Since I don’t have a self-driving car or a death wish, I am, of course, referring to audiobooks. Notice that I don’t put quotations around the word reading here. I don’t want to get into a fray that’s been beaten to death on both sides by internet trolls and literacy advocates, but I absolutely think that audiobooks “count” as reading and anyone who tells you otherwise is generally a miserable little gatekeeper who ought to be reading instead of getting all up in other folks’ business. That said, the discourse around audiobooks tends, as Colton Cauthen writes in this thoughtful exploration of the subject, “toward the ditches,” meaning that it’s driven by extreme viewpoints and rage bait. Of course audiobooks are a valid way to experience books. Obviously, they’re an invaluable resource for visually impaired people, and when experienced readers are done listening to a book, they can mull it and discuss it with just as much authority as if they’d sat down and read it. For my purposes, since I spend almost eight hours a week on the highway, audiobooks allow me to read WAY more books than I would otherwise, and there’s no way that’s a bad thing. But of course there are differences in the way we internalize books when we listen to them rather than reading text even if they both have their strengths and weaknesses and their respective places in most readers’ lives.

I find that some books work better for me via audiobook than others. Length is a factor; it can be harder to maintain momentum and sustain interest in longer books in this format. Books with huge ensemble casts of characters and and names to keep up with or lots of time-period hopping can be difficult for me in audio format as well. But the one factor that weighs most heavily for me is the quality of the narration. When I (finally) delved into Ursula K. Leguin’s Earthsea series a few years back, I was so engrossed by Harlen Ellison’s narration I missed my interstate exit and was nearly late for work. I generally don’t care for a high level of voice acting (just read the text, please) but Ellison’s animated delivery was spellbinding, and it really worked with the subject matter. Then there’s the opposite side of the coin. I don’t want to throw anyone under the bus, so I won’t name names, but there’s one prolific audiobook reader who’s voice irks me so much that I all but refuse to read books that feature them as a narrator.

It’s not uncommon for me to DNF an audiobook after a few chapters because the narration gets under my skin for one reason or another. With Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, though, I had an unusual problem. This was a book that was somewhat difficult for me as an audiobook not because of its length (a fairly long, but not behemoth 16 hours) or an unmanageable cast of characters or a bad narrator. Quite the opposite; this was an audiobook made challenging because the narrator was perhaps too good. Robin Miles’ narration was great, tastefully treading the line between voice acting and more straightforward reading, giving voice to Mengiste’s poetic prose with aplomb. But that prose was so poetic, Miles’ voice so lilting and soothing, there were times I had to stop and rewind after finding I’d drifted off on the sound of it, interstate miles flying by while the narration was like ambient music soothing the beasts in my head even when the subject matter was heavy. Let me be clear: this is MY failing, not the novel’s, and certainly not Miles’. She is a first-class audiobook narrator, one of the best around, and she did a great job narrating this challenging and thorny novel despite my tendency to lose the thread of the story listening to her siren song.

Set during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia prior to WWII, The Shadow King, like a lot of the books I’ve read or penciled in as TBR for this project, explores the legacy of colonialism and seeks to center the role of women in times of strife. Though it hops around in third-person points-of-view that follow a handful of expertly drawn characters, it focuses most sharply on Hirut, an orphaned servant woman who evolves into a soldier in the Ethiopian militia fighting the Italians. Hirut, who is, according to Mengiste’s postscript, loosely inspired by the author’s grandmother, is fierce and determined. She rises through the ranks and eventually becomes the bodyguard of the titular shadow king, a peasant made up to look like Emperor Haile Selassie, who has fled to England, in an attempt to rally the Ethiopian resistance. The struggle against the Italian invasion, though central to the action of the novel, takes something of a backseat to Mengiste’s exploration of Hirut’s complicated relationships, most notably with Aster, the wife of Kidane, the aristocratic militia leader whose house Hirut serves. Early in the novel, Aster beats Hirut mercilessly for trying to run away, but things change when they are both taken prisoner by Italian forces.

Speaking of Italian forces, Mengiste also gives life to two memorable characters on the other side of the struggle. Colonel Carlo Fucelli could easily have been a cartoonish, one-dimensional villain in the hands of a lesser writer. Though he remains a clear antagonist whose cruelty knows no bounds, we get enough of his backstory with an overbearing father to find a glimmer of empathy for him even as we cheer his eventual downfall. There’s also his fraught relationship with Ettore Navarra, an Italian soldier and photographer whom Fucelli forces to document the sadistic treatment of Ethiopian prisoners. Fucelli takes Navarra, whose father is Jewish, under his wing and attempts to protect him from the military census ordered by Mussolini to round up all the Jews serving in the Italian army, a proposition that Navarra something of a double pariah, despised by the Ethiopians, even after he stays in the country until the revolution of the 1970’s epilogue, and subject to a witch hunt by his own countrymen.

All told, it’s an unflinching yet multifaceted look at the brutal conflict that absolutely refuses to pander to easy answers or simplistic depictions. Despite my tendency to drift off the thread of the audiobook from time to time on the highway, this was a gripping novel, and these characters, especially Hirut and Navarra, are among the most memorable I’ve read in this project so far.

So what’s next? As you might imagine, I end up reading a lot of pretty bleak books dealing with war, strife, and civil unrest for this project, so I like to pepper in some lighter fare when I can. I’ve read a handful of detective novels along the way, and I’ve read and penciled in some science fiction as well. I haven’t read a lot of contemporary fantasy novels, and, since the whole point of this endeavor is to stretch myself a bit and get out of my reading rut, I’ve started one via audiobook: Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister, representing Malaysia. So far, it’s a perfect palette cleanser, and it’s so thoroughly engrossing I find myself firing it up even when I’m not commuting, so it’s accompanied me as I wash dishes and walk the dog, things I usually do in silence or with music.

More on that one when I finish. In the meantime, if anyone has a suggestion for a book from anywhere not shaded in my map, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Leave a comment

When he said “Asia,” I was thinking China, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and the like. I wasn’t banking on the Middle East being considered part of Asia, though that seems pretty obvious in retrospect. Even that would have been pretty straightforward if the global geopolitical map were the same as it was when I was his age, as anyone who’s plugged in to current events has at least a passing understanding of where Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Israel are on the map, right? What caused me the most grief was the plethora of former Soviet republics that were all just part of Russia back in my day. Sure, I knew where Georgia, Azerbaijan, and all the Stans—Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan—were in a general sense, but it took a good while to learn which one was which, especially with the pressure of a ticking clock and smug twelve-year-old looking over my shoulder.

I thought about that map game a lot as I was picking books for all those former Soviet republics that have now been granted statehood. When it came to Turkmenistan, choosing a novel was a whole lot easier than mastering that map. When I read that Ak Welsapar’s The Tale of Aypi was supposedly the first novel to emerge from Turkmenistan, meaning of course, not that it’s the first Turkmen novel, but rather the first novel to be widely translated into English since Turkmenistan became its own country, the choice seemed clear.

And a good choice it turned out to be. The Tale of Aypi is something of a modern fable that fits this project perfectly. Taking place during the Gorbachev era near the end of the Soviet Union, the novel is set in a small Turkmen village on the shore of the Caspian Sea. Soviet officials, intent on building a health spa in the area, have forbidden the men of the village to continue their traditional livelihood of fishing, promising that the entire village will soon be razed, its people moved to new lives and apartments in the city. One fisherman, Araz, insists on refusing this decree and continues fishing, making him something of a pariah in the village. The village’s woes are so heavy they awaken the ghost of Aypi, a woman who was sacrificed by the villagers’ ancestors for courting danger by accepting a ruby necklace from a band of mysterious outsiders generations ago.

Aypi, who has become something of a folk legend, is at first bewildered and confused by the modern conveniences of the village, but soon learns that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and that human nature has changed little in the century or so since her death. Enraged that men still treat women largely the same as they did in her day and that women still allow it, she sets out to exact revenge on the people of the village, who are themselves bewildered and confused by the lives led by their children and compatriots who have moved away to the city. It’s a clever little ghost story that draws on folklore to explore the ongoing battle of the sexes and a theme that pervades many of the novels I’ve read or penciled in for this project, the clash between traditional values and the persistent creep of modernity.

Another reason The Tale of Aypi fits this project so well is the way it reminds me just how vast the world is, even now as it’s seemingly getting smaller and smaller. After nearly a century as part of the Soviet Union, Turkmenistan declared independence in 1991, but, despite that independence, it’s carried on as a largely totalitarian state despite recent small inroads toward more open democracy. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that Turkmenistan is fairly obscure on a global scale. I like to think I’m relatively well-versed in world affairs, but, as I learned in my son’s summer homework, I struggled to locate it on a map and knew next to nothing about it aside from the existence of the Door of Hell, a natural gas crater that has been burning for over fifty years, and come to think of, I may have thought that was in Tajikistan or Kazakhstan. Yet it’s home to nearly 8 million of the world’s people with a distinct culture and language. It’s a place I’m very unlikely to ever visit (hey, if you’re a rich patron who wants to pay me to visit these places from which I’m reading books, by all means hmu!) and one I likely wouldn’t have had many conscious thoughts about if I hadn’t picked up this novel. All that just underscores why reading widely is a good thing.

