Golriz Ghahraman finds it harder to read fiction these days.
I feel perpetually guilty for never reading enough fiction anymore. Of course, reading often also feels like a stolen pleasure, a weekend morning or just a few pages snuck between work and life's never-ending admin.
Girl, Woman, Other is a book I'm about to begin and feel late coming to,
because all the readers around me are buzzing about it. It traverses interconnected stories of a group of black British women, with timeless questions about race and gender. The 12 characters move through the world in different decades with overlapping stories.
I loved Virginia Woolf's The Waves but never managed to convince anyone else I know to actually read it through. I obviously like a bit of complicated storytelling with overlapping characters. As much as I love fiction that pushes creative boundaries, I crave perspectives that don't often get published.
I also enjoy a good collection of short stories or essays. The bite-sized reading portions are a handy time-poor reader's life hack. Right now I'm reading and re-reading Collected Stories: Patricia Grace. I studied some of these at school, which was the first time I was introduced properly to a Māori perspective and consciousness in my understanding of Aotearoa New Zealand. It's so interesting to re-engage and reflect on my initial reactions.
Poetry is a bit the same, in that you can pick a collection up and revel in it for any length of time. My next purchase will be Night Sky with Exit Wounds, by Ocean Vuong, which my friend Rebekah described as "beautiful, dreamy writing by a Vietnamese-American poet who was born in a refugee camp". Since writing my own memoir, including the refugee experience, I've looked more carefully at works by authors of similar backgrounds, comparing our perspectives. It's enriching to hunt out those rare voices.
