Paula Ramón

Paula Ramón is a Venezuelan journalist who has lived and worked in China, the United States, Brazil, and Uruguay. She is currently a correspondent for Agence France-Presse, based in Los Angeles. She has written and reported for the New York Times, National Geographic, Columbia Journalism Review, and Piauí magazine, among other outlets.

Ramón's new book is Motherland: A Memoir.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

For my job I try to mix my reading between something that relates to the place where I am working and something that speaks to me in a personal way. And sometimes I have the pleasure of reading a book that brings both together. My favorite recent books that I either finished or am currently reading:

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion.

This is one of those examples where my two interests come together. For me it was a book about grief, and Didion portrays grief without any formulas. Sometimes it made me laugh, sometimes cry. It’s a very human and authentic account. But in its pages, in which Didion looks back over the year after her husband's death, she also takes readers through some places and episodes of recent California history, which is where I live and what I have to write about in my work as a correspondent.

The Beast, by Óscar Martínez

With much delay I recently finished the incredible work of Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez who condenses in this book years of traveling the migration routes from Central America to the United States. It is about what migrants suffer in the region and about the economics of migration that has made migrants a commodity.

Unwind, by Neal Shusterman

I am beginning to read this dystopian novel set in an undated future in a United States where abortion is prohibited, but the government allows that parents or representatives can decide if the bodies of children and adolescents up to 18 years of age can be dismembered and their organs used for donation, known as "unwinding."

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--Marshal Zeringue