So what’s next? I picked up this short novel as a bit of a palette cleanser before I jump back into the gargantuan Les Miserables in earnest. I’m also plugging away at Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King via audiobook. As always, if you have a suggestion from any place not colored in on my map, let me know.

Until then, keep reading.

Leave a comment

Share

When it came to picking a book from Ukraine, the obvious choice would have been to go with a book about the ongoing war, or at least one dealing with Ukraine’s long and bloody history as a part of the Soviet Union and its eventual independence. Andrey Kurkov, one of Ukraine’s most prolific modern writers, has a book called Diary of an Invasion, a collection of dispatches from war-torn Kyiv, would have fit that bill precisely. But I was in the mood for something a little lighter, and part of me didn’t want to limit Ukraine to a study of current events, and instead celebrate its wider literary heritage, so I chose another Kurkov book, Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv.

This novel, which finds Lviv, a city in Eastern Ukraine, far from any ocean, suffering from a seeming return of the ancient Carpathian sea; sea gulls attack pedestrians, crabs and starfish scuttle about in the shadows, and the pungent, salty scent of the seaside rises from the sewers. Drawn up in this oblique supernatural intrigue is an ensemble cast of characters: Ryabatsev, a former KGB officer, Alik Oleysevich, an aging hippie whom Captain Ryabatsev feels a kinship with because he spent a career spying on him, Taras, a cab driver who makes a living curing kidney stone patients by driving them over bumpy cobblestone streets, and his new girlfriend Darka, who’s allergic to money until a princely kidney stone from Taras’ collection cures her of her strange malady. It’s as quirky and darkly whimsical as it sounds, and it paints a picture of the city and its inhabitants that I’ll remember long after the echoes of the audiobook fade.

There are times when it struggles to come together, and the explanation and resolution of the far-from-apocalyptic return of the sea is underwhelming, but I did find the relationship between Ryabatsev and Alik Oleysevich fascinating. Of course I was aware of the KGB’s culture war against Western influences, but here it takes on a multifaceted sheen, as Ryabatsev is clearly enamored with and surprisingly tolerant of the hippie counterculture he spent his life waging secret war against. It’s a testament to how complicated culture wars are; the hippie movement, decried by Nixon-era American conservatives as dangerous and communist, was also feared by real communists, even while the agents doing surveillance on it are oddly drawn to it. That sense of complication is probably the most tangible thing I’ll carry away from this book.

So what’s next? I’m still trudging through Les Miserables for France. It’s amazing and tedious in equal measures, so it’s going to take a while. I’m also plugging away at Ethiopia via Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, a return to war and strife, as it’s set during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia prior to WWII. It’s beautiful and poetic, but I keep having to rewind it, as the narrator’s voice is so lilting and soothing that I find myself drifting away on the sound of it and losing the thread of the narrative, something that happens sometimes when the narration is almost too good.

Until next time, keep reading and feel free to send me suggestions for books from anywhere not colored in on my map.

Leave a comment

In Gwendolyn Brooks’ People of the Book, which I read years ago and which probably planted the seed for this round-the-world reading project, a young character recalls what her father tells her about the ethnic separatist violence between Bosnians and Serbs. It’s not everyone on either side causing all this trouble, he reminds her, just the louts, which are, unfortunately, well-represented on both sides of any conflict. This is a good way to think about political violence; the vast majority of people everywhere, even those who have strong political, nationalist, or separatist leanings, are mostly content to just live their lives, take care of their families, and live in as much peace as they can manage. The trouble is that the louts amongst us, the loudest, dumbest, most hateful of us, have a way of ruining things for the rest of us.

This is on full display in Burns’ Milkman. The narrator here, who like everyone in this book has no name and is only referred to in code (her not-quite-official boyfriend is called Maybe Boyfriend, her three younger sisters are undifferentiated as Wee Sisters, and she mostly goes by Middle Sister and so on) just wants to read 19th century novels while walking around (the also unnamed) Belfast. But, since she lives in an insular neighborhood beset by the violence between UK government loyalist Protestants and Catholic Renouncers, The Troubles just will not let her be.

I’m beginning to miss the days when books like this one didn’t seem so damn prescient, but it’s hard not to draw parallels between Milkman, in which everything is politicized and over-scrutinized, and modern day America, which is increasingly beset by its own partisan divides and angry, shit-posting louts. Burns does a fantastic job here of showing us just how difficult it is escape the shackles of the time and place we inhabit. This is, of course, often even more difficult for women in societies that tend to devalue them. When a local Renouncer big shot known only as Milkman takes a shine to our protagonist, she has little choice in the matter. Even as she shuns his advances, the court of public opinion, which has already half-decided she is officially Beyond the Pale, a title reserved for those who show any eccentricities, decides that she is his mistress, and so she might as well be just that.

I loved this book for its unrelentingly obtuse and enigmatic language, and for the way it uses those attributes to explore the effects of living in the constant shadow of political violence. But what really got under my skin is the way it explores how oppressive it feels to live under constant surveillance from your neighbors. I haven’t lived in circumstances of such overt political strife as that seen in this novel, but it definitely resonated with me as the product of small town life and religious upbringing, in which any eccentricities are magnified and it’s easy to find yourself Beyond the Pale.

I suppose maybe I’m missing the point here in insisting on relating this novel set specifically during The Troubles to my own life. Certainly I learned more about that ugly bit of Irish and British history here. But I can’t say I walked away from it with any specific political take. While I sympathize with the plight of the Irish and might have Renouncer leanings if I’d grown up, as Middle Sister did, in a Catholic neighborhood in a divided Belfast, it’s hard to get behind any movement driven largely by louts, which this one is from both sides, at least as its presented in this book, and I definitely can’t get behind any movement that resorts to bombing innocent people just going about their lives. I’m just hoping that none of this gets any closer to home.

While it’s set in similar circumstances amidst the political upheaval and ethnic war that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, Bodrožić’s Hotel Tito couldn’t be farther from Milkman in style. While Milkman revels in playfully obtuse language experiments, Hotel Tito, named for the apartment building where its narrator, a young girl named, like the author, Ivana, is steadfastly straightforward, a work of matter-of-fact autofiction. In that regard, it reminded me of Vaddey Ratner’s Shadow of the Banyon, which is also drawn heavily from the author’s childhood experiences and war-torn existence.

The thing that interested me most about Hotel Tito is how remote the war seems for most of the book. Ivana is young when her family is displaced by the violence and moved into the titular hotel. While it continues to affect her family’s existence, this is best thought of as a coming-of-age story that just happens to be set in the aftermath of the war that splintered the former Yugoslavia into six separate nations. It’s a reminder of how the rituals and struggles of growing up are universal, even when our lives are torn asunder by violence.

After back-to-back books about civil strife and ethnic violence, I wanted something a bit lighter. Queue Richard Wagamese’s novella Him Standing. I’d decided to slot a First Nations writer for Canada after reading about the plight of native children torn from their families and sent to live at state schools. Wagamese was an exceedingly prolific writer, and many of his novels seem epic in scope, historical fictions dealing with the struggles of First Nations people. Maybe I’ve sold him short here by slotting what is probably one of his more minor works as the book to represent Canada. But all human stories are important, not just the ones that explicitly lay bare the catastrophes and injustices of our times, and this one seemed to fit the moment.

Him Standing follows Lucas Smoke, a talented Ojibwe carver with a knack for rendering faces in wood. When a mysterious stranger gives him a wad of cash and commissions a mask with only the instructions to carve what he sees in his dreams, Lucas jumps at the chance. By the time he realizes he’s been tasked with bringing a powerful shaman who’s been imprisoned in the dream world into our world, it’s too late and he’s in mortal danger. The story that follows, drawn from Ojibwe folklore, falls somewhere between horror and magical realism, two of my literary loves. I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one except that I enjoyed the hell out of it and I definitely plan to read more of Wagamese’s work in the future.

That’s going to have to wait, though, as I have quite a few countries left to go. For now, I’m still plugging (slowly) away at Les Miserables for France, and I’ve just started a new audiobook, Andrey Kurkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, which is representing Ukraine. Til then, keep reading and feel free to suggest books from anywhere that’s not yet shaded on the map above.

Leave a comment

The novel tells the story of the African men and women who accompanied Dr. David Livingstone on his journey to find the origin of the Nile River, and after his death, carried his remains and papers 1500 miles across Africa so they could be returned to England. Obviously, a reading project like this one has to take on the specter of colonialism. Rarely is it dealt with in such a direct way. Here we have a novel that lets African natives give voice to the story of one of the lightning rod figures of the colonial era. As such, this novel seemed absolutely tailor-made for this project.

It did not disappoint. The thing that elevated this novel for me was the complicated way that it explored the fallout of colonialism, bold enough to lay bare its hypocrisies and cruelty, but complex enough to never wallow in absolutes. Dr. Livingstone himself was a complicated man with a decidedly mixed legacy; anti-slavery in principle but not above mingling with slave traders and even buying a wife or two for the men on his journey, somewhat enlightened to the plight of Africans compared to many Europeans of his era, but also not above committing shocking acts of cruelty and certainly not immune to the paternalistic attitudes toward native cultures that excused colonial brutality. All of that is on display here, contrasting Livingstone’s own voice through his diary entries with that of the natives who serve him.

