“What We’re Reading” is a column about readers in the community and the books they love, in their own words.
Brit Chism
Book: “Dear Life” by Alice Munro
“Dear Life” is a collection of short stories by the author some call “the Canadian Anton Chekov.” She has gathered 14 of her many works into this book. The short stories were published in various literary journals: Narrative, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Paris Review and others. Many of the stories, especially the last four, read like autobiography, but Munro says they are fiction, based on her life growing up in southern Ontario. What unifies these stories are themes of sex, love and death. If you can imagine her life’s work as a row of books, a metonym for the author, bookended by this one which she has said will be her last.
Denise Keegan O’Hara
Book: “Giants: The Dwarfs of Auschwitz” by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev
I started reading this book a couple of years ago. It was very unsettling and disturbing; I needed to take a break. After recently learning of my Jewish heritage, I decided to pick it back up. As hard as it is to read, I think it’s very important that these stories are known.