Reading and writing

After writing non-fiction all day, I like to read fiction at night.

Currently my husband is reading Terry Pratchett's latest, Making Money, out loud to me while I cook dinner. About a thief who finds himself in charge of a banking system, it's so good that sometimes I put dinner on the table and we just keep reading until the food cold! If you haven't read anything by Pratchett, the bestselling writer (alongside J.K. Rowling) in England for the past decade, I'd suggest you start with Jingo.

While Pratchett writes speculative fiction that sounds suspiciously like literature, Michael Chabon writes literature that sounds suspiciously like speculative fiction. I just finished Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union about a police detective in Sitka, Alaska (which in the book is a fictitious Jewish community created after the 1948 collapse of the state of Israel). This delightful book may well be the best-written novel of the decade.