Readers who are looking for a straightforward story telling narrative style might find this somewhat disjointed. The novel begins with the voice of Halima, a woman who’s not exactly sure if she’s free or a slave, as she was purchased by the doctor, ostensibly to be the bride of one of his native helpers. Her side of the story gives new dimension to Dr. Livingstone’s own words, as each of her chapters opens with an entry from his diaries. The dissonance between Halima’s perspective and the doctor’s reminds us that there’s really no such thing as a reliable narrator.

Following the Doctor’s death, we pick up the story from the point of view of Jacob Wainwright, a freed slave and devout Christian convert. Many of the reviews I’ve read are from readers who gave up on the book when Jacob’s section started. I get that; his sanctimonious piety is often hard to take. But I think he gives the novel an extra dimension. Here is a character who has really drank the colonial kool-aid, so to speak. It’s easy to condemn him for it, and certainly other native characters in the novel do just that, but it’s easy to see how Jacob comes to this mentality given his life story, and having this perspective adds to the richness of what the book has to say about its colonial themes.

In the end, this novel does exactly what it sets out to do. And maybe it serves as a bit of an atonement for me for slotting Scotsman Alexander McCall Smith’s The #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency as my pick for Botswana.

Leave a comment

The rough patch had actually started weeks earlier, back around Thanksgiving, when we got the tragic news that our neighbor’s grandson, one of my son’s best friends, had committed suicide at age 13. The kid, a fixture in our lives for most of his life, was at our house shooting basketball with me and my son on Friday afternoon. Monday morning he was dead. I can only imagine the pain his immediate family has experienced, so I don’t mean to compare our sorrow to theirs, but, because my son is around the same age, the kid’s death hit my wife and I hard. It also forced me to think about the things my son has to deal with out in the world, bringing the helplessness that comes with knowing there are some things you can’t protect your children from no matter how hard you try into sharp, bitter focus. Maybe that’s why the first of the three books I’ll write about here connected with me.

The selection from Turkey was a bit of a no-brainer. I’d been meaning to read Orhan Pamuk, a Nobel Prize winner, for some time, so this project seemed like a good time to finally cross him off the old TBR. As for the book selection, I left that to the winds of fate. I had a few of his books on my favorites list in Libby, one of the library apps I use for e-books, and when I was ready for my next read, his 2016 novel The Red-Haired Woman was the only one available. I’ve written here before about how sometimes the universe seems to send us books at the right time. This was one of those cases. Just as I was deep in my thoughts about my son in the wake of the tragedy, this book about fraught father-son relationships fell right into my lap.

There are so many layers to those kinds of relationships in The Red-Haired Woman. Our protagonist, Cem, is estranged from his mostly-absent, political dissident father. When he takes a summer job as a well digger’s apprentice, he takes on another father figure in the form of his boss, Mahmut, whom he ends up betraying in shocking fashion. Those layers get even more complex when Cem has to deal with his own troubled son. Further enriching all this exploration of father/son dynamics are the threads of two myths running in the background with eerie parallels to the story. Cem is obsessed with the myth of Oedipus, in which a son is fated to kill his father, and the sort of Oedipus-in-reverse Persian myth of Rostam and Sohrab.

I sincerely hope I never have to deal with the exact kind of father/son stuff that goes down in this book, but I know firsthand how difficult and thorny these relationships can be, so I appreciated the exploration of them here. I’m also a sucker for mythology, so the exploration of the familiar Oedipus story and the new-to-me Persian mythology was interesting as well. I’m told that this isn’t the best place to start with Pamuk, as it’s apparently a stylistic outlier not very typical of his work, but I loved this book. Some books stick with you for a long time. This is one of those. The emotional imprint of The Red-Haired Woman will resonate with me long after the details of the plot fade somewhat in my memory.

Not all books can hit that hard. The follow-up read, Nu Yi’s Smile as They Bow, the pick for Myanmar, is likely to slide right off rather than stick. That’s not necessarily a slight; I’m sure there are many readers who will find this book at the right time, just as I did with The Red-Haired Woman. Yi’s novel is set during the Taungbyon festival honoring the Nats, local spirits in Burmese tradition. The novel, based loosely on a true story, follows Daisy Bond (real name, U Ba Si) a gay transvestite medium who makes a living doing spiritual performances for the throngs of people flocking to the festival. I appreciated this one from a cultural standpoint; I knew absolutely nothing about this festival and very little about Mynamar beyond the international headlines going in to the book, so it represented a peek inside a culture that was completely foreign to me.

Aside from that, this one fell a bit flat for me. I love the exploration of how the festival gives gay men a place in a society in which they’re marginalized, but Daisy’s relationship with his young lover/assistant was problematic for me. Maybe I just had a hard time taking off my own cultural lens to see it in its true light, but either way, I found it a bit difficult to connect with the characters here.

Finally, there was Ibrahim Al-Koni’s Gold Dust. I chose this one because it was described as a Libyan Western, which seemed intriguing. Though it’s not as bleak or relentlessly violent as Blood Meridian, it might be best thought of by American readers as more of a Cormac McCarthy Western than, say, a Louis L’Amour Western. Sparse and lyrical, concerned mostly with being a spiritual parable, Al-Koni’s story about a man obsessed with his camel, a rare piebald specimen with a wild streak, is a quick read.

It’s also a good example of the kind of book I didn’t understand, at least as I was reading it. Though it seems obvious now, it’s largely an allegory about the Sufi understanding of sin, something that was lost on me until I did a little digging after finishing the novel. Luckily, it worked on both levels, as I was intrigued by the story, which says a lot about Al-Koni’s writing, as the story can mostly be summed up as being about a man following and searching for his lost camel in the desert. The allegorical stuff added a layer of complexity after the fact and I wonder how it would have affected my reading if I’d known more about it going in.

I guess we’ll never know.

So what’s next? As is my usual modus operandi, I have two books going at once, one via audiobook for the endless commute, and one in print form. Pettina Gappah’s Out of Darkness, Shining Light, the Zimbabwean pick currently riding shotgun with me to and from work, seems tailor made for this project, an account of Dr. Livingstone’s life and death as told by the natives who accompanied him on his journey and carried his remains across Africa. Obviously colonialism is an important theme in this project, and it would be difficult to find a book that deals with it more directly. I’m also reading Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, an absolute brick of tome at around 1300 pages. Luckily I’m doing that one along with a small group of reader friends including my wife, so it’s not quite so daunting as tackling it alone.

Until next time, keep reading.

Leave a comment

I’d probably be a lot happier if I could just, you know, shut the fuck up and enjoy the movie. But, though I’m no Marxist, my blue-collar angst and cantankerous nature make it all but impossible not to apply the lens of class struggle and thought control to pretty much anything I read. Or watch. Right from the start, I knew I’d better try to rein that in while reading Martin Suter’s Allmen and the Dragonflies, the pick for Switzerland. J

Johan Von Allmen, the gentleman thief who becomes, in later installments in this series, a detective specializing in art heists, is exactly the kind of protagonist I’m set up to hate. He’s a wealthy trust fund baby, now nearing middle age, who’s blown through his inheritance with a lifestyle of Old World luxury and conspicuous consumption, now living in the cottage of the grand villa he was forced to sell. To keep up appearances and season tickets to the opera, he begins to dabble in petty theft, pinching antique vases and such to sell to unscrupulous dealers. It’s relatively small potatoes until a chance fling gives him the chance to lift a nearly priceless set of art nouveau bowls finely decorated with dragonflies. Trouble is, it turns out those bowls were already stolen. which sets off a series of events that puts Allmen and his faithful servant (ugh, there goes my inner Marxist again) Carlos in mortal danger.

I do a lot of (over?)thinking when I read. Surely the examined life is the only one worth living. But sometimes, it’s best to turn that off and just enjoy a story for what it is. Allmen and the Dragonflies is a taut little crime thriller; I tried to let it be just that, a diversion via audiobook to keep my mind off the drudgery of interstate driving to and from work. It’s a testament to Suter’s pacing and skill at developing character that I was mostly able to succeed. I devoured this short novel (4 hours as narrated) in just a handful of commutes, and I only grumbled to myself about wanting to eat the rich once or twice. If I wasn’t knee deep in this project, I might well spend some more time with Allmen soon. I’m curious to see how the character grows as he turns a new leaf and works as a detective rather than a thief. I suspect I might like him more as thief. Maybe I should examine that.

Leave a comment

As it happens, I’m spending most of my audiobook time (my endless, Sisyphean work commutes up and down the interstates of South Carolina) with The Lord of the Rings. I’d read The Hobbit as the pick for England, which made me want to make another attempt at the LOTR trilogy, a massive undertaking I’d made an aborted attempt at decades ago and have been sort-of meaning to read for real ever since. A couple of reader friends reached out wanting to read it together in a small group, so the time seemed right. We took a week or so off between The Fellowship of the Ring and Book II, The Two Towers, and I was looking for something quick I might knock out in just a few commutes. This little book (just over four hours in audiobook form) popped up on the suggested reads in Hoopla, the digital library app I use for audio and e-books.

