Have Library, Will Travel

How I Use the Library to Prepare for a Journey

By Christina S

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I am planning a much anticipated, and needed, vacation for late this year to Quebec, Canada. I am really excited about this journey because I love exploring a new city, trying new foods, and seeing new things. I have never been to Quebec before so I want to familiarize myself with the city layout, it’s history, laws, and culture. I want to feel confident and comfortable exploring the city when we arrive and have a basic plan of what sights we want to see. This does make arriving, settling in, and making decisions easier, but it is especially important for my family because one of my adult children has medical needs. I need to make sure their needs can be accommodated and they can enjoy the vacation as much as the rest of us.

Below are some of the ways I am using the library to help me prepare for this journey, and I hope it helps you to use the library to prepare for your future adventures!

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Travel Guides

The Library stocks a plethora of Travel Guides for destinations both domestic and foreign. These can help you plan for a journey in obvious ways. You can learn about your destination, what to expect, sights worth seeing, places to stay, places to eat, and cultural expectations. For my trip I am using the following:

Fodor’s Montréal & Québec City (Full-color Travel Guide)

Whether you want to party at Jazz Fest, explore La Citadelle , or stroll the promenade in front of the Chateau Frontenac, the local Fodor’s travel experts in Montreal & Quebec City are here to help! Fodor’s Montreal & Quebec City guidebook is packed with maps, carefully curated recommendations, and everything else you need to simplify your trip-planning process and make the most of your time. This new edition has been fully-redesigned with an easy-to-read layout, fresh information, and beautiful color photos.

Lonely Planet Montréal & Québec City

Lonely Planet’s Montreal & Quebec City is our most comprehensive guide that extensively covers all the cities have to offer, with recommendations for both popular and lesser-known experiences. Stroll the cobblestoned streets of Old Montreal, catch some summer jazz, and sip beer and watch the world go by in the Quartier Latin; all with your trusted travel companion.

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Atlas

I understand that some of you are wondering why I am including Atlases, especially with Google Maps on nearly every phone. The honest answer is that I love seeing the larger picture and I am of an age where I learned orienteering with paper maps. When I am planning a trip, whether it is a driving trip or I am flying in, I get a better sense of place and distance from a paper map and/or Atlas. Below are two Atlases in the SFPL collection that I am finding useful in preparing for my journey.

Historical Atlas of Canada : Canada’s history illustrated with original maps by Derek Hayes

Maps tells the story in this innovative volume, and the story of Canada they tell is profoundly engrossing and rewarding. The atlas covers a period of a thousand years and contains essentially all the historically significant maps of the country. Gathered from major archives and libraries all over the world, they include treasures from the National Archives of Canada, many never before published, and many from the archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Included are maps by the founder of New France, Samuel de Champlain, by Philip Turnor and Peter Fidler. There are English maps and French maps; Spanish maps and Russian maps; American, Italian and Dutch maps as well as maps drawn by Native people such as the Beothuk, Blackfoot and Cree. Canada’s colorful past unfolds in sumptuous visual detail and history seen from a whole new perspective.

Rand McNally 2024 Large Scale Road Atlas – 100th Anniversary Collector’s Edition

This updated 2024 edition contains maps of every U.S. state, plus expanded coverage of Canada and Mexico, that are 35% larger than the standard atlas version. Includes over 350 detailed city inset and national park maps and a comprehensive, unabridged index. Road construction and conditions contact information for every state are conveniently located on map pages. Contains mileage chart showing distances between 77 North American cities and national parks with driving times map. Tough spiral binding allows the book to lay open easily.

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MANGO

Did you know that you can learn another language for free with your library card? It is called MANGO and is such a great resource, especially when you want to brush up on phrases and pleasantries before heading to a foreign land. Quebec is a French speaking city so I am using MANGO for myself and my kids. MANGO is easy and fun and you can learn over 70 different languages at your own pace and time. My family used it before we went to Sweden a few years ago and it really was helpful. I anticipate that it will be just as useful when we arrive in Quebec.

What’s available: Choose from over 70 languages to learn in this easy to use, self-paced online language learning system

Works on: Computers, tablets, and smartphones (The Mango Languages App is available in your App Store)

Visit the Troubleshooting Page to find answers to your questions about Mango, or call the Reference Department.

Launch Mango

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Reading

Before leaving on a trip, I find several books to read about the place where I am going. I usually read several before going, but will try to save one to read while on the trip. For me, there is something about reading where I am going to that helps me to connect more with the sense of the place. I find that it enriches my journey and deepens my appreciation for where I am going. If you are planning a trip, I encourage you to check out some books, either fiction or non-fiction, before you leave. For this trip I have settled on one contemporary and one historical book to read before the trip, and a Historical drama to read on the trip.

Bury Your Dead: a novel by Louise Penny

Much of this thriller takes place at the Morrin Center, where the library of the Literary and Historical Society of Québec City is housed, when an amateur archaeologist, obsessed with Champlain’s burial, is cruelly killed there.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is on break from duty in Three Pines to attend the famed Winter Carnival up north. He has arrived in this beautiful, freezing city not to join the revels but to recover from an investigation gone hauntingly wrong. Still, violent death is inescapable―even here, in the apparent sanctuary of the Literary and Historical Society, where one obsessive academic’s quest for answers will lead Gamache down a dark path. . .

Shadows on the Rock by Willa Cather

In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends—and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.

Fanette: Uptown Conquest, Volume 1 by Suzanne Aubry (Via OverDrive)

The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland forced thousands of people to leave their beloved country. Many Irish immigrants chose Canada as their new home. Fanette-Uptown Conquest (volume 1) relates the story of Fionnuala, a seven year old girl, who travels in a “coffin ship” carrying her family from Ireland to Quebec City after the outbreak of the famine. Through courage and resilience, Fionnuala survives the ordeal of the voyage but loses both her parents to typhus. Along with her sister Amanda, she is placed on a farm near Quebec City and her name is changed to Fanette. The destinies of the two sisters are intertwined in a compelling saga exploring the depths of human cruelty and solidarity.

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DVDs / Streaming

If you are a visual person like me then you understand how helpful watching videos of my destination can be. SFPL has a collection of DVD’s and streaming e-videos and I found it easy to locate and checkout some material on Quebec. For this trip I have chosen one travel DVD and one travel streaming e-video from the SFPL collection.

