Weekend Reading

I was in California this weekend for a conference, but I managed to get some writing done on Sunday. I took a long walk on the beach in Monterrey and tried to figure a way out of my current dilemma. I’m not sure the solution I thought of will work, but I can at least see some shape to the last third of the book, the hardest part so far.

I also caught up on some online reading. There’s a great Op-Ed by Robert Harris in the New York Times, about the parallels between an incident that took place in Ostia, in 68 B.C. , at the height of the Roman empire, and modern-day America.

Gary Shteyngart’s NYTBR essay–about trying to write about Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov–made me smile. It’s so…well, so Shteyngartian: Ten Days with Oblomov.

Rachid Bouchareb’s film Indigènes, which I mentioned on a few occasions here, is finally coming out in France, and he’s interviewed in Time. It looks like Chirac is finally going to sort out the pensions of North African WWII veterans. C’est pas trop tôt.

Maud Newton reviewed Aminatta Forna’s Ancestor Stones, and she says that, although the characters’ voices “feel insufficiently differentiated,” she likes it very much. I am adding this book to my box of books to ship to Casablanca.