In addition to being a quick read (listen?) The Patience Stone checked a lot of boxes. For one, it was a good pick for Afghanistan, a country I didn’t really have concrete plans for. It also seemed to fit well with the gestalt of this project. I don’t have any rules about the kinds of writers I try to read beyond them being natives of the place their book represents, and I certainly don’t want to get precious about it, but I think it fits the ethos of Bookmark Planet to make sure there are a good many women represented on the booklist. That’s probably especially true of places where women are struggling against political and religious oppression. In the introduction of The Patience Stone, Khaled Hosseini writes “For far too long, Afghan women have been faceless and voiceless. Until now. With The Patience Stone, Atiq Rahimi gives face and voice to one unforgettable woman–and, one could argue, offers her as a proxy for the grievances of millions.” That quote, included in the Hoopla synopsis, was what drew me to this book.

Thus it was that I went into The Patience Stone thinking I was reading a book by a woman. Though I probably should’ve been tipped off by his name, I didn’t learn the truth about Atiq Rahimi’s gender until I actually read the introduction, which I generally save for last. I’m not sure that knowledge changes anything. Nor does the knowledge that Rahimi wrote this in French, a language he adopted after fleeing war and strife in Afghanistan, because he noted a tendency to self-censor when he wrote in his native language, Farsi.

For what it’s worth, whatever language he’s writing in, I think Rahimi’s treatment of his unnamed female protagonist is thoughtful and fair. The book is written from a static point of view, the reader looking in on the scene as if watching a play with stark stage design, never looking away from our vista on the room where the woman takes care of her catatonic husband, who’s gone and got himself shot in an argument while off fighting for an unnamed side in the factional violencethat’s destroying the city. The action is described almost in terms of stage directions; anything that happens outside of this room is either related to us through dialog or described through sounds from the street. Most of the book happens as an ongoing monologue as the woman talks to her unresponsive husband. The title The Patience Stone comes from Persian mythology, referring to a magical stone that absorbs all the pain and suffering one speaks about to it, which the man becomes as the woman pours out her heart, finally finding the courage to express her darkest secrets and hidden desires, things she never could have uttered aloud before. Through this increasingly frank and ultimately angry monologue, we learn a great deal about the woman and their life together before the accident.

As you might imagine, this is not a happy little book. The picture of their life under the extreme Islamic fundamentalist oppression is a fractured one, and even though our gaze never leaves the room where the man lies comatose, the violence of the world outside eventually finds its way into the frame. It’s a testament to Rahimi’s power as a writer that this avant garde approach, which easily could’ve become tedious, actually works, illuminating the ways that religious fundamentalism warps the oppressors as much as it does the oppressed. It’s a theme that I’m sure we’ll revisit as this project takes me to other places around the world scarred by similar strife.

As I wrote at the top of this post, the itinerary for my reading journey is a loose one, so if you have suggestions for something to read from anywhere that I haven’t yet gotten to, please let me know. Otherwise, keep on reading.

Leave a comment

While it’s tempting to read that as something more than coincidence, it would be a slap in the face to the novel to dwell on it. Death in the Andes is terse and knotty and definitely delivers on the promise of its title, a South American Heart of Darkness in which death seems just around the corner on every page. It follows Corporal Lituma, a civil guardsman appointed Naccos, a remote Andean village built up around a highway construction project. Stuck in Naccos with his young underling Tomasito Carreño, who cries himself to sleep each night telling the tale of his star-crossed romance with Mercedes, Lituma becomes obsessed with solving the disappearances of three workers. He’s convinced that the aging hedonist barkeep Dionisio and his witchy wife Adriana have ritually sacrificed them to the Apus, local spirits in Andean lore, in exchange for protection from Shining Path guerrillas and landslides.

It seems that I just can’t get away from bloody political revolutions. They’ve turned up over and over again in so many different stops on this reading exercise. Sometimes, as with Cambodian pick In the Shadow of the Banyan, I knew what I was getting into. But deadly uprisings and ideological violence have also popped up in the most unexpected places, like Swedish pick The Man From Beijing, which I’d selected as a good old murder mystery. I suppose given the history of Peru and the fact that, like many prominent Latin American writers, Llosa was intimately involved in the political life of his country, I shouldn’t have been surprised to find them here, but it’s not like I’d come to Death in the Andes looking for them either.

While Llosa’s own political leanings are complicated—like many of his contemporaries, he was smitten with the Cuban Revolución in his youth but soured on left-wing politics to the point that he apparently gave tacit support to Brazilian fascist Jair Bolsinaro in recent elections—are well-known, I wouldn’t call Death in the Andes an overtly political book. Certainly it takes an anti-Shining Path stance, but, like the fat-sucking, vampiric pishtacos and other boogey men haunting this novel, the Shining Path are just a fact of life, just one more monster lurking in the shadows of the mountains.

The Maoist Shining Path is depicted here much like the Khmer Rouge in Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, as brutes hardened by grinding poverty and blind devotion to ideology. Shining Path terrucos—the term itself is fraught with socio-political complications—seem to be closing in on Naccos throughout the entire novel. We see them stone two young French tourists to death and attack villages to conduct brutal mock trials, punishing everyone from drunkards and adulterers to shop owners and other capitalist enemies of the people. Like the ever-present threat of landslides, the Shining Path just are, like the weather, something that must be appeased with violence, with human sacrifice. It’s that sense of inevitability that I take away from this novel. I won’t say that the reading I’ve done so far as part of this project has changed my own socio-political world view per se, but it has widened the focus somewhat. The whole of human history seems like a perpetual struggle over how we might best organize and govern ourselves, driven by competing ideologies that share one unfortunate flaw: the tendency to become a meatgrinder when wielded by those whose experiences and circumstances have rendered them desperate or willing to trade their humanity for devotion to a cause.

It’s enough to give you a bleak view of humanity. If you didn’t already have one to begin with, that is. But the fact that we can tell stories about this meatgrinder world is something, even as I wish that all these explorations of political violence didn’t seem so damn prescient. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take many more human sacrifices to appease whatever gods are writing the script for the 21st century.

It’s going to a be a while before I get a respite from socio-political angst; I just started the next book for this project, Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses, the pick for Congo. I knew very little about it going in, but within the first few chapters, we’re in suddenly in the middle of a (how did I not see this coming?) leftist political coup. After that, who knows. I have a couple penciled in, including stops for Canada, Myanmar, and Switzerland. But I think I’ll let the wind dictate which way we’ll sail.

As always, if you have a suggestion for a place I haven’t yet read, please pass them along.

Leave a comment

I read a lot of independent lit because my own writing has been published by decidedly indie presses, so I’m immersed in that world. I read a good many mass-market books, but I’ll always be partial to indie presses because, at their best, they publish vital, engaging works that often takes risks you don’t typically see in more commercial fiction. I use the word indie here to mean pretty much anything outside the Big 5 publishing houses, from smaller traditional presses to self-publishing. It doesn’t get much more indie than self-publishing, so Waheed’s Radio Man and Kite Fighter, two novellas that apparently took 1st and 2nd place in a 2007 Maldivian competition for writing in English, so they seemed like a natural fit for this project.

Radio Man is an auto-fiction that tracks the life of its narrator from childhood to adulthood through anecdotes about the family’s vacuum-tube radio, marking the modernization of Maldivian society along the way. Kite Fighter is a love story that takes place against the back drop of, well, kite fighting. Both are imminently readable—I knocked them both out in a sitting apiece—and go down easy. I confess that I knew very little about The Maldives going in to these novellas beyond its general location somewhere in the Indian Ocean. That curiosity has definitely been satisfied, especially by Radio Man, which almost reads like it was intended as a primer on country and its people, so these were definitely a good choice.

I’ve been reading some indie lit on the home front, too. I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Kayli Scholtz’ Yeehaw Junction, and asked to write a blurb for it. I’ll let the blurb speak for itself on this one:

Yeehaw Junction might just be the most unsettling book I’ve ever read. But it’s not just unsettling, it’s un-everything: unflinching, uncompromising, unrelenting, but mostly un-put-down-able.

If that sounds like something you’d be into, it’s available for pre-order from Moonstruck Books. While you’re shopping Moonstruck, check out Nightmare Diaries as well. It’s a horror anthology featuring stories by Scholtz and Fever House author Keith Rosson among others. I’ve got a story in there as well, a converted chapter from a 1980s-set vampire novel in progress.

Then there’s 120 Murders, a Ruadan Books anthology of dark fictions inspired by the alternative era. I came to this one for Chris L. Terry’s “Timebomb,” an homage to the Rancid song. It also has stories from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Paul Tremblay, and other horror heavyweights.

I’m still making my way through these anthologies and waiting on some library holds for a couple of books from various places around the world, so I’m not exactly sure what’s coming next for BookMark Planet. I’m thinking that, for obvious reasons given current events, I might prioritize Iran, Israel, and Palestine, which I’ll be treating as a separate country for this project.

