The Lowland

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

Fiction

Lahiri’s novel, The Lowland follows four generations of one Indian family over time and distance and through personal turmoil and national conflict. The events in the characters’ personal lives mirror the historical context of the book.  Personal conflicts reflect the larger political conflict that India faced during the same time period and Lahiri juxtaposes the personal drama with the political and social turbulence of Indian and American society during the seventies.  It prods readers to examine their personal lives to find the key moments in their past that continues to affect them in the present. It also prompts the reader to consider how personal events are shaped by political events and the times in which they are lived.  The Lowland is a story of how our lives are shaped by our context, how history continues to shape the future, both on an individual and a societal level, and how personal history can continue to haunt one’s life because of the threads that tie the past to the present.

No Matter the Wreckage

No Matter the Wreckage by Sarah Kay

Fiction

Not to sound cheesy, but Sarah Kay’s No Matter the Wreckage is truly poetry for the modern era. Most people know her from her TED Talk or her YouTube videos where she performs spoken word poetry and has given a new face to poetry, which is normally alienating and a genre most readers my age avoid. But, Sarah Kay’s poems are anything but alienating. I actually thought that a lot of her poems dealt with themes that were very familiar, most notably “B.” “B” may be my favorite poem because it was the first poem that I saw Kay perform in her TED Talk, or it could be because it emphasizes resilience despite hard times, which is a theme that all readers can relate to.