The Seasoned Traveler Quebec C’est Magnifique – DVD

It is the largest province in the second biggest nation on the face of the earth. Quebec is absolutely charming. We visit its world-class metropolis, Montreal, then its captivating capital, Quebec City, and journey northward into just a few of its many-splendored places. Bring your French phrase book along and prepare to enjoy la bon vie.

Curious Traveler – Season 3: Curious Quebec City

(Via Hoopla)

After nearly 500 years, French is still the official language of this North American city. How has this UNESCO World Heritage Site retained its ‘Frenchness’ after all this time? Why does the Château Frontenac hotel look like a French castle, and what does it have to do with the Canadian railway? What’s so curious about Rue Saint-Jean, Place Royal and Petit-Champlain?

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e-Resources

Traveling can mean business and excitement, but it often also means downtime. Waiting for flights, evenings in your hotel room while winding down after a busy day, relaxation time by the pool, any variety of other situations all lead to downtime. Many of us travel with our phones and tablets these days and as long as you have internet access you can access the e-resources from SFPL anywhere in the world! Some of our resources allow you to download when you have internet so you can access them when you do not have internet. SFPL offers e-books, e-audio, e-videos, access to news, and e-music, which often is enough to keep anyone entertained during the lulls of travel.

What’s available: Latest digital magazines, eBooks, and eAudiobooks, including Kindle titles

Works on: Computers, tablets, and smartphones (The Overdrive App is called “Libby” and available in your App Store)

You can have: 5 checkouts at a time, 7-14 days per checkout

Launch Overdrive

Get help from Overdrive.

Getting Started | iPhone app info | Android app info

What’s available: eBooks, eAudiobooks, movies, music, television series, and eComics

Works on: Computers, tablets, and smartphones (The hoopla App is called “hoopla Digital” and available in your App Store

You can have: 6 checkouts of any type per month

Launch Hoopla

Get started with Hoopla | Helpful videos

What’s available: Films, television, documentaries, Great Courses, and Kanopy Kids content including digital story time

Works on: Computers, tablets, and smartphones (The Kanopy App is available in your App Store)

You can have: 15 tickets per month (tickets used per checkout vary by title)

Launch Kanopy

Visit the Help Page to find answers to your questions about Kanopy or call the Reference Department

What’s available: Streaming music and music videos

Works on: Computers, tablets, and smartphones (The Freegal App is called “Freegal Music” and available in your App Store)

Launch Freegal

You can have: Freegal currently has unlimited streaming and 3 downloads per month

New Mexico Newspapers (NewsBank)
Santa Fe New Mexican: 9/7/1994 – Present
Albuquerque Journal: 1/1/1995 – Present
Roswell Daily Record: 1/2/2002 – Present
With your library card

Reading the World – Part 18

Syria – Turkey

by Christina S

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This post was challenging. Several of the countries on this leg of our journey have strong literary traditions, but either the books are not available in English or they are not available to us to purchase. This was frustrating and many of the books looked really good and were well reviewed.

There were also several countries who do not seem to have a literary tradition at all and where finding authors from there has been difficult. In a few cases I have had to rely on books by outside authors. Despite these challenges I do believe that I have managed to curate a strong offering of titles for you!

This isn’t the first time these particular challenges have arisen during this series, but it seemed more acute on this particular post. Over time, the dearth of published writing in some countries has made me contemplate why some lands are less likely to have published local authors while other places have literature that flourishes.

Every culture and every person has stories within so it seems reasonable that there would be the storytellers that would emerge, and when none do it does makes me wonder why. Is it due to high illiteracy rates in that country? Is it lack of nurturing and mentorship? Is it because oral storytelling is the accepted norm, and writing it on paper isn’t? Is it because it is not valued and seen as unnecessary? Perhaps some of these; perhaps something else. I am sure that whatever the reasons are, they are complicated, but I do think about the amazing authors who will never put pen to paper and the stories that may never be told.

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Syria

The Pianist from Syria : a memoir by Aeham Ahmad

Aeham Ahmad was born a second-generation refugee—the son of a blind violinist and carpenter who recognized Aeham’s talent and taught him how to play piano and love music from an early age. When his grandparents and father were forced to flee Israel and seek refuge from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict ravaging their home, Aeham’s family built a life in Yarmouk, an unofficial camp to more than 160,000 Palestinian refugees in Damascus. They raised a new generation in Syria while waiting for the conflict to be resolved so they could return to their homeland. Instead, another fight overtook their asylum. Their only haven was in music and in each other. Forced to leave his family behind, Aeham sought out a safe place for them to call home and build a better life, taking solace in the indestructible bond between fathers and sons to keep moving forward. Heart-wrenching yet ultimately full of hope, and told in a raw and poignant voice, The Pianist from Syria is a gripping portrait of one man’s search for a peaceful life for his family and of a country being torn apart as the world watches in horror.

The Scent of Pomegranates and Rose Water: reviving the beautiful food traditions of Syria by Habeeb Salloum

The traditions of Syrian cooking go back hundreds of years, and is notable for its sensory components, in which aroma and texture are as important as taste and nutrition. Over the centuries, the unique dishes of Greater Syria (bilaad al-shaam) were preserved by those who cooked them. For cooks in imperial households, family homes, or on simple peasant farms, recipes were handed down from generation to generation. Despite centuries of occupation, unrest, economic hardships, and political strife, the people of Greater Syria continued to cook their burghul, lentil, chickpeas, kishk, and yogurt dishes as if life around them never changed.

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh

Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She had a normal teenager’s life. Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe. But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, Salama is torn between her loyalty to her country and her conviction to survive. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And when she crosses paths with the boy she was supposed to meet one fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all. Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are—not a war, but a revolution—and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria’s freedom.

The Aleppo Cookbook : celebrating the legendary cuisine of Syria by Marlene Matar

It is hardly surprising that Aleppo, one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, is also home to one of the world’s most distinguished and vibrant cuisines. Surrounded by fertile lands and located at the end of the Silk Road, which passed through Central Asia and Mesopotamia, Aleppo was a food capital long before Paris, Rome, or New York. Its diverse communities of Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Circassians, and others contributed to its culinary traditions and produced a vast selection of different types of dishes – and no less than 20 kinds of kibbeh recipes. Wonderful full-color photography of the food, people, and markets of Aleppo make this a stunning cookbook, and a fitting tribute to a beautiful city and the suffering its people have endured.