Which reminds me. I know the world has a way of hiding its goodness behind a wall of uncertainty, fear, and hate. Just don’t ever let the bastards grind you down. That’s exactly why readers and writers do what we do. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like a whole lot, but it’s something, and sometimes its all we got.

Leave a comment

Given India’s rich legacy of highly-regarded literary authors plumbing the depths of its colonial past and often troubled present, it almost seemed like a cop-out to select this relatively light-hearted—one might even say cozy—mystery novel, the first in a popular and still-growing series. But I’ve actually read a good bit of Serious Literary Fiction™ from India in the form of Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri and the like. Plus, as I’ve written about here in the past, detective novels and the way mystery tropes translate across cultures has become a real theme of this project in the early going, so The Bangalore Detectives Club fit right in.

Historical fiction presents a bit of conundrum for the writer—it’s difficult to stay true to the genuine ethos of the setting while writing characters that remain relatable and palatable to modern readers. Many writers of historical crime fiction and detective novels do this by plopping plucky heroines with ideals more in line with 21st century values into their stories to fight against the prevailing norms of the time. Think Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes, solving crimes and battling the rampant misogyny of Victorian England with her bare wits.

Nagrenda does something akin to that with The Bangalore Detectives Club. Kaveri, our would-be detective, and her husband Ramu both seem to some degree like ex-pats from the 21st century, gently scoffing at the mores of both Indian and British society. There are times when this seems a little on-the-nose. For the most part, though, it works, and the novel delivers a tasty little murder mystery and a glimpse into pre-independence India, a setting I’d only explored through the eyes of the British colonizers with writers like Kipling and George Orwell. That’s what this project is all about, so I’d say it was the right choice after all.

Leave a comment

Karina Sainz-Borgo’s It Would Be Night in Caracas is set during the worst of this unrest and follows Adelaida Falcon, a young woman mourning her mother’s death as her country fall apart around her. Like Ratner’s novel about the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, this is fiction, but the story clearly draws heavily on autobiographical elements. As such, it’s brutal and often hard to read. I found this one more difficult to get through than In the Shadow of the Banyon, even though the scale of the atrocity in Cambodia is larger. Maybe it’s because Ratner’s novel is told through the veil of child narrator and imbued with a sense of wonder that mitigates the horror somewhat, even as the subject matter becomes heavy. Maybe it’s because the Venezuelan conflict is closer to home, both geographically and temporally. Maybe it’s because I read this one at what seems like a particularly dicey time in American history.

Whatever the reason, It Would Be Night in Caracas left me with a gnawing sense of despair. After reading some of the reviews of the novel on Goodreads, it also left me pondering the role and the responsibilities we take on when we write about the world. As you might expect with subject matter like this, reviews of this novel are divisive. While many gush about its frankness and willingness to take on such heavy topics, it has its share of detractors as well. Many of these detractors trash the novel largely for political reasons. A common thread among these is that Sainz-Borgo seems unaware of or unwilling to engage with her relative privilege as a white, middle class Venezuelan as she romanticizes the way the country was before the revolution. Several reviewers also take her to task on ignoring the way that U.S. sanctions against the new leftist government led in large part to the crushing poverty and escalating inflation that fueled much of the violence.

While those are valid concerns, I think they miss the point of fiction. Sainz-Borgo is writing her story here, obviously fictionalized, but nonetheless inspired by and written from her own experiences. Her responsibility here is to her story, to conveying the emotional truth of her experiences to give us one perspective on the subject matter. It’s a mistake to hold writers accountable for conveying the entire, multi-faceted truth of any situation, especially one as complex and fraught as this. In the end, this is just that — one perspective. For my money, it’s one well worth reading.

So what’s around the bend? I’m currently reading a cozy mystery from India, Harini Nagrenda’s The Bangalore Detectives’ Club. Maybe it’s a bit cheap to slot in a cozy little detective novel from a place so affected by colonialism as India, but I don’t feel too bad about it; though it’s a somewhat conventional mystery novel, but doesn’t exactly ignore the fallout of British colonization. Plus it’s a welcome change of pace from the darkness that nearly swallowed me as I read It Would Be Night in Caracas. I spend a lot of time on the highway commuting back and forth to work, so I always have an audiobook going. I’ve just started Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the North, which will be the Australian pick. If it follows through on its early promise, it’s going to be devastating. I’m also waiting out a couple of library holds on books from China and Dominica, and I’ve got some indie lit from the Maldives ready to go to fill in the gaps. As always, I’m open to suggestions for books from any place I haven’t yet read.

Until next time, keep reading.

Leave a comment

Noor follows a woman called A.O., a self-christened acronym for Autobionic Organism. Born with severe birth defects and further disabled by a car accident, A.O. is cybernetically enhanced with artificial legs, a prosthetic arm, and various internal and brain implants. In the Africanfuturist world that Okorafor skillfully builds here, autobionic people are seen by many as abominations. When she’s attacked at the market by a group of men riled up by recent religious revivals demonizing people like her, she kills several of them in self defense and goes on the run, pursued by both the authoritarian Nigerian government and global conglomerate Ultimate Corp, which has its fingers in everything, including the technology that allows her to live. Along the way, she meets a Fulani herdsman named DNA who’s also been wrongfully vilified as a terrorist, and the two of them, along with a pair of his prized steers, seek shelter in a mysterious, secretive domed city within the Red Eye, a massive, eternally raging sandstorm that occupies thousands of square miles of northern Nigeria. In a world where everything is streamed and interconnected, the world is watching as the pair flees, but A.O.’s rage in the market incident has triggered an evolution in her cybernetic enhancements that might just give them an advantage.

As with any top-notch science fiction, there’s a lot here we might see as commentary on both the world we live in and speculation on where it might be going. Certainly we can see our own world in the obsession with social networks and live-streaming and the way they pave the way for rampant disinformation. The Red Eye as an environmental disaster evokes our fears of climate change. There are parallels between the vitriol toward the cybernetically enhanced and the hate we see toward any number of marginalized groups in our own world. I also dig the way the technology (like much of Okorafor’s work, there’s room for both tech and a bit of juju magic here) makes traditional ways of life more viable. The thing that makes Noor so great is that it works on all those levels and also delivers a story worth savoring.

I enjoyed thinking about about all those parallels, but the thing I found most heartening about Noor is the way it depicts a world that might be described as dystopian but isn’t bleak or cynical. I grow weary with dire predictions of the future. Of course with all problems facing humanity, it’s natural to worry, but it strikes me that the entire course of human history has been one of living on the verge of disaster of one kind or another. It’s our natural state. The human story is one of perseverance. In Noor, we see a world beset by many of the same problems we face today. But even as the Red Eye rages, misguided hate runs rampant, and soulless corporations control us in ways we can’t even fathom, there is room for human stories. And that means there is room for hope.

So what’s on the horizon? I’ve just started Harini Nagrenda’s The Bangalore Detective Club, a cozy mystery set in colonial India and a return to the detective novels that have been a recurring theme of this project so far. After that, it’s up to the library, as I have holds on books from China, Italy and a few other places which I’ll read as they become available. I have some true indie lit on tap from the Maldives to fill in the gaps. And it looks like I’ve been neglecting South America, which I’ll need to remedy here soon. As always, if anyone has any suggestions for any place I haven’t yet covered, let me know. And keep reading.

Leave a comment

As you might guess from the title, this is a novel about a young woman, Yeong-hye, who gives up eating meat following a series of dreams about human cruelty. Through the three linked novellas that form the story, Han Kang explores the increasingly violent dire consequences of that seemingly innocuous decision.

At its heart, this is not a novel about the ethical considerations of a vegetarian diet. It barely even explores that aspect of Yeong-hye’s decision at all, instead focusing on the way her personal decision makes nearly everyone in her life go ape shit because they can’t understand it. I know there’s a lot here that isn’t aimed at me, and my experience is wholly different than that of a young Korean woman, so I don’t mean to impose myself onto a book that is, at least in part, a response to the patriarchal nature of South Korean society. But Han Kang herself has said in interviews that she hopes audiences around the globe find some personal and universal meaning beyond just the examination of her society, and that’s exactly what this project is all about, so I feel somewhat justified in relating to the story.

The whole time I was reading (actually, listening to, since I did this one via audiobook) this novel, I found myself having a visceral reaction to it. It took me a while to figure out exactly why. Eventually it dawned on me that Yeong-hye’s experience after announcing that she’d given up meat, which is greeted by confusion, consternation, and unsolicited advice by everyone around her, mirrored for me the experience of turning away from religion. When you live in the Bible Belt and choose to separate yourself from the mindset that those around you take for granted, you deal with a lot of the same things Yeong-hye deals with. I can’t say that my own experiences have ever spiraled into the depravity and violence that marks Yeong-hye’s ordeal, but I was struck by the psychological similarities, especially the way that most of those in her life mostly just refuse to accept her decision.

I don’t want to paint too dire a picture of my upbringing here—church was, for the most part, a pretty positive experience in my childhood. As I got a little older, though, I had questions that blind faith just couldn’t answer. By the time I was a teenager, I felt like I had to fight and claw my way out of the shackles of a religious mindset that I found increasingly nonsensical. Though my immediate family never spurned me for it, it absolutely did damage relationships with many people along the way. For much of my young adulthood, I was angry about it, but, while I still get annoyed with attempts to impose Christian symbols and ideals on public life, I’ve softened somewhat. I understand why some people need the reassurances of religion, and I try not to begrudge them that comfort as long as they let me and anyone else who doesn’t share their worldview be.

