Rating: 8.3/10. Novel spanning 7 generations, beginning in Ghana around 1760 and following two half-sisters and their family lines. The first sister Effia marries an Englishman in charge of the slave trade; this side of the family remains in Ghana. The other sister Esi is captured and sent on a ship to the Americas; this…
Category: World
A Savage Dreamland: Journeys in Burma by David Eimer
Rating: 7.5/10. David Eimer’s second book, after “The Emperor Far Away”, describes all the corners of Burma / Myanmar. This country is seldom visited, is ruled by an oppressive military junta, and is far less developed compared to neighboring countries in Southeast Asia like Thailand and Vietnam. The Burmese people migrated there from Yunnan around…
Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China by Peter Hessler
Rating: 7.2/10. A bunch of stories about China that personify the country’s rapid development into the modern age. The author Peter Hessler is an American journalist for the New Yorker magazine, who speaks Chinese fluently and spent a lot of time in China. There are various story arcs and the book switches back and forth…
The Saga of the Volsung translated by Jackson Crawford
Rating: 7.5/10. One of the most famous of the Icelandic Sagas: it was written in the 1200s in medieval Iceland, but describes existing folklore of the Viking culture that were familiar to everyone in the society. The events are perhaps based off real people but would have taken place several hundred years prior, in continental…
Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter
Rating: 8.2/10. Book by journalist and son of scrapyard owner. Americans think of recycling as an environmentalist act, but in reality it’s more like harvesting valuable materials out of what would otherwise be trash. Metals like copper, steel, and aluminum are harvested from all kinds of things like Christmas lights, cables, cars, etc. It’s a…
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
Rating: 7.0/10. Modern day Japanese romance novel, between a 38 year old woman Tsukiko and a former high school teacher thirty years older than her. She’s an office worker and doesn’t really have friends, and he is also lonely since his wife died. They start out as acquaintances and run into each other a lot…
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon
Rating: 6.3/10. Novel originally written in Icelandic by author Sjon and translated into English, takes place in medieval Iceland (in the 1600s). Back then, Iceland was poor and in a remote corner of the world, people starved during the winter. The main character, Jonas, is a talented naturalist that explores the world through science. However,…
The Devil’s Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea
Rating: 7.7/10. This book tells the story of a group of 26 illegal migrants from Veracruz, Mexico, that attempted to cross the desert into Arizona in May 2001. They got lost in the desert, where 14 died of exposure and only 12 made it through alive. They thought it would be one day of walking…
Man by Kim Thuy
Rating: 4.9/10. A short novel by a Vietnamese-Canadian refugee, it tells the story of a girl who immigrated from Vietnam to Montreal to escape the war, just like herself. Translated from French, the book is comprised of short chapters of a paragraph to a page each. There is a lot of poetic descriptions of scenery…
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Rating: 8.3/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] Pachinko is the name of the Japanese pinball game, where you watch metal balls tumble through a machine. It’s also the name of this novel, that traces a Korean family in Japan through four generations (Yangjin/Hoonie/Hansu -> Sunja/Isak -> Noa/Mozasu -> Solomon/Phoebe). Sunja is the first generation to immigrate to Japan…
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Rating: 8.1/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] This novel tells the story of the geisha Sayuri, from her childhood until her death. It pretends to be a real memoir, but it’s written by an American man. The facts are thoroughly researched, so we get a feel of what Kyoto was like before the war. Essentially, society in Japan…
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
Rating: 8.0/10. A classic Japanese novel, written over a hundred years ago, fairly short novel but quite profound. It’s a story about friendship and loneliness, and is divided into three equal parts. The first part deals with the author and Sensei, a reserved but intellectual man. Sensei seems to be wise but doesn’t really do…