collection celebrating Arab American Heritage Month. Morning follows a Palestinian family from the 1930s through to the present day (the book was published in 2006). The family loses their home and their land after the state of Israel is formed, ultimately settling in the Jenin refugee camp. Abulhawa said that she was inspired to write the book after doing humanitarian work in the Jenin camp after it was destroyed by Israeli forces in 2000 or 2001. It's terribly sad (no one dies of old age) but worth a read for the Palestinian perspective alone. My favorite character was the Irish guy who came to do humanitarian work in 1967 and never left.
Augustine the African, Catherine Conybeare
This was also in the Arab American heritage collection, and I couldn't figure out why. Augustine's mother was Berber, so maybe Arab-ish? Conybeare is British. I suppose that I read it because Hippo (where Augustine spent most of his professional career) is not far from Carthage. Conybeare's main thesis is that St. Augustine was profoundly shaped by his north African upbringing, and the book offers multiple examples of how he felt like a foreigner when he went to Rome and Milan. Latin was his native language, but he spoke it with an accent, and his parents were solidly middle class. I read Confessions in my medieval history class in college, and the only thing that I remember is that I was completely bored. It might be worth revisiting, though. Conybeare makes a good case for it, and it sounds more manageable than City of God. I had to skip the second half of a theological crisis because the arguments didn't hold my interest, but otherwise I enjoyed this book a lot considering I'm a very lapsed Catholic.
Less (Arthur Less no. 1), Andrew Sean Greer
I'm probably the last person to have read this book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018, so you can skip my surprise that a rom-com, essentially, won a Pulitzer. It is a very good romantic comedy, with some gorgeous writing (Greer is very good at crafting moments of quiet beauty). I could easily see this being a movie or limited t.v. series. Arthur Less is a writer of one successful novel, and his ex-boyfriend is getting married the day before his 50th birthday, so he decides to avoid the wedding by taking a trip around the world, stringing together offers to speak or lecture at various places. We are supposed to believe that Less is ugly, not particularly smart, and awkward, yet somehow he finds someone to sleep with in the first four places he visits. It's like trying to believe that Julia Roberts is unattractive in Eat, Pray, Love. Still, this book made me chuckle and had lovely writing--can't ask for much more than that.
Carthage: A New History, Eve MacDonald
I was excited to hear about this book, so Brent bought it for me. I don't think that there's really much new compared with Carthage: A History, by Serge Lancel, but MacDonald's book is about 1000 times easier to read than Lancel's. It also helped to skip over Hannibal's military campaign. The part that was new to me was a bit more about Carthage after Rome destroyed it in 146 BCE--about 100 years later it was the most important Roman city in north Africa. Well worth a read for ancient history fans.
The Lying Life of Adults, Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)
I sort of lost track of Ferrante after the My Brilliant Friend series, but she has not been idle. This was a bit of a slog for me (definitely Literature), and I just don't have the attention span after work. It didn't help that the protagonist is not very likable. Admittedly, most teenage girls are probably annoying. Her parents split up because her father declares that he's in love with his best friend's wife, so she's navigating that as well as her own hormones. To make matters worse, her own best friends are the children of her father's best friend, and they move to a new apartment with their mother and her father. There's some lovely prose in here, and the city of Naples is probably the most interesting character in the book. I might have gotten more out of it if I had been less tired, but it may also just not be that good.
Mornings in Jenin, Susan Abulhawa
This was part of my library's collection celebrating Arab American Heritage Month. Morning follows a Palestinian family from the 1930s through to the present day (the book was published in 2006). The family loses their home and their land after the state of Israel is formed, ultimately settling in the Jenin refugee camp. Abulhawa said that she was inspired to write the book after doing humanitarian work in the Jenin camp after it was destroyed by Israeli forces in 2000 or 2001. It's terribly sad (no one dies of old age) but worth a read for the Palestinian perspective alone. My favorite character was the Irish guy who came to do humanitarian work in 1967 and never left.
Augustine the African, Catherine Conybeare
This was also in the Arab American heritage collection, and I couldn't figure out why. Augustine's mother was Berber, so maybe Arab-ish? Conybeare is British. I suppose that I read it because Hippo (where Augustine spent most of his professional career) is not far from Carthage. Conybeare's main thesis is that St. Augustine was profoundly shaped by his north African upbringing, and the book offers multiple examples of how he felt like a foreigner when he went to Rome and Milan. Latin was his native language, but he spoke it with an accent, and his parents were solidly middle class. I read Confessions in my medieval history class in college, and the only thing that I remember is that I was completely bored. It might be worth revisiting, though. Conybeare makes a good case for it, and it sounds more manageable than City of God. I had to skip the second half of a theological crisis because the arguments didn't hold my interest, but otherwise I enjoyed this book a lot considering I'm a very lapsed Catholic.
Less (Arthur Less no. 1), Andrew Sean Greer
I'm probably the last person to have read this book, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018, so you can skip my surprise that a rom-com, essentially, won a Pulitzer. It is a very good romantic comedy, with some gorgeous writing (Greer is very good at crafting moments of quiet beauty). I could easily see this being a movie or limited t.v. series. Arthur Less is a writer of one successful novel, and his ex-boyfriend is getting married the day before his 50th birthday, so he decides to avoid the wedding by taking a trip around the world, stringing together offers to speak or lecture at various places. We are supposed to believe that Less is ugly, not particularly smart, and awkward, yet somehow he finds someone to sleep with in the first four places he visits. It's like trying to believe that Julia Roberts is unattractive in Eat, Pray, Love. Still, this book made me chuckle and had lovely writing--can't ask for much more than that.
