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

The Voice of Asia by James A. Michener

February 28, 2018 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Random House, 1951. 338 pgs. Purchased.  Before embarking on any trip — around the world or within the United States — I always look to see if James A. Michener wrote about the particular place I’m set to visit. I find his multi-generational, fictional stories make the nonfictional history of a particular geography accessible and intriguing in a way that guidebooks cannot. As I will be traveling throughout southeast Asia in April, I looked into Michener’s back […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Asia, India, Japan, Nonfiction, Thailand, Travel, Vietnam • Tags: James A. Michener

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

January 10, 2018 by Christina

Fiction – print. Vintage, 2014. 415 pgs. Purchased. In the 1960s, two brothers born roughly fifteen months apart explore the lowlands of Calcutta with a particular fascination for the Tolly Club, a golf course established for whites only by the British during the colonization of India. Their exploratory exploits are interrupted first by a policemen tasked with enforcing the club’s exclusivity and, later, by their pursuit of higher education. Udayan, the younger brother, went to the Presidency to study physics; […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Asia, Awards and Prizes, Fiction, India, ReadDiverse • Tags: Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

February 19, 2016 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Matilda Novak. HighBridge, 2005. Originally published 1999. 6 hours, 15 minutes. Library copy. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, Lahiri’s collection of nine short stories address the conflict between one’s identity as an Indian and the America in which the individual now lives. This common theme connects all nine of the stories irregardless of the exact identity of the central character (male or female, Indian or Indian-American or white American) or the location (Boston, […]

Categories: 2016 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Fiction, India, New England, North America, ReadDiverse, Short Stories, United States • Tags: Jhumpa Lahiri, Matilda Novak

Journalism by Joe Sacco

December 27, 2014 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Metropolitan Books, 2012. 192 pgs. Library copy. This collection of short-form comics produced by Sacco for various journalist enterprises reports from conflict zones around the world — Gaza, Chechnya, Iraq — and as well as from areas trying to reconcile with the aftermath of those conflicts — migration from war torn African nations to Malta, the war tribunals for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, poverty amongst the Dalits (“untouchables”) in India. At the end of reprinted […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Asia, Balkans, Comics, Europe, Genocide, India, Israel/Palestine, Middle East, Nonfiction, Russia • Tags: Joe Sacco

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

November 8, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by John Lee. Tantor Media, 2008. 8 hours, 6 minutes. Library copy. Winner of the 2008 Man Booker Prize, Adiga’s novel centers on Balram Halwai as he writes a letter to the visiting official from China relating his own life as an example of the entrepreneurial spirit possessed by the people of India that China must emulate to continue growing their economy. Over the course of seven nights, Balram explains how he established himself as an […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Fiction, India • Tags: Aravind Adiga, John Lee

Homeless Bird by Gloria Whelan

October 26, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. HarperCollins, 2000. 216 pgs. Library copy. Right after her thirteenth birthday, Koly’s parents announce it is time to find her a husband and begin preparing her dowry. While her mother works on her wedding sari, Koly starts on her wedding quilt creating pictures of her village with scraps of fabric and weaving in the anxiety she feels about her marriage — that her husband will find her as ugly as her bothers say she is, that her […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Asia, Fiction, India, Juvenile • Tags: Gloria Whelan

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

February 17, 2012 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Random House, 2012. 368 pgs. Review copy. I received Boo’s book for review from the Early Reviewers program at LibraryThing. I read the book in a single sitting on a flight across the United States back in January. My hope had been to post about the book before it on sale on February 7, 2012 but, alas, I missed my own deadline. Subtitled “Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity,” Boo’s book is based on three […]

Categories: 2012 Reads, Asia, India, Nonfiction • Tags: Katherine Boo

Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl

November 22, 2011 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Public Affairs, 2011. 316 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men,” Hvistendahl turns a critical eye to practice of sex selection as people around the world are tilting the sex ratio from a normal 105 boys for every 100 girls to a staggering 120 to 163 boys for every 100 girls. It’s not just China and India that are selecting boys over girls but countries in Eastern […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Asia, China, Economics, India, Nonfiction • Tags: Mara Hvistendahl

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

October 26, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Free Press, 2010. Originally published 2008. 342 pgs. Purchased. The title of Adiga’s novel is quite intriguing: Between the Assassinations? Between which assassinations? But it’s really the cover of this novel that caught my attention. The bright yellow cover with pink font seems to even poke fun at the seriousness of the title. The novel is set in Kittur, India, a city where only 89 of its 193,432 residents declare themselves to be without religion or caste. […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Asia, Fiction, India • Tags: Aravind Adiga

The Sandalwood Tree by Elle Newmark

July 7, 2011 by Christina

Fiction — print. Atria Books, 2011. 360 pgs. Library copy. Set in India in 1947, Newmark’s novel tells the story of an American woman named Evie Mitchell who recently moved to India with her husband, Martin, and small child, Billy. In their university-provided bungalow, she discovers the letters and journal of two English women who lived in the same home almost a hundred years earlier. I absolutely loved the backdrop of this novel. The British Empire is pulling out of […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Asia, Fiction, India • Tags: Elle Newmark

When the Rivers Run Dry by Fred Pearce

September 13, 2010 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Beacon Press, 2006. 311 pgs. Library copy. In his 2006 book about “Water — The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-First Century”, Pearce examines the disappearing rivers, lakes, and underground aquifers to make the claims that when the rivers run dry, the crops fail, we mine our children’s water, wetlands die, floods may not be far behind, we build more dams, men go to war over water, civilizations fall, we go looking for new water, we try to […]

Categories: 2010 Reads, Asia, China, India, Middle East, Nonfiction • Tags: Fred Pearce