I took Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies to read in the hospital, a bad choice, I discovered: While experiencing great pain it is hard to muster up sympathy for someone else’s suffering.
Back home I’ve been reading only things that make me feel better (the one exception being the Sunday New York Times). Yesterday I plucked from my shelves (in the Polish section) Gary Gildner’s The Warsaw Sparks. The author was a Fulbright professor in Warsaw in the late ’80s where, in addition to teaching English, he coached a makeshift baseball team. Halfway through the book Stan Musial, paying a visit to his ancestral homeland, meets the team. Twenty pages later, Gildner has a meeting in Gdansk with Lech Walesa. There are not many books in which those two men both make appearances.
