Recent Reading: Tokarczuk's Flights

 I have recently been reading Olga Tokarczuk's Flights with a good deal of pleasure. Much of what I love about the work of

Italo Calvino is here, and more. An early reference to Moby Dick (without actually naming it, a thought-provoking move) hints at why the book is structured as it is. Human movement is the topic; not whales, whaling, and obsession. Rather than feeling like a strung-together series of short pieces on a theme, Tokarczuk's text of many texts accretes its segments unto itself until the reader grasps it holistically, as a deeply empathetic meditation on some humans' need to move. Here's a slightly different perspective than mine, which I enjoyed reading: https://www.triangle.house/unmapping-on-olga-tokarczuks-flights

In February, I read Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, and enjoyed it for different reasons.  Comic, grisly, with a twist near the end, and not a plot twist, a genre twist. This one would be good beach reading; Flights would be better for a long, cold, rainy weekend in an empty house.