Portable Magic
Reading, for me, is entertainment and an escape from the real world. But it can also inform and stretch the boundaries of the life I live.
Currently reading
Cartwheel ★★★☆☆
This is a sluggishly paced story of the characters surrounding a foreign student’s murder and her roommate’s prosecution in Argentina. The characters angst and agonize and reflect on tragedies past and present. The author puts us inside the heads of nearly every character in turn, so we have the dubious pleasure of discovering everybody’s perception of events and their own and each other’s participation in those events. By the end of the story, we know much more about them than they know about themselves or each other, and very little about what actually happened.
The story resonated with me in one respect, in that I could not help reflecting on parallels with the recently completed Serial podcast, where sometimes the criminal justice system cares more about proving guilt than it does about discovering the truth. Sometimes, the system gets it right, and sometimes it doesn’t, but as long as we can convince ourselves that we’re on the righteous path, we can sleep well at night.
Audiobook version, competently read by Emily Rankin.
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