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Tajikistan

Sovietistan: travels in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan by Erika Fatland

An unforgettable journey through Central Asia, one of the most mysterious and history-laden regions of the world. Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan became free of the Soviet Union in 1991. But though they are new to modern statehood, this is a region rich in ancient history, culture, and landscapes unlike anywhere else in the world. Traveling alone, Erika Fatland is a true adventurer in every sense. In Sovietistan, she takes the reader on a compassionate and insightful journey to explore how their Soviet heritage has influenced these countries, with governments experimenting with both democracy and dictatorships. In Kyrgyzstani villages, she meets victims of the tradition of bride snatching; she visits the huge and desolate Polygon in Kazakhstan where the Soviet Union tested explosions of nuclear bombs; she meets shrimp gatherers on the banks of the dried out Aral Sea; she witnesses the fall of a dictator.

Neanderthal: a novel by John Darnton

When a paleoanthropologist mysteriously disappears in the remote upper regions of the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan, two of his former students, once lovers and now competitors, set off in search of him. Along the way, they make an astounding discovery: a remnant band of Neanderthals, the ancient rivals to Homo sapiens, live on. The shocking find sparks a struggle that replays a conflict from thirty thousand years ago and delves into the heart of modern humanity.

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Tanzania

The Magic of Saida: a novel by M.G. Vassanji

The haunting story of Kamal, a successful Canadian doctor who, in middle age and after decades in North America, decides to return to his homeland of East Africa to find his childhood sweetheart, Saida. Kamal’s journey is motivated by a combination of guilt, hope, and the desire to unravel the mysteries of his childhood–mysteries compounded by the fact that Kamal is the son of an absent Indian father from a well-to-do family and a Swahili African mother of slave ancestry. Through a series of flashbacks, we watch Kamal’s early years in the ancient coastal town of Kilwa, where he grows up in a world of poverty but also of poetry, sustained by his friendship with the magical Saida.

Gravel Heart by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Salim has always known that his father does not want him. Living with his parents and his adored Uncle Amir in a house full of secrets, he is a bookish child, a dreamer haunted by night terrors. It is the 1970s and Zanzibar is changing. Tourists arrive, the island’s white sands obscuring the memory of recent conflict–the longed-for independence from British colonialism swiftly followed by bloody revolution. When his father moves out, retreating into disheveled introspection, Salim is confused and ashamed. His mother does not discuss the change, nor does she explain her absences with a strange man; silence is layered on silence.

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Thailand

Bright by Dư̄anwāt Phimwanā

When five-year-old Kampol is told by his father to wait for him in front of some run-down apartment buildings, the confused boy does as told, he waits, and waits, and waits, until he realizes his father isn’t coming back anytime soon. Adopted by the community, Kampol is soon being raised by figures like Chong the shopkeeper, who rents out calls on his telephone and goes into debt while extending his customers endless credit. Kampol also plays with local kids like Noi, whose shirt is so worn that it rips right in half, and the sweet, deceptively cute toddler Penporn. Dueling flea markets, a search for a ten-baht coin lost in the sands of a beach, pet crickets that get eaten for dinner, bouncy ball fads in school, and loneliness so merciless that it kills a boy’s appetite all combine into Bright, the first-ever novel by a Thai woman to appear in English translation. urban, and at times gritty, The vignettes are balanced with a folk-tale-like feel and a charmingly wry sense of humor. Together, these intensely concentrated, minimalist gems combine into an off-beat, highly satisfying coming-of-age story of a very memorable young boy and the age-old legends, practices, and personalities that raise him.

Thailand, the Beautiful Cookbook: authentic recipes from the regions of Thailand by Panurat Poladitmontri

The range and diversity of Thai cooking is showcased in this magnificent collection of authentic recipes from each of the four regions of Thailand. Thai-born chef and culinary expert Panurat Poladitmontri and his partner, Judy Lew, have prepared this superb collection of authentic, recipes, each of which has been individually photographed by leading food photographer John Hay and beautifully styled by Ann Creber. Internationally renowned photographers Luca Invernizzi Tettoni and John Hay present a spectacular collection of photographs to show Thailand’s great scenic diversity, from the beaches and jungles of the South to the misty mountains of the North, and the varied lives of it’s people. William Warren, who has spent many years in Thailand, writes with an insider’s knowledge. He takes the reader on an absorbing trip around the country discussing the various influences–historical, physical, racial and cultural–that have formed the distinctive culture of the Thai people.

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth: a novel by Wīraphō̜n Nitipraphā

Tuned to the rhythms of the soap operas that air on Thai television each night and written with the consuming intensity of a fever dream, this novel opens an insightful and truly compelling window into the Thai heart. This is a melodrama about a ship-wrecked relationship. Set in Thailand and traveling loosely over the 1980s and ’90s, with mention of a political incident in 2010, this sad and beautiful book begins on the day Chareeya is born, the same day her mother discovers her father having an affair with a traditional Thai dancer. From that moment on, Chareeya’s life is bound to the weight of her parents’ disappointments. She and her sister Chalika grow up in a lush, tranquil riverside town near the Thai capital of Bangkok, captivated by romance novels, classical music and games of make-believe. As children, the two develop a friendship with an orphaned boy, Pran. Over time these childhood friends find themselves lost between unrequited desires and fantastical dreams that are realer than their everyday lives. The culmination of the story comes as neither Chareeya, Chalika, nor Pran can exit safely from the intertwined labyrinth of their fates.

Bangkok Local: cult recipes from the streets that make the city by Sarin Rojanametin

This beautiful book features seventy recipes for dishes that define Bangkok, so you can capture the city’s magic in your own home. Bangkok is any explorer’s dream and a food-lover’s paradise. In the Thai capital, most food is still sold along the ancient canals that crosshatch the city, and on street corners, from mobile carts and inside its bustling markets. Of course, you’ll find the best green curry and pad Thai of your life in this dynamic city. But Bangkok holds infinite secrets for anyone truly passionate about food. This comprehensive cookbook follows one culinary day, with sections marked for Early, Mid, and Late.

