The Island of Second Sight

I don’t believe I’ve ever taken as long to read a book! Sure, it’s over 700 pages, but that wasn’t what took me so long.  I’d simply ingested enough story after just a few pages to be satisfied with the experience. The book is a fictionalized (or is it?)  memoir by German writer Albert Vigoleis Thelen of the years he and his wife Beatrice spent on the island of Majorca. Initially landing there under the false impression that her brother Zwingli is dying, the couple ends up spending five years in various parts of the small island during the run-up to World War II.

Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos

I came across this book in the autobiography section of the Children’s/YA department of our lovely library. The writer is a very prolific children and YA book author (just lured my 6 year old into reading densely worded, pseudo-chapter/picture book by leaving a bunch of Gantos’ Rotten Ralph volumes on the couch), but his own coming-of-age is very 1970s, South Florida/New York City grit, involving an adolescence of living alone in welfare hotel as he finished up high school and devolving into a life of drug running and prison. A gulping good read, made all the better because it is an autobiography and