January Books of the Month

February 7, 2020 by Christina

Whenever I am in Montana, I tend to go dark across social media, focusing on spending time with family and being outdoors over writing blog posts, responding to emails, or posting to Instagram. (I deleted Facebook in August 2019 followed by Twitter the next month.) I planned to return to blogging once my vacation ended. Then, work threw my team and I through another re-organization, and I was too mentally scrambled to organize my bookish thoughts in coherent ones. I’m really […]

Categories: 2020 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Canada, Cartography, Chunkster, Classics, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Germany, Iceland, Icelandic, Indigenious Peoples, Japanese, Mexico, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, Persephone Books, ReadDiverse, Reread, South America, Translated, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Andrew Cauthery, Anna Funder, Björg Árnadóttir, C.J. Box, Cathy O'Neil, Charles C. Mann, Guðmundur Andri Thorsson, Kaoru Mori, L. M. Montgomery, Monica Dickens, Naomi Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

September 11, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. 474 pgs. Purchased.  Marie’s father committed suicide in Hong Kong in the days after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre — duel sins referred to only in hushed tones. Ten-year-old Marie is unsure how she is supposed to grieve for the father than abandoned her and her mother back in Vancouver months before the protests were brutally ended. And her distance from mainland China leaves her unsure as to why her father […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Awards and Prizes, Canada, China, Chunkster, Fiction, Giller Prize, North America, ReadDiverse, Women's Prize • Tags: Madeleine Thien

Thoughts on Three Book of the Month Selections

April 3, 2019 by Christina

About four years ago, a number of the members of my book club in Boston joined Book of the Month, a subscription service that mails you a newly published book out of five options once a month. I passed on subscribing for two reasons: I was able to pick up a number of these titles as read (and unread) castoffs at book club meetings I figured a new book would arrive each month and promptly be added to my bookshelves […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, New York, North America, ReadDiverse, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Candice Carty-Williams, Etaf Rum, Yangsze Choo

Fascism by Madeleine K. Albright

March 15, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Harper Perennial, 2019. Originally published 2018. 320 pgs. Library copy. In the conclusion of her book, Albright says that some may find the title of her book to be alarmist, but it is her belief that we are living in an alarming time. Her assertion holds gravitas because of her credentials – she served as the United States Secretary of State and the Ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 2001 – and her personal […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Balkans, Europe, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Nonfiction, North America, Poland, Russia, South America, United States • Tags: Madeleine K. Albright

The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay

February 13, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Grove Press, 2019. 448 pgs. Purchased. Following her mother’s unexpected death, Shalini finds herself set adrift amid a life of privilege in Bangalore, India. She is unstimulated and unfulfilled by her job as an accountant for a nonprofit – a fact her boss has started to notice and comment on – and is no longer interested in the cycle of working and partying that her friends are engaged in. As she searches for meaning, Shalini remembers a […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Fiction, India, ReadDiverse • Tags: Madhuri Vijay

Cheap by Ellen Ruppel Shell

January 29, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Penguin Press, 2009. 320 pgs. Library copy. Since reading The Millionaire Next Door earlier this month, consumerism has been dominating my thoughts. I’ve been particularly contemplative of how people have rejected of material goods, attracted to articles like one in The Guardian by a man who lives “houseless” in Alaska and contemplating rereading Not Buying It.  In my search for more books on the topic, I was reminded of Shell’s book on consumerism. I borrowed her book from the library in […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Economics, Europe, Food, Nonfiction, North America, Scandinavia, Thailand, United States • Tags: Ellen Ruppel Shell

The Newcomers by Helen Thorpe

December 31, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Scribner, 2017. 416 pgs. Purchased. Subtitled “Finding Refuge, Friendship, and Hope in an American Classroom”, Thorpe spent a year and a half in an English Language Acquisition (ELA) class at Denver’s South High School. The twenty-two students she shadowed arrived in America as refugees with little English comprehension from around the world, including Iraq via Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burma, and El Salvador. Over this period of time, these students struggled to adjust to […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Africa, Asia, Book Club, Education, Middle East, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, South America, Thailand, United States • Tags: Helen Thorpe

A River in Darkness by Masaji Ishikawa

December 23, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction – Kindle edition. Translated from the Japanese by Risa Kobayashi and Martin Brown. Amazon Crossing, 2018. 174 pgs. Free download from Amazon. Subtitled “One Man’s Escape from North Korea”, Ishikawa’s memoir is quite short – five chapters plus an epilogue – but it comprises one of the more moving and informative first-hand accounts of life in North Korea that I’ve encountered. I want to highlight the label of Informative because this the only book I’ve encountered that looks at […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Asia, Japan, Japanese, Nonfiction, ReadDiverse, Translated • Tags: Masaji Ishikawa

The Dead Lake by Hamid Ismailov

September 30, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition. Translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. Peirene Press, 2014. Originally published 2011. 128 pgs. Library copy. In a remote part of Kazakhstan, Soviet scientists and military personnel test atomic weapons as they race to catch up to the Americans. A young boy named Yerzhan lives near the test site with his mute mother, grandparents, and the daughter of their only neighbors. His grandfather discovers he is a child prodigy with instruments, including the violin, and […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Asia, Fiction, Peirene Press, Russian, Translated • Tags: Andrew Bromfield, Hamid Ismailov

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

September 2, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Francois Chau. Audible Studios, 2015. 13 hours, 53 minutes. Purchased. The narrator in Nguyen’s novel is a man serving in the South Vietnamese army as a caption and watching the collapse of his country in April 1975. He has grown increasingly disillusioned with the Vietnam War and the role of the Americans, whom he refers to as drug dealers now cutting off the supply. This disillusionment is further fostered by the fact the unnamed narrator […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Asia, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Fiction, North America, United States, Vietnam • Tags: Francois Chau, Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

April 18, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Jeff Cummings. Brilliance Audio, 2015. Originally published 1962. 9 hours, 58 minutes. Purchased.  In 1962, fifteen years after the end of World War II, a defeated America has been split into three zones — the Pacific States ruled by Japan, the East Coast colonized by Nazi Germany, and a demilitarized zone comprised of the Rocky Mountain states. In Colorado and Wyoming, individuals who once (and still) identified as Americans live far freer than those on either […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Dystopia, Europe, Fiction, Germany, Japan, North America, Science Fiction, United States • Tags: Philip K. Dick

Southeast Asia Guidebooks

April 11, 2018 by Christina

‘Bangkok City Guide’ by Andrew Burke and Austin Bush. Nonfiction — print. Lonely Planet, 2010. 304 pgs. Library copy. ‘Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos’ by David W. Lloyd with Andrew Spooner. Nonfiction — print. Footprint Handbooks, 2015. 576 pgs. Library copy. The first leg of my upcoming trip to southeast Asia — or second, if you count a twelve hour layover in Hong Kong — will be centered around the capital of Thailand, Bangkok. Burke and Bush’s guidebook — written under the […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Asia, Chunkster, Nonfiction, Travel, Vietnam • Tags: Andrew Burke, Andrew Spooner, Austin Bush, David W. Lloyd