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Timor-Leste

If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die: how genocide was stopped in East Timor by Geoffrey B. Robinson

Available via Over Drive

This is a book about a terrible spate of mass violence. It is also about a rare success in bringing such violence to an end. “If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die” tells the story of East Timor, a half-island that suffered genocide after Indonesia invaded in 1975, and which was again laid to waste after the population voted for independence from Indonesia in 1999. Before international forces intervened, more than half the population had been displaced and 1,500 people killed. Geoffrey Robinson, an expert in Southeast Asian history, was in East Timor with the United Nations in 1999 and provides a gripping first-person account of the violence, as well as a rigorous assessment of the politics and history behind it.

Cargo of Hope: voyages of the Humanitarian Ship Vega by Shane Granger

Available via OverDrive

In December 2004, Shane Granger and his partner, Meggi Macoun, had just completed a sailing odyssey from South Africa to Malaysia and were enjoying a well-earned siesta when the Boxing Day Tsunami changed their lives forever. In a matter of hours, unstoppable waves, often over ten meters high, demolished cities not only in Malaysia but also as far away as Sri Lanka, Thailand, and East Africa, making it the deadliest tsunami in recorded history. With thousands of people suddenly in dire need, Shane and Meggi loaded their vessel with donated food and medical supplies, then set sail for Sumatra to deliver aid. Shane and Meggi’s first mission of mercy marked a turning point and evolved into a passion. Every year since 2004, they have undertaken a 7,500-mile journey to carry tons of health supplies, educational materials, and other tools to remote island communities in eastern Indonesia and East Timor. To date, Vega has sailed more than 100,000 miles, delivering everything from pulse oximeters and midwife kits to backpacks and sports equipment and visiting locations few outsiders will ever see.

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Togolese Republic

The Village of Waiting by George Packer

Available via OverDrive

A frank, moving, and vivid account of contemporary life in West Africa. Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means “wait a little more”) in tiny and underdeveloped Togo, George Packer reveals his own schooling at the hands of an unforgettable array of townspeople—peasants, chiefs, charlatans, children, market women, cripples, crazies, and those who, having lost or given up much of their traditional identity and fastened their hopes on “development,” find themselves trapped between the familiar repetitions of rural life and the chafing monotony of waiting for change.

Descent Into Night: a novel by Edem Awumey

Available via OverDrive

With a nod to Samuel Beckett and Bohumil Hrabal, a young dramatist from a West African nation describes a student protest against a brutal oligarchy and its crushing aftermath. While distributing leaflets with provocative quotations from Beckett, Ito Baraka is taken to a camp where torture, starvation, beatings, and rape are normal. Forced to inform on his friends, whose fates he now fears, and released a broken man, he is enabled to escape to Quebec. His one goal is to tell the story of the protest and pay homage to Koli Lem, a teacher, cellmate, and lover of books, who was blinded by being forced to look at the sun–and is surely a symbol of the nation.

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Tonga

American Taboo: a murder in the Peace Corps by Philip Weiss

Available via OverDrive

In 1975, thirty-three Peace Corps volunteers landed in the island nation of Tonga. It was an exotic place — men wearing grass skirts, coconut-thatched huts, pigs wandering the crushed-coral streets — governed by strange and exacting rules of conduct. The idealistic young Americans called it never-never land, as if it existed in a world apart from the one they knew and the things that happened there would be undone when they went home. Among them was a beautiful twenty-three-year-old woman who, like so many volunteers before her, was in search of adventure. Sensuous and free-spirited, Deborah Gardner would become an object of desire, even obsession, in the small expatriate community. On the night of October 14, 1976, she was found dying inside her hut, stabbed twenty-two times. Hours later, another volunteer turned himself in to the Tongan police, and many of the other Americans were sure he had committed the crime. But with the aid of the State Department, he returned to New York a free man, flown home at the Peace Corps’s expense. Deb Gardner’s death and the outlandish aftermath took on legendary proportions in Tonga; in the United States, government officials made sure the story was suppressed.

Mauri Ola: Contemporary Polynesian Poems in English (Whetu Moana)

Available via OverDrive

This anthology includes poetry written over the last 25 years by more than 80 writers from Aotearoa, Hawai’i, Tonga, Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau, Tahiti and Rotuma – some living in these islands and some dispersed around the globe. Together with works by established and celebrated poets, the editors have introduced the fresh voices of a younger generation. The anthology includes selections from poets including Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Sia Figiel, J. C. Sturm, Konai Helu Thaman, Haunani-Kay Trask, Hone Tuwhare and Albert Wendt. The late Hawaiian poet Wayne Kaumualii Westlake is represented here by a unique set of concrete poems and experimental verse. Tusiata Avia tells tales of Nafanua in different settings around the world; Rangi Faith imagines ‘First Landing’; Imaikalani Kalahele writes a letter to his brother; Brandy Nalani McDougall discusses ‘cooking Captain Cook’; Karlo Mila, eating chocolate, watches ‘paul holmes apologise for calling kofi annan a darkie’; Robert Sullivan writes against the grain; and Apirana Taylor follows zigzag roads. Ranging from the lyrical and sensual to the harsh and gritty, from the political to the personal, the poems in Mauri Ola are infused with vivid imagery, claims of identity, laments, rages and celebrations that confront again a colonial past and a global present.

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Trinidad and Tobago

Home Home by Lisa Allen-Agostini

Moving from Trinidad to Canada wasn’t her idea. But after being hospitalized for depression, her mother sees it as the only option. Now, living with an estranged aunt she barely remembers and dealing with her “troubles” in a foreign country, she feels more lost than ever. Everything in Canada is cold and confusing. No one says hello, no one walks anywhere, and bus trips are never-ending and loud. She just wants to be home home, in Trinidad, where her only friend is going to school and Sunday church service like she used to do. But this new home also brings unexpected surprises: the chance at a family that loves unconditionally, the possibility of new friends, and the promise of a hopeful future. Though she doesn’t see it yet, Canada is a place where she can feel at home–if she can only find the courage to be honest with herself.

When We Were Birds: a novel by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St Bernard woman in every generation has the power to shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out. Raised in the countryside by a devout Rastafarian mother, Darwin has always abided by the religious commandment not to interact with death. He has never been to a funeral, much less seen a dead body. But when the only job he can find is grave digging, he must betray the life his mother built for him in order to provide for them both. Newly shorn of his dreadlocks and his past, and determined to prove himself, Darwin finds himself adrift in a city electric with possibility and danger. Yejide and Darwin will meet inside the gates of Fidelis, an ancient and sprawling cemetery, where the dead lie uneasy in their graves and a reckoning with fate beckons them both.