All this has been on my mind a lot lately. That’s partly because of the rise of Christian Nationalism in the Trump era, which chills me to the bone. But there’s also a reason that’s a lot closer to home. Recently I’ve had to tackle an aspect of parenting I’ve been dreading for a long time—having The Talk with my son. The Talk I’m referring to probably isn’t the one you’re thinking about. I’m actually pretty comfortable talking about the birds and the bees. We’ve mostly let his Health classes at school cover the mechanics of what goes where, and instead tried to foster age-appropriate conversations about sexuality, focusing on how what he hears from his friends is probably bullshit and that anything he sees on the internet is unlikely to be a healthy representation of real life. The Talk I’m referring to here is a way more difficult one, at least for me. At twelve years old, my son has discovered religion, and while’s he’s thus far been understandably weirded out and reluctant to discuss anything related to sexuality, when it comes to God, he’s turned into a real chatterbox.

A couple months back, in my post on reading The Hobbit, I lamented the difficulty of fostering his desire to read. Recently he has started reading on his own accord, but it’s taken a form I hadn’t exactly anticipated—he’s started reading The Bible. One day last week, I saw a copy of The King James Bible on his nightstand. As someone who grew up in a devout Southern Baptist family but turned away from the church for all the usual reasons at a relatively early age, I was curious and a little bit nervous about where this was coming from. I asked him about it, trying hard to remain as neutral as possible, because it’s important to me that he feels free to explore ideas and belief systems on his own terms without me imposing my own views on him. I noted that reading such a huge and challenging book was a difficult undertaking, hoping to start a conversation. He’d started in the logical place—the beginning—and had found Genesis somewhat impenetrable. So, like a true native of the digital age, he’d looked up a YouTube video on how to read the Bible, and, following the advice there, he’d started with Gospels, which he found easier going but was still somewhat flummoxed by the ornate language of the King James. We talked about different translations, the layout of the Old and New Testaments, the pitfalls of literal interpretations of ancient spiritual texts, about mythology and dogma.

In the days since, we’ve had several good talks about it. His curiosity about spiritual matters stems from the place that it does with most people: a growing awareness of human mortality. He said he didn’t want to be a “slave to any particular religion” —his words—but that he was beginning to crave some kind of reassurance that there was something waiting after we die. That’s understandable. I’ve come to find comfort in the idea that death is most likely an end to the self, a non-existence as total as what we experienced—or, I suppose, didn’t experience—before we were born. I think any speculation on what happens to us after death is just that, pure speculation, born solely of wishful thinking and totally without a shred of empirical evidence. But that’s a lot for a kid to process, and, in the end, I don’t pretend to have the answer to that age-old question, so why not let him explore his own beliefs?

I suspect that his new-found interest in Christianity comes from another place as well. Like anywhere in the Bible Belt, you can hardly go outside without someone asking you where you go to church. He’s never had an answer for that question, and I know well firsthand how isolating it can feel to find yourself on the outside of something so many take for granted. Whatever is driving it, it strikes me that he’s living my experience in reverse. My son is coming at this from the other side of the mirror. Though I’ve tried hard to avoid imposing my own secular worldview on him, of course he’s soaked it up. I guess it’s only natural he’s curious about exploring other paths.

He’s a smart kid, and a thoughtful one, amazingly emotionally mature for his age, and it’s interesting to watch him wrestle with this stuff. For what it’s worth, I’m doing my best to answer his questions about my own views and about what Christians believe honestly. But I’m also parsing my answers, trying to avoid maxims or sweeping pronouncements and letting him connect the dots the way he sees fit. My only hope is that making those connections becomes for him a lifelong process, that he doesn’t latch on to one way of looking at the world at a young age. That’s something we would all do well to strive for I guess, if we really want to live the life of the mind.

I’m grateful to The Vegetarian for helping me sort through some of this stuff. And for being another reminder why it’s important to read widely and look for both the personal and the universal in the human stories we encounter. The novel is rich enough to support this and a lot of other readings, and it’s easy to see why Han Kang was awarded a Nobel for her literary endeavors.

So what’s up next? I’ve got a few books going at the moment. The first isn’t something for this project, but a sort of palette cleanser. A manga version of The Count of Monte Christo caught my eye on a recent trip to the library with my son. I’ve always wanted to read the novel, but I’ve slotted another 1500 page behemoth, Les Miserables, for France, so I don’t think the time will be right for a while. The manga version, which is part of a series of classics retold in Manga form) is pretty engrossing. I don’t have much experience with Manga, but I caught on pretty quickly to the back-to-front reading, and I’m tearing through this one, which, as a rip-roaring adventure story, is a good swerve away from the heavy nature of my recent reading.

I’ve got two books going for Bookmark Planet as well. My commutes to and from work are currently being made tolerable by Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor, an African Futurism sci-fi novel that almost feels like cheating as the pick for Nigeria because Okorafor is one of my favorite contemporary writers and I’ve read so much of her stuff. I’m also reading my pick for India, a return to the detective novel, which has been another recurring theme of this project, in the form of Harini Nagendra’s The Bangalore Detective’s Club. Looking down the road, I’ll soon start reading Jean Rhys’ The Wide Sargasso Sea, which is the reason it’s been so long since I wrote anything for this project, as I recently spent 24 full hours engrossed in Jane Eyre, to which Sargasso is a prequel, via audiobook in preparation for reading it as the pick for Dominica.

As always, I’m game for suggestions if you have them for any place I haven’t yet visited. Until then, keep reading.

Leave a comment

Then there are those that present a very different challenge, places with such long, rich literary histories and booming contemporary lit scenes where the sheer number of choices is paralyzing. Russia, China, and many European countries presented this kind of difficulty. In those cases, I’ve tried to select either classics of world literature that I haven’t read (Les Miserables from France, for instance) or contemporary novels that caught my fancy (The Three Body Problem from China). When it came to selecting a book from my home country, the U.S.A., I figured I’d take a similar approach. The problem was, I’d already read most of the obvious choices among must-read American classics. I wanted something contemporary, but still quintessentially American, whatever that means. When I learned about Percival Everett’s James, I knew immediately it was the perfect fit. Published earlier this year, James is a re-telling (re-imagining might be a better word) of what many consider to be the Great American Novel, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This version of the story gives us the story from the perspective of Huck’s companion, runaway slave Jim.

As such, it’s a brilliant attempt to reconcile the shortcomings and dated conventions of the novel with its considerable literary merits. Toni Morrison, in her introduction to “this amazing, troubling book,” outlines all of the thorny racial territory more eloquently than I ever could, so I’ll encourage you to read her take rather than expound on it. Suffice it to say that her real issue with the book isn’t its repeated (and utterly realistic and necessary) use of the N-word that made it so uncomfortable for middle-school readers and teachers forced to read and teach it. Rather, it’s the “minstrelization” of Jim, portrayed in the novel with “an ill-made clown suit that cannot hide the man within.”

With James, Percival Everett seeks to address this. Here, the “clown suit” is something Jim wears consciously, a code-switching act he and many of his fellow slaves have perfected to deal with white folks. Having secretly taught himself to read and write, the Jim we see in James is thoughtful and articulate in ways that he has to hide even from Huck. It’s a neat trick, delving into the very thing that de-humanizes Jim to flesh out his humanity. Some of the reviews I’ve read of the novel take issue with this version of Jim, finding it unrealistic that he sounds like a world-weary philosopher in his authorial voice and when talking to other slaves, only to resort to what he calls “slave talk” around the white folks. But, for my money, it works. It’s hilarious and poignant, something any tribute to or continuation of a Twain novel should be.

I won’t get into too much in the way of spoilers here—the action should be familiar to those who’ve read Huck Finn but definitely takes detours and fills in spots where Jim and Huck are separated. But suffice it to say there’s a big reveal that comes as a shock but makes a great deal of sense. All in all, James is excellent, a fitting coda for a truly great American novel that, like the history that spawned it, requires some serious reckoning.

James is likely my last book of 2025, and it was a fitting way to end the reading year. So what’s next? That’s wide open. I gave up on a couple of my original selections because I just wasn’t feeling them in the moment, so I’m back to the drawing board. I have a notion to start Les Miserables sometime soon, but that’s a door stop of a book that will probably take me most of the year to read with some side-piece books to break it up. So I guess I’ll be delving back into the reading list soon to make a tentative plan for the new year. Perhaps I should focus on getting some of the harder-to-fill places out of the way. Or maybe I’ll go on another detective novel spree.

Until then, keep reading.

Leave a comment

Jar City is the first (well, the first to be translated into English, anyway) in a long series following Inspector Erlandur Sveinsson, a crusty, middle-aged Icelandic police detective. The novel opens, as do most murder mysteries, with a body. As anyone who’s read more than a few of these stories can guess, the murdered man turns out to have a dark secret hiding in his past, one that begins to spiral into something bigger as Erlandur (I learned here that Icelanders go by their first names, as most don’t have surnames but rather patronymics indicating their father’s first names) begins to unravel the mystery.

