Albert Salvadó is an Andorran novelist; The Teacher of Cheops is the only one of his books to be translated into English, and it is, unsurprisingly, my book from Andorra for the Read The World challenge. It is, as the title suggests, a historical novel set in ancient Egypt. It tells the story of a slave, Sedum, who gains his freedom [...]
Posts tagged with ‘books’
Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor and Roger Warner
6 March 2013 – 12:02 pm
Survival in the Killing Fields is my book from Cambodia for the Read The World challenge. Haing Ngor was a doctor in pre-revolutionary Phnom Penh. That alone was enough to make him a target for the Khmer Rouge, but he managed to survive their regime through lies, determination, judgement and blind luck. Later he made it to America, was [...]
The Free Negress Elisabeth by Cynthia Mc Leod
18 February 2013 – 9:58 pm
This is the novelised true story of Elisabeth Samson, a freeborn black woman in C18th Suriname, when it was a Dutch colony built on slave labour. She became one of the richest landowners in the colony and fought a legal battle for the right to marry a white man, successfully arguing that Dutch law superseded [...]
The Diesel by Thani Al-Suwaidi
11 February 2013 – 10:01 pm
I actually finished this about a week ago, but I’ve been busy doing other things: hacking, snorting, waking up in the night with my lungs apparently trying to invert themselves. But this morning I feel much more human, so: this is my book from the United Arab Emirates for the Read The World challenge. It’s [...]
The Republic of San Marino by Charles de Bruc
18 January 2013 – 12:03 pm
… or to give him his full Ruritanian title, ‘Comte Charles de Bruc, Chargé d’Affaires de la République de St Marin à Paris, Grand Croix de l’Ordre Équestre de Saint Marin, Officier de l’Ordre des SS. Maurice et Lazare, etc.’ Although I guess even that’s not his full title, because it ends with ‘etc’. This [...]
Books of the year 2012
2 January 2013 – 11:38 am
Now I list (most of) the books I read on Goodreads, it’s pretty easy to glance back over the books I read in 2012. And I can report the sad fact that I didn’t give a single book a five star rating last year. As the person who gives those scores, I know exactly what [...]
Beyond the Islands by Alicia Yánez Cossío
19 December 2012 – 4:44 pm
Beyond the Islands is set in the Galapagos. It’s a novel in the form of a set of eight stories, each about a different character. Each picks up from where the previous one left off, and there is continuity and overlap, but they are somewhat separate stories; eight narrative arcs rather than one overarching one. [...]
The Soul of the Rhino by Hemanta Mishra
3 December 2012 – 11:29 am
Hemanta Mishra is a Nepali conservationist who, among other things, was part of the campaign to set up Nepals’ first national park, primarily to protect what is usually referred to as the Indian Rhinoceros, but which he refers to, for understandable nationalistic reasons, as the Asian one-horned rhinoceros. This book is a memoir and is primarily [...]
88 Days – A true story of Somali Pirates in the Indian Ocean by Francis Roucou
2 December 2012 – 12:07 pm
This is a first person account of being kidnapped and held for ransom by Somali pirates. Roucou was the captain of the Indian Ocean Explorer, a boat from the Seychelles which was chartered by tourists for diving and fishing — although only the crew was on board when the boat was captured. It’s what you might expect: [...]
Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre
12 November 2012 – 5:10 pm
Ben Goldacre’s previous book, Bad Science, was effectively an adaptation of his Guardian columns of the same name, and although it wasn’t a straightforward compilation, it had something of the same character: a bit of a grab-bag of subjects, held together by the broad theme of bad science and bad science journalism, with a emphasis [...]
A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution by Samar Yazbek
5 November 2012 – 3:11 pm
A Woman in the Crossfire is, as the subtitle suggests, an account of the Arab Spring-inspired uprisings in Syria; or at least the first few months of them. This is my book from Syria for the Read The World challenge. Because of the rules I’ve set myself, that the books should be written by people [...]
A Poet and Bin-Laden by Hamid Ismailov
22 October 2012 – 3:57 pm
This book tells the true story of Belgi, an Uzbek poet who fled the brutal regime in Uzbekistan and ended up in an Islamic militant/terrorist/dissident organisation up in the mountains of Tajikistan, just at the end of the 90s: in other words, as part of the same broad cultural movement as the Taliban and Osama [...]
Read The World challenge: status report
27 August 2012 – 11:47 am
August 1st marked four years of the Read The World challenge. Last time I did a status report was two years ago: at that point I calculated that, at the rate I was reading them, it would take me another four years to finish. Well, I’ve done the sums again, and at the current rate [...]
Birds in London by W. H. Hudson (1898)
20 August 2012 – 1:17 pm
I downloaded this from Project Gutenberg after reading Hudson’s novel Green Mansions. The novel — a rather peculiar romance about a wild girl found living in the Venezuelan jungle — has has not aged particularly well; personally I found Birds in London much more interesting, although non-London non-birders will inevitably find it less so. Some of it is interesting [...]
Translations From The Night by Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo
4 July 2012 – 2:58 pm
Rabearivelo was a poet writing in Madagascar in the 20s and 30s — he killed himself in 1937 at the age of 36. He wrote in French; some of his later poems claimed to be translated from Malagasy, but according to this anthology’s introduction, the evidence suggests it was the other way round: that he wrote them [...]
To Sir, With Love by E.R. Braithwaite
20 June 2012 – 3:58 pm
I knew that To Sir, With Love was a book about a black Caribbean man struggling with racial prejudice in 1950s London, so I was quite amused that the opening — his description of travelling on a bus full of East End women — reads so much like a white colonial Briton describing the natives of a third world country. [...]
The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah
2 June 2012 – 2:51 pm
The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born is a novel set during the last days of the Nkrumah government in Ghana. It’s about a man resisting corruption, quixotically in the view of most of those around him. The scathing portrayal of a corrupt society is all the sharper because of the contrast with the optimism [...]
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
3 April 2012 – 6:08 pm
I’ve had this on my to-read shelf for some time (the one in my bedroom, not the one on Goodreads), basically because I thought Housekeeping was a really magical book. But I knew there was a long gap between the two — 24 years, apparently — so I didn’t quite know what to expect. And it is a rather different book; [...]
The Book of Khalid by Ameen Rihani
6 March 2012 – 3:36 pm
I heard about The Book of Khalid because last year was the centenary of its publication, and there was a burst of publicity to celebrate it as the first Arab-American novel. There’s a fuller biography of Rihani here, but here’s the snapshot version: Ameen Fares Rihani was born in Lebanon, but the family moved to New York [...]
Noli Me Tangere by José Rizal
22 February 2012 – 1:43 pm
Noli Me Tangere is described on the back cover as ‘The novel that sparked the Philippine revolution’. Which sounds a bit hyperbolic, but apparently the publication of the novel in 1887 was an important moment; even more so, Rizal’s subsequent execution for rebellion, sedition and conspiracy. So it’s a political novel, an unusually early example [...]
Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland
3 February 2012 – 11:06 am
Pointless fact about Marshall McLuhan: he has always been oddly tangled up in my mind with Malcolm McLaren, he of the Sex Pistols and Buffalo Gals. The lingering after-effects of a youthful misunderstanding. Malcolm McLaren, in turn, gets mixed up with Malcolm McDowell. I’m a fan of Douglas Coupland’s novels — they’re not all masterpieces, but they’re [...]