Book of the Little Axe: a novel by Lauren Francis-Sharma

In 1796 Trinidad, young Rosa Rendón quietly but purposefully rebels against the life others expect her to lead. Bright, competitive, and opinionated, Rosa sees no reason she should learn to cook and keep house, for it is obvious her talents lie in running the farm she, alone, views as her birthright. But when her homeland changes from Spanish to British rule, it becomes increasingly unclear whether its free black property owners — Rosa’s family among them — will be allowed to keep their assets, their land, and ultimately, their freedom. By 1830, Rosa is living among the Crow Nation in Bighorn, Montana, with her children and her husband, Edward Rose, a Crow chief. Her son Victor is of the age where he must seek his vision and become a man. But his path forward is blocked by secrets Rosa has kept from him. So Rosa must take him to where his story began and, in turn, retrace her own roots, acknowledging along the way the painful events that forced her from the middle of an ocean to the rugged terrain of a far-away land.

The Stars and the Blackness Between Them by Junauda Petrus

Told in two voices, sixteen-year-old Audre and Mabel, both young women of color from different backgrounds, fall in love and figure out how to care for each other as one of them faces a fatal illness.” –Trinidad. Audre is being sent to live in America with her father because her strictly religious mother caught her with her secret girlfriend, the pastor’s daughter. Her grandmother Queenie tries to reassure her granddaughter that she won’t lose her roots. Minneapolis. Mabel is trying to figure out why she feels the way she feels — about her ex Terrell, about her girl Jada and that moment they had in the woods. When Audre and her father come for dinner, Mabel falls hard for Audre and is determined to take care of her as she tries to navigate an American high school. But when test results reveal why Mabel has been feeling low-key sick all summer, it’s Audre who is caring for Mabel as they face a deeply uncertain future.

‘Til the Well Runs Dry: a novel by Lauren Francis-Sharma

An epic saga about a Trinidadian family spanning WWII to the early Sixties. Told in alternating voices, the author recounts the story of Marcia, our fierce heroine, who leaves her island home in order to protect the man she’s loved for years, and finds herself isolated in a strange land but with the determination to survive and rebuild

Where the Rhythm Takes You by Sarah Dass

Seventeen-year-old Reyna has spent most of her life at the Plumeria, her family’s gorgeous seaside resort in Tobago. But what once seemed like paradise is starting to feel more like purgatory. It’s been two years since Reyna’s mother passed away, two years since Aiden—her childhood best friend, first kiss, first love, first everything—left the island to pursue his music dreams. Reyna’s friends are all planning their futures and heading abroad. Even Daddy seems to want to move on, leaving her to try to keep the Plumeria running. And that’s when Aiden comes roaring back into her life—as a VIP guest at the resort.

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Tunisia

The Italian: a novel by Shukri Mabkhout

Available via OverDrive

In Tunisia at the turn of the 80s and 90s, an era of great tensions and political and social changes, the story of a revolutionary love and dream destined to succumb in the clash with the harsh reality of a country in which repression, malpractice and general degradation crush the ambitions and dreams of the individual. At his father’s funeral, to the great consternation of all present, Abdel Nasser beats the imam who is celebrating the funeral rite. The narrator, a childhood friend of the protagonist, retraces the story of Abdel Nasser from his days as a free and rebellious adolescent spirit to the leader of a student movement and then affirmed journalist. Those were crucial years in Tunisia, with great tensions and changes coming up: the growth of Islamism fighting against the strong repression by the government.

The Tunisia Cookbook: healthy red cuisine from Carthage to Kairouan by Haffida Ben Rejeb Latta

(On Order)

The culinary traditions we celebrate in Tunisia today are the flowering of a mature culture that has flourished and deepened over centuries. It explores the many levels at which diet contributes to the community. The Olive tree, which lies at the heart of Mediterranean cooking, is used comprehensively – its roots, trunk, branches, twigs, leaves and fruit are all used for the benefit of healthy living. The wood is turned into craft items and the foliage is often used for medicinal purposes, while the fruit appears as appetizers or in the form of oil for cooking and cosmetics. Without roots and trunks a tree cannot grow leaves and without supportive dietary roots societies, too, can wither in the same way.

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Turkey

A Strangeness in My Mind: A novel by Orhan Pamuk

Since his boyhood in a poor village in Central Anatolia, Mevlut Karataş has fantasized about what his life would become. Not getting as far in school as he’d hoped, at the age of twelve he comes to Istanbul—“the center of the world”—and is immediately enthralled by both the old city that is disappearing and the new one that is fast being built. He follows his father’s trade, selling boza (a traditional mildly alcoholic Turkish drink) on the street, and hoping to become rich, like other villagers who have settled the desolate hills outside the booming metropolis. But luck never seems to be on Mevlut’s side. As he watches his relations settle down and make their fortunes, he spends three years writing love letters to a girl he saw just once at a wedding, only to elope by mistake with her sister. And though he grows to cherish his wife and the family they have, he stumbles toward middle age in a series of jobs leading nowhere. His sense of missing something leads him sometimes to the politics of his friends and intermittently to the teachings of a charismatic religious guide. But every evening, without fail, Mevlut still wanders the streets of Istanbul, selling boza and wondering at the “strangeness” in his mind, the sensation that makes him feel different from everyone else, until fortune conspires once more to let him understand at last what it is he has always yearned for.

The Turkish Cookbook : the culinary traditions & recipes from Turkey by Musa Dağdeviren

The definitive cookbook of hearty, healthy Turkish cuisine, from the leading authority on Turkey’s unique food traditions, Musa Dagdeviren, as featured in the Netflix docuseries Chef’s Table. Vibrant, bold, and aromatic, Turkish food – from grilled meats, salads, and gloriously sweet pastries to home-cooking family staples such as dips, pilafs, and stews – is beloved around the world. This is the first book to so thoroughly showcase the diversity of Turkish food, with 550 recipes for the home cook that celebrate Turkey’s remarkable European and Asian culinary heritage – from little-known regional dishes to those that are globally recognized and stand the test of time, be they lamb kofte, chicken kebabs, tahini halva, or pistachio baklava.

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Reading the World – Part 17

South Korea – Switzerland

by Christina S

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There is a title in this segment that is instrumental in affecting societal change in Korea and is an example of how literature can be a powerful change agent. Kim Jiyoung, born 1982: a novel by Cho Nam-Joo is one of the cited inspirations for the growing 4B Movement in South Korea. It openly delves into the deep rooted misogynies of Korean culture and the real effects on Korean women, and the women of the country are talking about it.

