Finished the Lahiri book and onto this. Both have a sense of the humane that is very reassuring right now. Sjodin's lumines with compassion as its continuity, satisfying what the other, more staid prose style of JL misses: jaggedness and surface tension. In this manner it is a story understood from behind the curtains, off moments of the observer, any mind, never mind, as seems natural- to me- to apprehend a story, even one's own. There is a welcome sense of feeling like a tourist of both, not merely because they are perspectives and stories non-Anglo or non-American, but in their candor and generosity. As bouts of snow arrive and depart all weekend I am reading, making soups and listening to Takemitsu and Bartok (the Mikrocosmos) for the first time since living in Providence. I am instantly reminded of writing my thesis in the first few chords and how foreign, long ago.