Pictured are my favorites this month.
Not pictured: books I am still reading.
I loved reading Shakespeare with #bardalongbookclub2022
and the discussions. It was a lot of fun.
I look forward to rejoining them in March.
My years old Shakespeare reading group
read The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
I just finished this tonight. It’s a new favorite.
My #RussianFrenchLit2022 selections
were both just excellent.
Voltaire was so much more than I expected
and Pushkin did not disappoint!
I love novel in verse.
Eugene Onegin has been on my list a long time,
so glad to finally accomplish it!
Reading the real Pinocchio
for my #ChildrenClassicRead2022
was EYE OPENING.
Just wow. Not for children.
Yikes.
the Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris
was an exquisite book
that will most likely make my top read of 2022 list.
Simone St James once again made me love a creepy book
in The OtherSide of Midnight.
Invisible taught me so much I’m still processing.
all the young men brought me back to that time and broke and severed my heart all over again. I had to set it down a lot, the memories of cruel people to beautiful souls continues- but in the early 80s it was more than one could process, and for me it is still.
In 1938, just as she was leaving Mexico for her first solo exhibition in New York, Frida Kahlo was devastated to learn from her husband, Diego Rivera, that he intended to divorce her. This latest blow followed a long series of betrayals, most painful of all his affair with her beloved younger sister, Cristina. In early 1939, anxious and adrift, Kahlo traveled from the United States to France–her only trip to Europe, and the beginning of a unique period of her life when she was enjoying success on her own.
Now, for the first time, this previously overlooked part of her story is brought to light in exquisite detail. Marc Petitjean takes the reader to Paris, where Kahlo spends her days alongside luminaries such as Pablo Picasso, Andre Breton, Dora Maar, and Marcel Duchamp.
Using Kahlo’s whirlwind romance with the author’s father, Michel Petitjean, as a jumping-off point, The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris provides a striking portrait of the artist and an inside look at the history of one of her most powerful, enigmatic paintings.
This is the first on my list I am keeping for BEST of 2022. It really was an exquisite read. Quite lovely to read.
In 1986, 26-year old Ruth visits a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS, and is called upon to nurse them. As she forges deep friendships with the men she helps, she works tirelessly to find them housing and jobs, even searching for funeral homes willing to take their bodies – often in the middle of the night. She cooks meals for tens of people out of discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets, stores rare medications for her most urgent patients, teaches sex-ed to drag queens after hours at secret bars, and becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of a deeply conservative state.
Throughout the years, Ruth defies local pastors and nurses to help the men she cares for: Paul and Billy, Angel, Chip, Todd and Luke. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis.
This deeply moving and elegiac memoir honors the extraordinary life of Ruth Coker Burks and the beloved men who fought valiantly for their lives with AIDS during a most hostile and misinformed time in America.
THIS BOOK JUST GUTTED ME.