As you might expect, Erlandur’s dogged determination eventually cracks the case. I won’t give too much away here, but the solution involves genetic research and explores both Iceland’s relatively isolated genome and the facade of its familial and social cohesion. Erlandur isn’t exactly hard-boiled a la Sam Spade, and he’s not possessed of some other-worldly sleuthing sense like Sherlock or Poirot, but he does come with his fair share of well-trodden detective tropes. He’s a bit of a loner, with a lot of baggage in the form of a failed marriage and an estranged junkie daughter, and he’s prone to violent outbursts when pushed to far. His fractured relationship with his daughter is further complicated by her connection to the seedy underworld exposed by the investigation, and this part of Erlandur’s story helps to ground him and make him interesting beyond the mystery at hand.

Indriðason endows Erlandur with enough familiar character traits that he feels very much a part of the genre, but he’s drawn sharply enough that he feels distinct and never hackneyed. This is also the case for Inspector Darko Dawson, the Ghanaian detective at the heart of Kwei Quartey’s Wife of the Gods. Unlike his Icelandic counterpart, Dawson is a devoted family man, but he comes with his own share of baggage: a young son in desperate need of an expensive heart operation, a nagging mother-in-law, a weakness for ganja, and a violent temper.

Wife of the Gods also starts with a body as a beautiful young AIDS worker is found strangled to death in the forest near a small Ghanaian town. Dawson, a big city detective from Accra, is assigned to the investigation because of his familiarity with the area. His mother was born here, and disappeared on a trip back home to visit her sister when he was young. As you might expect, the investigation opens old wounds and explores the tension between Darko’s more modern sensibilities and traditional practices, which includes indenturing young women as wives to much older traditional healers, an institution the murdered woman at the heart of the mystery was trying to expose. That exploration of cultural tensions made it a great choice for this project, even if some critics have noted that Quartey (an American citizen who was born in Ghana) writes about rural Africa in a way meant to appeal to foreign preconceptions. For all my attempts to read widely and without borders, I’m not qualified to comment on that aspect of the novel. I can only say I thoroughly enjoyed it and found it interesting to see familiar tropes translated into another culture.

I was a bit more reluctant to select the third book here. One of the tenets of this project (rules is too rigid a term) is that I select books by writers who are actually from and of the places they represent. In the cases of cultures heavily affected by colonization, I try to defer to native voices. I broke that tenet in selecting Alexander McCall Smith’s #1 Ladies Detective Agency to represent Botswana. Though he was raised in what is now Zimbabwe and taught law in Botswana, Smith is a white Scotsman. #1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is the first in a long series of beloved mysteries following Precious Ramotswe, who opens up shop at the edge of the desert as the first female private detective in Botswana.

Since I had some reservations about the selection, the primary thing was on my mind as I read this one was whether Smith had done justice to his subject matter. I’d say that’s a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, he’s keenly aware of the oppressive legacy of colonization and never glosses over it, especially early in the novel as he writes about Mma Ramotswe’s father working in the mines. I get the sense that Smith was well aware of the prickly nature of writing from the perspective of a native woman and tried to do it with care. Obviously there are others more qualified to assess this than me, but I think there are times, though, when his depiction of native culture seems a bit patronizing and simplistic.

Maybe it’s just that I like my detective stories a bit grittier. The overriding tone here is cute and lighthearted, even as horrific things are happening. Maybe I like my detective stories more tightly focused. This one is more episodic, as Mma Ramotswe solves a series of crimes and Smith takes long tangents to explore her backstory. Either way, I can see why this series is a wildly popular global phenomenon, but it left me a bit underwhelmed, especially compared to the other two I read in conjunction with it.

There are more detective novels to come from other places around the world. One of the ones I’m most looking forward to is Raja Alem’s The Dove’s Necklace, a Saudi murder mystery set in the holy city of Mecca. I’m not sure when I’ll get to that one, as right now I’m ending the year with my American selection, Percival Everett’s James, a retelling of what many call the Great American Novel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from runaway slave Jim’s point of view.

Until then, keep reading.

Leave a comment

I just want equip him with the tools to explore these things in a thoughtful, educated way. Which is why there’s one thing I do push him to do – reading. He's a smart kid, one who reads well above his grade level, but he’s yet to find a sustained love for it. Of course I fear that forcing him to read when he’d rather be playing video games or doing just about anything else might backfire and make him resent it, but still I persist.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about why this matters so much to me. Part of it is that, as a community college English teacher whose students are mostly high schoolers taking college classes for dual credit, I’m horrified by the level of literacy I see in the classroom. There are exceptions, and of course every generation thinks the next one in line might well be the end of the world, but the cynic in me sees a generation of screen-addicted, quasi-literate automatons who have lost not just their taste for engaging with anything longer than a text message, but the ability to do it in any meaningful way. Brain rot is a very real thing. They spend so many hours of their days staring into screens that flash dopamine-inducing signals directly into their brains that many—I'd actually say most—are nearly incapable of critical reading.

So part of it is that I want what’s best for him. I want him to rise above the generational malaise (let’s not blame just young folks here, as it’s clear many of us old farts have happily rotted our own brains as well) and have the tools it takes not just to navigate the world successfully, but to think critically about it as well. But there’s more to it than that. Reading—and writing—are so much a part of my life that they’ve become wrapped up in my identity and my sense of self. I suppose in this way I’m not unlike religious parents who shove their own faith-based worldviews down their kids’ throats. But I like to think it’s different in that I don’t want to teach him what to think, but rather how to think.

Or maybe it’s just that I want what all parents want, for my son to be a reflection of me in some way. In the liner notes to Incesticide, a B-sides album with a handful of punk covers released after Nevermind, Kurt Cobain writes that Nirvana made this record to “pay tribute to something that helped us to feel as though we had crawled out of the dung heap of conformity.” That’s how I feel about reading. Exposing myself to the world of ideas and stories set my brain on fire and helped me forge my own identity. I want my kid to feel that way, to be excited about something, to be a reader—and a thinker—in a world of dopamine-addled automatons. I don’t care what he reads, so long as he’s reading.

All of which brings me to The Hobbit, my selection for merry old England (I’ve decided to split the United Kingdoms for this project like they do in international soccer). I debated whether or not I would count this as my English choice. It’s not exactly in line with the kind of thing I’m reading for most of the countries in this project. But in many ways it fits perfectly; it would, after all, be hard to find a book that’s had a bigger cultural impact on its native country or the world at large, or one that’s been as hugely successful or widely read. But the real reason I selected it is because I wanted to share it with my son, who chose it from a short list of books available for a recent school book report project. Since I’m always looking for things we can read together, I figured this was the perfect time to finally read it.

I’d hoped he’d fall in love with it, but it didn’t exactly go down that way. He found it a bit of a slog. It’s easy to see why he didn’t immediately cotton to it. The Hobbit has a reputation as lighter fare compared to the later books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, a sort of entry-point fantasy novel aimed at a younger audience, but it’s still a fairly challenging book for a sixth grader. The story itself is epic in scope, but it’s pretty straightforward. The language, though, is somewhat antiquated, both because it was written in 1937 and because it has a bit of a medieval flare, and the narrative style—it’s told to the reader from an authorial voice that evokes oral storytelling—sometimes robs it of immediacy. He found it easier going when I set it up for him to read the e-book version, as the definitions of words he’d never encountered were just a click away.

As for me, I enjoyed the book immensely, and I got lost in the story even though I was familiar with it from the movies. A more critical reading might find some things to quibble about. There are almost literally no female characters in the entire novel—they’re barely even mentioned, much less present as fully realized characters, and even the goblins and giant spiders and talking eagles are seemingly all dudes. But perhaps it’s unfair to look at the book through this kind of 21st century gender lens, so let’s just leave that where it lies. It’s obviously one of the foundational documents of fantasy, and though Tolkien might not have invented these tropes, he certainly canonized them here, so it’s an important book for anyone interested in fantasy or just storytelling in general.

I wish my son would have enjoyed it as much as I did, but he did warm to it a bit by the end, and he very astutely observed that Bilbo grew and changed a great deal over the course of the novel. I’m still looking for the book that will ignite his love for reading and make him crave it the way I do, but I’m proud of him for getting through this one. At nearly 400 pages, it’s a hefty tome for a kid in this digital age. In the meantime, I’ve agreed to read his favorite book, one he read a year or so ago and plans to re-read with me over the Christmas break, Shelley Jay Shore’s Rules for Ghosting. I’ll be going into it blind, and I’ll be thinking about the book I’ll choose for us to read together when it’s my turn to pick again. Suggestions are welcome.

Until next time—I have an omnibus review of detective novels from Iceland, Ghana, and Botswana on the way soon—keep reading.

