Although the pandemic is still with us, most of us have given up on “going back to normal”. Normal evolves and time marches on. We have to find a way to live our lives. A year ago we had just elected a new president and the insurrection of January 6 was yet to come. We hoped that vaccines could magically restore us to the carefree travelers who visited Thailand in 2019, but every trip still involves a complicated risk assessment. No one wants to throw caution to the winds but we’re tired of sitting inside, too.

Moving on from the last post, now I have read Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Talents. With a neighbor and the help of the book Tolstoy Together, an outgrowth of Liyun Li’s online reading group, I have also tackled War and Peace again, which I failed to finish years ago. These are books that I suspect would have changed my life had I read them earlier. Butler’s prescience is breathtaking. So is Tolstoy’s breadth and charm. Even now, I feel my brain expanding.

My holiday offering is an essay called My Father’s Voice in the Winter 2022 Threepenny Review, based on the newspaper columns I talked about earlier this year. The Threepenny Review

Toni Martin Writes