Planes, trains and books
So tomorrow I’m going to spend large chunks of my time on a train from Dusseldorf to Frankfurt, a plane from Frankfurt to Calgary and another plane from Calgary to Victoria, where AbeBooks’ headquarters are located. It’s going to be a prime opportunity for concentrated reading.
Coming out to Germany, I read a copy of Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann, a staff writer on The New Yorker. Lemann is somewhat of an expert on America’s black population and their experiences over the past two centuries. Redemption focuses on how the white population seized back political and social power in the southern states after the Civil War had handed voting rights to black people. Murder, torture, scare tactics and propaganda were all used to ensure black people didn’t vote and created the foundation for the Jim Crow laws which affected race relations in the South for the next 80 years. I had no idea, being a Brit, on this part of American history. I have learnt a lot about the Civil War over the years but never anything about its aftermath.
Jodi Picoult’s latest book will be my reading material tomorrow although I have absolutely no idea what the book is called – the Frankfurt Book Fair seems to have damaged my short term memory. I read The Tenth Circle earlier this year and enjoyed most of it. She seems to sell books by the truckload. I took a quick look at her website and Jodi Picoult looks really young too. Her bio says she’s 39 but I’m 38 and I look terrible.
