Novels from the Caribbean: Join My On-Line Book Club

So...those of you who love to read novels: will you join my online-book club?

Stories from Haiti: "The Dew Breaker"

My husband headed to bed before I did last night. Our sons are in New Brunswick for a few days at Rutgers Model Congress. So the house is quiet for once.  At my request,  my husband put the novel I am reading outside our bedroom door. A little light reading? he joked when I told him The Dew Breaker is the story of a torturer from Haiti who immigrated to Brooklyn.

So how have I ended up immersed in my second novel in as many weeks by Edwidge Danicat?

In the Aftermath of Boston: Lessons Relearned By the Wife of a World Trade Center Survivor

Given that my husband, Greg, is a survivor of terrorism, I am unable and unwilling to  immerse myself emotionally and intellectually in any news about acts of violence. To that end, I am limiting myself to reading about the massacre in Boston to just once a day, in the morning, on my New York Times newsfeed. 

Last night I took a half hour walk in the dark here in Palm Beach County, Florida, where I am visiting my parents from my home in New Jersey. My heart was full, missing my husband and our now-teenaged sons and grateful that I am still blessed with the presence of my octogenarian parents.

Preparing for Frankenstorm with Solzhenitsyn

Hurricane Sandy, the late-season storm that already has taken 43 souls in the Caribbean, is heading here. The radio stations are full of advice and warnings about what some forecasters are calling "Frankenstorm," because the cyclone is expected to meet a winter storm sometime close to Halloween.

I don't know if what happen in New Jersey though I feel certain we will lose power for several hours, if not days. That happens a lot in our old town with its ancient trees that tend to fall right on power lines. Our power grid is pretty fragile. My next-door neighbor is putting gas in his  generator.

We are so self-absorbed; deaths in Cuba and Haiti don't seem to matter much to us Americans. Our TV and radio are full of reports about how Americans are preparing by filling up our gas tanks and stocking up on milk and bread.

"Island Beneath the Sea:" Sex, Slavery, History and Heartache

Better-read folks than I say that Isabel Allende's novel Island Beneath the Sea is not her finest work, nor is it the best novel about Haiti. But this is my first encounter with the Chilean-American writer and the first book I have ever read about that former French colony. And I am enjoying this novel about the New World of colonists and slaves and the mingling of many cultures.

I bought the audio version of this 2010 novel to keep me company on weekday mornings, when I head from home before dawn to my teaching job. This is an epic, historical tale that switches back and forth from a third-person omniscient narrator to the first-person point of view of Zarite, the mulatta child of an African mother raped by white sailors on her forced passage to the New World.