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 [...]
Posts tagged with ‘read the world’
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 [...]
From the Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe
19 January 2012 – 2:50 pm
From the Land of Green Ghosts is an autobiography. Pascal Khoo Thwe is from the Padaung ethnic minority in Burma — best known for the brass neck-rings worn by the women which elongate their necks — and was brought up with both the local animist traditions and Catholicism; the two religious traditions seem to have coexisted rather more easily than a [...]
The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas
13 November 2011 – 2:05 pm
I’ve just read two books for the Read The World challenge; one of them, Life in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, represents the downside of the challenge. It was somewhat interesting, but to be honest, reading it felt like doing homework. And there have been quite a few books which were either boring or just embarrassingly [...]
Life in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, ed. Anono Lieom Loeak, Veronica C. Kiluwe, Linda Crowl
10 November 2011 – 5:14 pm
Life in the Republic of the Marshall Islands is my book from the Marshall Islands for the Read The World challenge. It’s a compilation of short pieces published for the 25th anniversary of the Marshall Islands constitution. It includes a variety of subjects, including personal memoirs, accounts of traditional crafts, and more political pieces. The [...]
Only Yesterday by S.Y. Agnon
25 September 2011 – 9:35 pm
S.Y. Agnon is apparently a key figure in Israeli literature, and Only Yesterday is very much a novel about Israel. But it is my book from Ukraine for the Read The World challenge. My reasons for assigning the book to Ukraine were basically pragmatic — there wasn’t an alternative from Ukraine which sprang out at me, and [...]
Mama Lily and the Dead by Nicolette Bethel
16 August 2011 – 10:26 pm
Mama Lily and the Dead is my book from the Bahamas for the Read The World challenge. It’s a collection of poems which tell Lily’s life story, running from ‘The Scotsman Gives Lily Her Name (1904)’ to ‘The Granddaughter Sings Lily Home (1994)’. I know Nico a bit via the world of internet poetry, and I’d read some [...]
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
3 August 2011 – 9:05 pm
Voices from Chernobyl was written in 1996, ten years after the reactor meltdown. It is an oral history of the disaster; that is, it’s presented as a series of ‘monologues’ by people who were involved in some way, with titles like ‘Monologue about War Movies’, ‘Monologue about the Shovel and the Atom’, ‘Monologue about Expensive Salami’. [...]
Read The World: new country shock!
9 July 2011 – 3:34 pm
I’m actually surprised that I’ve spent three years trying to read a book from every country in the world without any new countries being created… but it looks like that’s about to change. Kosovo seemed like the favourite to join the list, but it looks like South Sudan have beaten them to it. They’re not quite members of the [...]
The Maltese Baron… and I Lucian by Francis Ebejer
10 June 2011 – 12:22 pm
The Maltese Baron… and I Lucian is my book from Malta for the Read The World challenge. It’s a novel narrated by an old man called Lucian which begins with the return after decades of his childhood friend, the Baron. It is the story of their fractious relationship, and Lucian’s relationship with a woman called [...]
The Devil That Danced on the Water by Aminatta Forna
29 May 2011 – 2:31 pm
Aminatta Forna’s father was a doctor, then activist and politician in Sierra Leone, rising to be Minister of Finance for a while before resigning in public protest at corruption in the government. But she was born in Scotland to a Scottish mother while her father was studying medicine there. Unfortunately politics in Sierra Leone was [...]
Ragamuffin by Tobias S. Buckell
4 May 2011 – 2:29 pm
Ragamuffin is my book from Grenada for the Read The World challenge. It’s a science fiction novel about a universe where humans share space with various other species and can travel from world to world via wormholes. Some of them come from a world which was settled by people from the Caribbean, hence the title [...]
Shadows of your Black Memory by Donato Ndongo
1 May 2011 – 12:02 pm
As part of my ongoing quest to read a book from every country, I picked up Shadows of your Black Memory as a book from Equatorial Guinea. It is a childhood/coming of age novel that sets up the conflict between traditional and western cultures: particularly in this case between traditional religion and Catholicism. Which, at this [...]
Warrior King by Sahle Sellassie
3 April 2011 – 2:40 pm
Warrior King is one of several books in English by Sahle Sellassie, all now apparently out of print. It wasn’t easy to find much information about them so I just went for the one which was available cheapest second-hand. It is a historical novel, telling the story of the rise of Kassa Hailu, who starts [...]
The King of Kahel by Tierno Monénembo
23 February 2011 – 5:31 pm
The King of Kahel is my book from Guinea for the Read The World challenge. It is the first book printed by AmazonCrossing, Amazon’s own publishing imprint specialising in translated literature. They say ‘AmazonCrossing uses customer feedback and other data from Amazon sites to identify exceptional works that deserve a wider, global audience.’ So this book [...]
The Sands of Oxus by Sadriddin Aini
19 February 2011 – 12:41 pm
The Sands of Oxus is my book from Tajikistan for the Read The World challenge. Which is a bit of a cheat, in fact. Aini’s Tajikistan credentials would seem to be impeccable: according to Wikipedia, he is ‘regarded as Tajikistan’s national poet’. He wrote the first Tajik novels and a Tajik dictionary. He was a [...]
Qatari Voices
8 February 2011 – 10:50 am
Qatari Voices is an anthology edited by two people — Carol Henderson and Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar — who organise a writing workshop at a Qatar university, supported by a grant from the US State Department. And the book is essentially a result of that project. So it is not a book put together by someone who, [...]
The Running Man by Gilbert Tuhabonye
22 January 2011 – 12:41 pm
I bought The Running Man* as my book from Burundi for the Read The World challenge. I can’t say I was particularly looking forward to reading it, though, because the blurb on the cover — How the voice in my heart helped me survive genocide and realise my Olympic dream — just sounds a bit [...]
This is Paradise! by Hyok Kang
9 January 2011 – 4:07 pm
Or to give it its full, bookshop-friendly title: This is Paradise! My North Korean Childhood, written by Hyok Kang with the French journalist Philippe Grangereau, and translated by Shaun Whiteside. When I was looking for books from North Korea for the Read The World challenge, I was quite surprised I could only find two actually [...]
This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
28 October 2010 – 12:06 pm
This Earth of Mankind is the first novel of the Buru Quartet, so called because it was composed when Pramoedya Ananta Toer was a political prisoner on Buru Island in the 60s. I say ‘composed’ rather than ‘written’ because the first version of it was told orally to his fellow prisoners. He had apparently just [...]
From Tajikistan to the Moon by Robert Frimtzis
18 October 2010 – 11:15 am
From Tajikistan to the Moon is a self-published memoir. Rather glamorously self-published, too, compared to the current trend for self-publishing via print-on-demand, in that it’s a proper hardback with an embossed cover. Frimtzis was born in Beltz (i.e. Bălţi) in what is now Moldova, although when he was born there it was part of Romania and [...]
Of Water and the Spirit by Malidoma Patrice Somé
14 September 2010 – 4:38 pm
Full title: Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman. Somé was kidnapped at the age of four and taken first to a Jesuit-run boarding school and then a seminary, where he was a victim of physical and sexual abuse. At the age of 20 he fled [...]