The simple act of telling stories can touch a nerve and provoke a wider discussion. It can allow awareness and the sense of communal experience, especially where the reader may have felt uniquely alone and isolated before. Stories can let us know we are not alone and that others share similar experiences.

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South Korea

If I Had Your Face: a novel by Frances Cha

Kyuri is a heartbreakingly beautiful woman with a hard-won job at a ‘room salon’, an exclusive bar where she entertains businessmen while they drink. Though she prides herself on her cold, clear-eyed approach to life, an impulsive mistake with a client may come to threaten her livelihood. Her roommate, Miho, is a talented artist who grew up in an orphanage but won a scholarship to study art in New York. Returning to Korea after college, she finds herself in a precarious relationship with the super-wealthy heir to one of Korea’s biggest companies. Down the hall in their apartment building lives Ara, a hair stylist for whom two preoccupations sustain her: obsession with a boy-band pop star, and a best friend who is saving up for the extreme plastic surgery that is commonplace. And Wonna, one floor below, is a newlywed trying to get pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they can afford to raise and educate in the cutthroat economy. Together, their stories tell a gripping tale that’s seemingly unfamiliar, yet unmistakably universal in the way that their tentative friendships may have to be their saving grace.

Maangchi’s real Korean cooking : authentic dishes for the home cook by Maangchi

For beginners, there are dishes like Spicy Beef and Vegetable Soup and Seafood Scallion Pancake. Maangchi includes a whole chapter of quick, spicy, sour kimchis and quick pickles as well. Banchan, or side dishes (Steamed Eggplant, Pan-Fried Tofu with Spicy Seasoning Sauce, and refreshing Cold Cucumber Soup) are mainstays of the Korean table and can comprise a meal. With her step-by-step photos—800 in all—Maangchi makes every dish a snap. A full glossary, complete with photos, explains ingredients. Throughout, Maangchi suggests substitutions where appropriate and provides tips based on her readers’ questions.

Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin

San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul’s bustling city center. Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life—painfully vulnerable, stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea. Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash coworker, quiet farmers, and aggressive customers. Fueled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographer.

Kim Jiyoung, born 1982: a novel by Cho Nam-Joo

The runaway bestseller that helped launch Korea’s new feminist 4B movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny. In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul, Kim Jiyoung — a millennial “everywoman” — spends her days caring for her infant daughter. Her husband, however, worries over a strange symptom that has recently appeared: Jiyoung has begun to impersonate the voices of other women-dead and alive, both known and unknown to her. Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that very person. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, Jiyoung’s concerned husband sends her to a psychiatrist, who listens to her narrate her own life story — from her birth to a family who expected a son, to elementary school teachers who policed girls’ outfits, to male coworkers who installed hidden cameras in women’s restrooms and posted the photos online. But can her doctor cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?

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South Sudan

A Rope From the Sky: the making and unmaking of the world’s newest state by Zach Vertin

The birth of South Sudan was celebrated the world round–a triumph for global justice and the end of one of the world’s most devastating wars. The Republic’s historic independence was acclaimed not only by its long-oppressed people, but by three U.S. presidents and the legions of Americans who championed their cause. But the celebration would not last; South Sudan’s freedom-fighters soon plunged their new nation back into chaos, shattering the promise of liberation and exposing the hubris of their American backers.

Ghost Season: a novel by Fatin Abbas

A mysterious burnt corpse appears one morning in Saraaya, a remote border town between northern and southern Sudan. For five strangers on an NGO compound, the discovery foreshadows trouble to come. South Sudanese translator William connects the corpse to the sudden disappearance of cook Layla, a northern nomad with whom he’s fallen in love. Meanwhile, Sudanese American filmmaker Dena struggles to connect to her unfamiliar homeland, and white midwestern aid worker Alex finds his plans thwarted by a changing climate and looming civil war. Dancing between the adults is Mustafa, a clever, endearing twelve-year-old, whose schemes to rise out of poverty set off cataclysmic events on the compound. Amid the paradoxes of identity, art, humanitarian aid, and a territory riven by conflict, William, Layla, Dena, Alex, and Mustafa must forge bonds stronger than blood or identity.

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Spain

The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Lucas Corso is a book detective, a middle-aged mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas’s masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer’s trail in this twisty intellectual romp through the book world.”Erudite, funny, loopy, brilliant…action-adventure spied with dollops of idiosyncrasy — and some very good talk.

Red Queen by Juan Gómez-Jurado

Introducing Antonia Scott — the most compelling and original detective since Lisbeth Salander — in Juan Gómez-Jurado’s Red Queen, the #1 international award-winning bestseller & thriller that has taken the world by storm. Antonia Scott — the daughter of a British diplomat and a Spanish mother — has a gifted forensic mind, whose ability to reconstruct crimes and solve baffling murders is legendary. But after a personal trauma, she’s refused to continue her work or even leave her apartment. Jon Gutierrez, a police officer in Bilbao — disgraced, suspended, and about to face criminal charges — is offered a chance to salvage his career by a secretive organization that works in the shadows to direct criminal investigations of a highly sensitive nature. All he has to do is succeed where many others have failed: Convince a recalcitrant Antonia to come out of her self-imposed retirement, protecting her and helping her investigate a new, terrifying case

The Shadow of the Wind: a novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author’s works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written. Barcelona, 1945-just after the war, a great world city lies in shadow, nursing its wounds, and a boy named Daniel awakes on his eleventh birthday to find that he can no longer remember his mother’s face. To console his only child, Daniel’s widowed father, an antiquarian book dealer, initiates him into the secret of the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a library tended by Barcelona’s guild of rare-book dealers as a repository for books forgotten by the world, waiting for someone who will care about them again. Daniel’s father coaxes him to choose a volume from the spiraling labyrinth of shelves, one that, it is said, will have a special meaning for him. And Daniel so loves the novel he selects, The Shadow of the Wind by one Julian Carax, that he sets out to find the rest of Carax’s work. To his shock, he discovers that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book this author has written. In fact, he may have the last one in existence. Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.

