Unaccustomed Earth
These days, I don't have as much time to read as I'd like. It's mostly a few stolen moments each night before passing out. So for me to finish a piece of fiction means it has to surpass great obstacles, namely my physical fatigue and attention-deficit disorder.
I enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, missed her follow-up novel The Namesake (and now if I ever read it all my mind will be fixated on the image of Kumar as the lead character, damn you Hollywood movie trailers), but picked up her latest collection of semi-linked short stories, Unaccustomed Earth.
It is superb. It is about the Indian-American experience, but it is also about the Asian-American experience, and about the American experience. Like the best of books, it is both specific and universal.
