People Reading : March 23, 2014, Sunday evening -- Reading Veronica Roth and David Mitchell

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I had been posting on Mondays 10am Pacific Time, but with Covid-19, I have slowed things down. For a while I was on lockdown in San Francisco and interviewed a few people from six + feet away. Now, I am in Taiwan, where I am learning how to say, "Can I take your picture for my reading blog?" I hope to continue posting pictures. Check back from time to time for new content.

As a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, I am more aware that this blog is filled with few black and brown people reading. I am (or was) a privileged white person living in San Francisco. According to Wikipedia, San Francisco's makeup is: Whites 48.1%, Asians 33.3%, African Americans 6.1%, Native Americans 0.5%, Pacific Islanders 0.4%, other races 6.6%, two or more races 4.7%, Hispanics or Latinos of any race 15.1%. When I return to San Francisco, I hope to interview more people that look different than me.

What I'm reading

From January 2014 to most recent: lots of New Yorker fiction that I caught up on – I especially loved The Christmas Miracle, by Rebecca Curtis; Life of Pi, by Yann Martel; The Help, by Kathryn Stockett; The Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov; Haruki Murakami's 1Q84; Bel Canto and The Magician's Assistant, by Ann Patchett; the choreographer Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit (intermittently); The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro; State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett; The Mystic Masseur, by the British/Trinidadian author, V.S. Naipaul; Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro; Sula, by Toni Morrison; two Swedish crime novels I read (in English) while in Sweden: Nephilim, by Åsa Schwarz & Killer's Art, by Mari Jungstedt; The Orphan Master's Son, by Adam Johnson; Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell, which my sister and friend, Colleen, recommended; Run, by Ann Patchett; When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro; The Complete Idiot’s Guide to World History, by Timothy C. Hall; The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell (only half because the ebook I was reading expired- but it was a re-read); The Circle, by Dave Eggers; Our Hotel In Bali: How two young Americans made a dream come true by opening one of the first Balinese tourist hotels on Kuta Beach in the 1930s, by Louise Koke (which I got from the Cannes free library on the beach, Pages à la plage); Jaffrey's World Vegetarian, by Madhur Jaffrey (from cover to cover - I was craving a kitchen, while traveling); Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami; The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt; The Corsican Caper, by Peter Mayle (on audio book); Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (on audio book); The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. (Starting a new year, 2015) Confessions of a Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella; Shaking out the Dead, by K.M. Cholewa; The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery; English teaching text books and New Yorker fiction; Divergent and Insurgent, by Veronica Roth; The Wolf Gift, by Anne Rice; and My Struggle, by Karl Ove Knausgård. --- I've been lazy for a long time about posting the books I've read lately. I'm not going to go back in time, but today (Feb 5, 2017) I just finished listening to Commonwealth, by Ann Patchett. Right before that I was on a Kim Stanley Robinson audio book kick and listened to Aurora and Shaman.

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March 23, 2014, Sunday evening -- Reading Veronica Roth and David Mitchell

On a bed of lava next to the snorkel spot "Two-Step" on Hawai'i's big Island (where I was, serendipitously, for Spring Break!!!)

Reading Allegiant, by Veronica Roth and Number9Dream, by David Mitchell.

Somehow my thumb got in the photos, though I'd like to think of it as non-dangerous lava flow.

Note to the readers: The David Mitchell book I was talking about was Ghostwritten. It was so oddly (but delightfully) bizarre and had many stories fit together within it and one of the characters also had a memory issue. Thanks for letting me photograph you on your vacation.

5 Comments:

monicastangledweb said...: I love your photos of people reading, and was wondering, do you ask permission or just take the photos in a way that they don't notice?; 9:24 PM
Sonya Worthy said...: Hi Monica,
I always ask permission first. Sometimes I think the photo would be more authentic if I just took the photo first, but I ask out of respect. After I get permission, I ask people to go back to reading as if I wasn't there....and then I interrupt them again with questions.; 10:27 PM
monicastangledweb said...: That is so cool. I only discovered you because the girl in that photo taken at the beach is my niece. Have your travels ever brought you to San Diego and if so, did you take any photos of readers down here? I work in public media where we run the One Book, One San Diego program. We love sharing anything that promotes literacy and a love of reading.; 9:37 PM
Sonya Worthy said...: One Book One City is a great program!! I was in San Diego in 2007 while on a road trip photographing readers in each of the lower-48 states (in 52 days...) I posted all my pictures on dogearedusa.blogspot.com . You can do a search for "San Diego" to see the San Diego readers - this is one of my favorites, though: http://dogearedusa.blogspot.com/search?q=Lydia+Adamson; 7:07 PM
monicastangledweb said...: Let us know if you ever come back this way and we'll be happy to post your photos/stories on our One Book page. In the meantime, we put a link to your blog on our Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/OneBookOneSanDiego/posts/838622416155044?ref=notif&notif_t=like

You do great work!; 3:46 PM

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March 23, 2014, Sunday evening -- Reading Veronica Roth and David Mitchell

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