Homeland by Fernando Aramburu

the story of two families in small-town Basque country, pitted against each other by the ideology and violence of the terrorist group ETA (Basque Homeland and Liberty), from the unrelentingly grim 1980s to October 2011 when the group proclaimed an end to its savage insurgency. Erstwhile lifetime friends — especially the generation of parents on both sides — the two families become bitter enemies when a father of one is killed by ETA militants, among them one of the sons of the other family. Told through a succession of more than one hundred short sections devoted to a rich multiplicity of characters whose role in the story becomes clear as one reads. Homeland brilliantly unfolds in nonlinear fashion as it traces the consequences for the families of both the murder victim and the perpetrator. Aramburu alludes only obliquely to a historical matrix even as he focuses on the psychological complexity of his characters while building nearly unbearable narrative tension.

Andaluz: a food journey through southern Spain by Fiona Dunlop

An enthralling Andalucian culinary journey from sierra to sea. For nearly eight centuries from 711 to 1492, Moorish rule in Andalucía brought about a revolution in Spanish culture, resulting in architectural splendors like the Alhambra as well as a rich culinary history. Andaluz is a quest to illustrate the legacy of the Arabs and Berbers in the kitchens of southern Spain today. Couscous, rice, eggplant, oranges, apricots, marzipan, and a wealth of spices are just a few ever-present ingredients that owe their influence to the Moorish people — along with a meticulous attention to the cultivation of olive varieties that Andalucía is renowned for.

The Spanish Table : traditional recipes and wine pairings from Spain and Portugal by Steve Winston

Steve Winson has created a cookbook full of tasty recipes for those specialty cooking utensils unique to Spain and Portugal-paella pans, cazuelas, cataplanas, and ollas. In a cheery and informative way, he provides the history and culture of the pans and how to use them. He also offers an excellent section on Iberian wines and ideas for hosting fun tasting parties. So, when in the mood for something a bit exotic, this book makes it easy for home cooks to try their hand at a traditional seafood paella, or Clams Medeira, or Black Olive-Fig Tapenade served with a fine Pedro Ximenex sherry. It’s a trip to the Old Country without leaving the kitchen.

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Sri Lanka

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: a novel by Shehan Karunatilaka

A searing satire set amid the mayhem of the Sri Lankan civil war. Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida — war photographer, gambler, and closet queen — has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka

Lanka Food by O Tama Carey

Sitting on the edge of the Indian Ocean, just below India, is a tiny teardrop-shaped island called Sri Lanka — Lanka is sanskrit for island, in Tamil meaning ‘that which glitters’. It is a country full of contradictions, and the food of Sri Lanka is equally hard to pin down. While the dishes are slowly gaining international recognition, the foundations and building blocks of Sri Lankan cooking are complex. They reflect the many diverse peoples, history, flavours and ideas that have overlapped to create a cuisine that is distinct yet difficult to define. With essays that further contextualize the cuisine, this cookbook is a guide for people wanting a deeper understanding of the culture and the central place of food, and serves as a wonderful starting point for cooking and sharing Sri Lankan feasts with friends and family at home.

I am Kavi by Thushanthi Ponweera

(Novel in Verse) 1998, Colombo. The Sri Lankan Civil War is raging, but everyday life must go on. At Kavi’s school, her friends talk about the weekly Top 40, the Backstreet Boys, Shahrukh Khan, Leo & Kate … and who died — or didn’t — in the latest bombing. But Kavi is afraid of something even scarier than war. She fears that if her friends discover her secret — that she is not who she is pretending to be — they’ll stop talking to her. I want to be friends with these / happy, / fearless, / girls / who look like they / belong. So I could also be / happy, / fearless, / and maybe even / belong. Kavi’s scholarship to her elite new school was supposed to be everything she ever wanted, but as she tries to find some semblance of normalcy in a country on fire, nothing is going according to plan. In an effort to fit in with her wealthy, glittering, and self-assured new classmates, Kavi begins telling lies, trading her old life — where she’s a poor girl whose mother has chosen a new husband over her daughter — for a new one, where she’s rich, loved, and wanted. But how long can you pretend to be someone else?

Island of a Thousand Mirrors: a novel by Nayomi Munaweera

Before violence tore apart the tapestry of Sri Lanka and turned its pristine beaches red, there were two families. Yasodhara tells the story of her own Sinhala family, rich in love, with everything they could ask for. As a child in idyllic Colombo, Yasodhara’s and her siblings’ lives are shaped by social hierarchies, their parents’ ambitions, teenage love and, subtly, the differences between Tamil and Sinhala people; but the peace is shattered by the tragedies of war. Yasodhara’s family escapes to Los Angeles. But Yasodhara’s life has already become intertwined with a young Tamil girl’s … Saraswathie is living in the active war zone of Sri Lanka, and hopes to become a teacher. But her dreams for the future are abruptly stamped out when she is arrested by a group of Sinhala soldiers and pulled into the very heart of the conflict that she has tried so hard to avoid – a conflict that, eventually, will connect her and Yasodhara in unexpected ways.

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St. Vincent & Grenadines

Mustique Island : a novel by Sarah McCoy

It’s January 1972, but the sun is white-hot when Willy May Michael’s boat first kisses the dock of Mustique Island. Tucked in to the southernmost curve of the Caribbean, Mustique is a private island that has become a haven for the wealthy and privileged. Its owner is the eccentric British playboy Colin Tennant, who is determined to turn this speck of white sand into a luxurious neocolonial retreat for his rich friends and into a royal court in exile for the Queen’s rebellious sister, Princess Margaret-one where Her Royal Highness can skinny-dip, party, and entertain lovers away from the public eye. Willy May, a former beauty queen from Texas-who is also no stranger to marital scandals-seeks out Mustique for its peaceful isolation. Determine to rebuild her life and her relationships with her two daughters-Hilly, a model, and Joanne, a musician-she constructs a fanciful beach house across the island from Princess Margaret and finds herself pulled into the island’s inner circle of aristocrats, rock stars, and hangers-on. When Willy May’s daughters arrive, they discover that beneath its veneer of decadence, Mustique has a dark side, and like sand caught in the undertow, their mother-daughter story will shift and resettle in ways they never could have imagined

Taste of St. Vincent and the Grenadine: a food travel guide by Juri Signorini

Available via OverDrive

The purpose of this guide is to complement and enhance your travel, with a gastronomic experience. It is designed for an easy and immediate reference, before and during the journey. It aims to give you tips, support, and encourage you to choose and try new dishes, but will also help you to decipher often incomprehensible menus. My book, the result of years of culinary-wandering, aims to stimulate your curiosity, seeking to give you an intuitive idea about local food, unknown ingredients (sometimes peculiar), preparations, or dishes that seem to some bizarre or weird because unusual. Being the result of direct experience and hours of talking with professional and local chefs, the goal is not to be complete but to be a useful tool.

