This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga is the ninth book in the 2023 Spring Read. Set in Zimbabwe, it is the story of Tambudzai navigating both job and personal worlds in a country that has been changed by years of conflict and racial divide. The young woman navigates the realities of life fraught with humiliation as well as one far different from the future she imagined. What were once dreams become a bitter struggle for survival.
Jane Holwerda is a mainstay with the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club, having served as one of the first book leaders back in 2016. She is vice president of academic affairs at Dodge City Community College, but is a creative and reflective English major at heart and in her past experience. Holwerda has long kept that spirit alive, publishing dozens of poems, memoirs and short stories over time. In a posting on DC3’s website, Jane commented on the importance of having a reflective stance on our own lives, recounting the old axiom that suggest that the unexamined life is not worth living. She said her work writing and recording BookBytes for High Plains Public Radio has helped her discover and see more concretely particular aspects of rural society. Organizers of HPPR’s Radio Readers Book Club try to select books that speak to concerns of people living on the High Plains.