Leave a comment

We

The thing that attracted me to this book was a factoid about Cela’s life: considered perhaps the only great novelist to come out of post-civil war Spain, Cela worked as a censor for the Franco regime but was also the subject of censorship himself. The Hive was banned in Spain for almost two decades after its initial publication in Argentina in 1950. According to most reports, Cela even continued ratting on his fellow artists as a censor even after his own work was censored. We usually think of great writers as being persecuted by authoritarian regimes, not doing their dirty work for them, but here was one who worked for the machine rather than raging against it. That duality seemed appropriate because so much of my early reading for this project dealt with political turmoil and people bound by their own isms.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect when I started The Hive, but given its history, I was expecting more overt political commentary. There’s surprisingly little of that here. There’s also surprisingly little in the way of true narrative. Told in a series of fragments and vignettes, hopping time frames and perspectives amongst nearly 300 characters, the novel seeks to present a slice-of-life in the years following the civil war. Instead of a cohesive story, we get a cacophony of voices that comes together (or not, depending on how successful you find Cela’s experiment) as the buzz of the “hive” of post-war Madrid. It’s difficult to express the plot, as there isn’t really any such thing in the traditional sense. Much of the action is centered around a cafe run by the harsh and unrelenting Doña Rosa, but it really only serves a hub for observing the rhythms of the city. In lieu of a story, the general point seems to be that everyone is miserable, suspicious, petty, and self-absorbed, which was apparently enough of a criticism of life under Franco to warrant censure.

The thing I found most fascinating about this novel was what it got me thinking about the nature of literary translation. The version of the novel I read was translated by John Michael Cohen. In writing about a newer translation, Chapman Cadell refers to Cela’s note on the Romanian version, in which he writes about the folly of literary translation:

He semi-seriously argues that a silla is not precisely a “chair.” If concrete objects are untranslatable, then the challenge posed by “merely” abstract notions is insurmountable. “If there were such a thing as good sense in the world,” he writes, “we writers would be the first and most stubborn opponents of translation.”

That’s a disheartening notion for someone bent on reading books from all around the world. I’m not sure I agree with Cela’s cynicism, but I can’t help but wonder if some of my difficulty with this book lies with the translation. I have enough Spanish to confidently converse with a toddler and read on maybe a third grade level, so I’ll never get to experience The Hive in its original tongue, but the dour realism here, coupled with the lack of traditional story structure, made this one a bit of slog. Cela’s reputation as a craftsman leads me to think that the language crackles in Spanish in a way that wasn’t quite reflected in translation. There are also moments of humor that sing out in the sea of dour realism that make me think the original is a lot funnier and far more sly than what we get in English. I guess I’ll never know.

Of course I like to draw parallels between the books I’m reading and my own life and times. I’m writing this in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. Presidential election, so I’d be remiss not to pursue that angle here. I’m not saying Trump himself is a quote-unquote fascist—after listening to his nonsensical rambling for the past decade, I doubt he could provide a coherent definition of the term—but his authoritarian leanings, desire to suppress political enemies, and embrace of the chilling mandates of Project 2025 absolutely do raise the spectre of the F-word. Cela’s novel was banned for its portrayal of Spanish life under Franco as a tacit critique of the regime. The difference between Cela’s time and now is that, should we install our very own fascist government, they won’t need to ban 21st century America’s version of The Hive. They (I mean the non-partisan they here, as in us, all of us, we) have already dumbed-down the political discourse and our culture in general to the point that no one will read it anyway.

Which is why it’s important to keep doing it. Read far, read wide, read whatever you want, be it epiphanic literary classics or tawdry trash. On my horizon, I have Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, a gritty Mexican horror novel, and the Icelandic entry, Arnaldur Indriðason’s Jar City, the next in a lineup of crime thrillers and detective stories from all over the globe, which is so engrossing that I got so caught up in the audiobook I missed the interstate exit I take to work every day.

Leave a comment

Twelve is the Charles Dickens of life stages: it’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times. Like everyone reading this, my memories of being twelve are half-wonderful and half-terrible, often for reasons that are laughable now but seemed serious as the grave while I was living them. It’s a difficult age, harder for some than for others, but complicated and bewildering for all. I think it’s a great deal harder for this generation, native to the internet age. The world wide web is a Pandora’s Box of knowledge and inanity, information and dis/misinformation, and porn. So much porn, more porn than our twelve-year-old minds, blown away by a pilfered copy of Penthouse, could ever even imagine.

I worry about my kid wandering around in the world—the real world and the increasingly omnipresent virtual one—trying to make heads or tails of everything it has to offer. Of course we monitor him, but there’s only so much sheltering you can do before it becomes weird and overbearing, and ultimately he’s going to have to live in these worlds. It’s something that’s been weighing on my mind recently, so it’s no surprise I selected Hanna Bervoets’ We Had to Remove This Post as the Dutch selection.

We Had to Remove This Post, narrated in the form of a letter to a lawyer, follows Kayleigh, whose work as a content moderator for a huge social media platform starts to have real-world consequences as the bombardment of images and videos showcasing the absolute worst of humanity she’s inundated with at work erode her psyche. My only real complaint with this book is that the exploration of the working conditions and psychological fallout of being a content moderator mostly take a backseat ; this is, at its heart, a novel about the toxic relationship between Kayleigh and her co-worker Sigrid. I suppose those two themes are inextricably linked, so it’s not too big of a complaint.

I guess I already had a decent understanding of how fucked up the internet can be when it comes to giving desperate, hateful, or just plain bored people a platform, so I found the exploration of those themes a bit underwhelming. What interested me most about this book was that it seemed so universal, the setting so banal that if I hadn’t known that it was translated from Dutch and it was ostensibly set in the Netherlands, I may have listened to the entire audiobook thinking it was Anywhere, USA, some faceless city in the midwest. Some of this is no doubt due to Kristine Hvam’s narration, which is rendered in un-accented American English. But it also seems conscious on Bervoet’s part as well, as descriptions are kept intentionally vague. At the sports bar where Kayleigh hangs out after work, “the game” is on. I imagined it to be UEFA league soccer, but it just as easily could’ve been Monday night football. Late in the novel, she travels to “a medium-sized seaside city,” not some specific Dutch location. The effect is the exact opposite of my Japanese pick, Akira Otani’s The Night of Baba Yaga, which is also rendered in contemporary English but retains a distinctly Japanese flavor. This attempt to scrub specifics away from a story so intimately connected with the internet, a homogenizing force threatening to pave over the world, is a stylistic choice meant to underscore the themes, as the things Kayleigh can’t unsee can be seen by content moderators all over the world, but it’s still a bit frustrating.

Another way this one fell into my lap at the right time has to do with its length. As you might imagine, facing a daunting reading list like this one makes one appreciate short, tight little novels. I have several huge tomes waiting for me. Les Miserables, penciled in for France, weighs in around 1500 words, roughly the same length as the Bible, and I’m currently in the middle of Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, which must be a doorstop in hardcover form because the audiobook is almost twenty-eight hours long. As is often the case with books—especially audiobooks—that long, I needed a break at halftime. We Had to Remove This Post, with its snappy run time just under three hours, came along as a short, easily-digested side quest. I’m glad it did. I can’t say it offered much in the way of solace about helping my son navigate the dark seas of the internet or the world in general, but its good to know I’m not alone in that angst.

In the works we have the representative from Spain, Cela’s The Hive, which I’m working through slowly, and Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, representing Mexico. It was supposed to be my Halloween selection, but the library hold system had other plans, so I’ll be starting it as the pumpkins give way to Christmas Trees.

Y’all keep reading.

Leave a comment

Share

As a palette cleanser from all the genocide and real-world heaviness that I’ve been reading about, this was just what the doctor ordered. I wanted something fun and (well, light probably isn’t the right word) and The Night of Baba Yaga delivered. Originally I’d slated Misuji Ibuse’s Black Rain for my Japanese selection. It’s been languishing on my shelf unread for years, and when I decided that I wasn’t quite ready for a novel about the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombings, I’d swapped it out for Yoko Ogawa’s Memory Police, which seems right up my alley. But on a recent trip to the library, The Night of the Baba Yaga caught my eye in the new releases section. I’m glad it did, as it delivered exactly what I was looking for: a quick, fun read that was still quintessentially Japanese.

The Night of Baba Yaga is a taut, pulpy little action thriller that dispenses with literary frills, seeking rather to roundhouse kick the reader in the face with ultraviolence and a bare-bones genderqueer love story that still manages to have some emotional heft despite its starkness. Our protagonist, Shindo is a woman raised by her grandfather, a harsh disciplinarian who disdains martial arts because of their orderly rituals and instead teaches her simply to fight and brutalize. The book begins with Shindo being kidnapped by a group of Yakuza gangsters to serve as a bodyguard and chauffeur for the Boss’ prim, privileged daughter, Shoko. As you might expect, things go sideways from there, and Shindo and Shoko escape the Yakuza compound and go on the lam together. Otani plays on a lot of tropes familiar to genre audiences, gleefully turning them inside-out and upside down, exploring gender and transgressing boundaries without being issue-y.

One of the main points of this project was to force myself to read as widely as possible. This is a good example of that, as this is a novel that I likely never would have read if I hadn’t been looking to fill the slot for Japan. That’s probably also true of my next read, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season, which I’ll likely polish off before the Spanish entry I mentioned last time just because, as a Mexican horror story, it’s doubling as my Halloween book.

Until then, keep reading.

Leave a comment

Share