Gloria and Julia

Jul 3, 2008 at 12:06 PM
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I finished reading two books this week. Since we don't have cable, in my downtime I watch DVDs (we're watching Weeds these days) and read both light chick-lit type stuff and some heavier things. Gloria Naylor's Women of Brewster Place is terrific. It's a "novel in seven stories" and each story focuses on one of several women living in a housing project. The characters also appear in the other stories and so we get to find out more about them. Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is in her signature clean writing style, and I'm fascinated by the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionaries who resisted the dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and were killed by him. There's a movie based on the book starring Salma Hayek that I have yet to see.