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State of Palestine

Salt Houses: a novel by Hala Alyan

A Palestinian family caught between present and past, between displacement and home … On the eve of her daughter Alia’s wedding, Salma reads the girl’s future in a cup of coffee dregs. She sees an unsettled life for Alia and her children; she also sees travel, and luck. While she chooses to keep her predictions to herself that day, they will all soon come to pass when the family is up rooted in the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967. Salma is forced to leave her home in Nablus; Alia’s brother gets pulled into a politically militarized world he can’t escape; and Alia and her gentle-spirited husband move to Kuwait City, where they reluctantly build a life with their three children. When Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait in1990, Alia and her family once again lose their home, their land, and their story as they know it, scattering to Beirut, Paris, Boston, and beyond. Soon Alia’s children begin families of their own, once again navigating the burdens (and blessings) of assimilation in foreign cities. Lyrical and heartbreaking, Salt Houses is a remarkable debut novel that challenges and humanizes an age-old conflict we might think we understand–one that asks us to confront that most devastating of all truths: you can’t go home again

Palestine on a Plate: memories from my mother’s kitchen by Joudie Kalla

Palestinian food is not just found on the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem with the ka’ak (sesame) bread sellers and stalls selling za’atar chicken and mana’eesh (za’atar and sesame bread), but in the home too; in the kitchens all across the country, where families cook and eat together every day, in a way that generations before them have always done. Palestine on a Plate is a tribute to family, cooking, and home—old recipes created with love that brings people together in appreciation of the beauty of this rich heritage. Immerse yourself in the stories and culture of Palestine through the food in this book.

Enter Ghost: a novel by Isabella Hammad

After years away from her family’s homeland, and healing from an affair with an established director, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa, Sonia hasn’t been since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her burgeoning acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new. Once at Haneen’s, Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertrude’s lines in Classical Arabic and spending more time in Ramallah than in Haifa with a dedicated group of men from all over historic Palestine who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, each want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall.

My First and Only Love: a novel by Sahar Khalifeh

Available via Over Drive

Nidal, after many decades of restless exile, returns to her family home in Nablus, where she had lived with her grandmother before the 1948 Nakba that scattered her family across the globe. She was a young girl when the popular resistance began and, through the bloodshed and bitter struggle, Nidal fell in love with freedom fighter Rabie. He was her first and only real love―him and all that he represented: Palestine in its youth, the resistance fighters in the hills, the nation as embodied in her family home and in the land. Many years later, Nidal and Rabie meet, and he encourages her to read her uncle Amin’s memoirs. She immerses herself in the details of her family and national past and discovers the secret history of her absent mother.

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Sudan

A Line in the River : Khartoum, city of memory by Jamal Mahjoub

A moving portrait, part history, part memoir, of Sudan – once the largest most diverse country in Africa – and its self-destruction. In 1956, Sudan gained Independence from Britain. On the brink of a promising future, it instead descended into civil war and conflict, including the crisis in Darfur which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and driven many more from their homes. When the 1989 coup brought a hard-line Islamist regime to power, Jamal Mahjoub’s family were among those who fled. Almost twenty years later, he returned, to find a country on the brink of rupture. Re-discovering the city in which his formative years were spent, Mahjoub encounters people and places that he left behind. The capital contains the keys to Sudan’s divided, contradictory nature and while exploring the Khartoum’s present – its changing identity and shifting moods, its wealthy elite and neglected poor – Mahjoub also delves into the country’s troubled history, one turbulent with the rivalry between Christians and Muslims. His search for answers evolves into a thoughtful meditation on the meaning of identity, both personal and national.

War Child: a child soldier’s story by Emmanuel Jal

In the mid-1980s, Emmanuel Jal was a seven-year-old Sudanese boy, living in a small village. But as Sudan’s civil war moved closer, his family moved again and again, seeking peace. Then, one terrible day, Jal was separated from his mother, and later learned she had been killed; his father Simon rose to become a powerful commander in the Christian Sudanese Liberation Army, fighting for the freedom of Sudan. Soon, Jal was conscripted into that army, one of 10,000 child soldiers, and fought through two separate civil wars over nearly a decade. Remarkably, he survived, and was adopted by a British aid worker, beginning the journey that would lead him to music: he recorded and released his own album, including the number one hip-hop single in Kenya, and has gone on to perform with international music stars, and to use his fame to help children like him.

Lyrics Alley: a novel by Leila Aboulela

In 1950’s Sudan, the powerful Abuzeid dynasty has amassed a fortune through their trading firm. With Mahmoud Bey at its helm, they can do no wrong. But when Mahmoud’s son, Nur, the brilliant, handsome heir to the business empire, suffers a debilitating accident, the family stands divided in the face of an uncertain future. As British rule nears its end, the country is torn between modernizing influences and the call of traditions past—a conflict reflected in the growing tensions between Mahmoud’s two wives: the younger, Nabilah, longs to return to Egypt and escape “backward-looking” Sudan; while Waheeba lives traditionally behind veils and closed doors. It’s not until Nur asserts himself outside the cultural limits of his parents that his own spirit and the frayed bonds of his family begin to mend.

River Spirit: a novel by Leila Aboulela

an enchanting narrative of the years leading up to the British conquest of Sudan in 1898, and a deeply human look at the tensions between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam, colonizer and colonized. In River Spirit, Aboulela gives us the unforgettable story of a people who—against the odds and for a brief time—gained independence from foreign rule through their willpower, subterfuge, and sacrifice. Through the voices of seven men and women whose fates grow inextricably linked, Aboulela’s latest novel illuminates a fraught and bloody reckoning with the history of a people caught in the crosshairs of imperialism. River Spirit is a powerful tale of corruption, coming of age, and unshakeable devotion – to a cause, to one’s faith, and to the people who become family.

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Suriname

On a Woman’s Madness by Astrid Roemer

Available via OverDrive

A classic of queer literature that’s as electrifying today as it was when it originally appeared in 1982, On a Woman’s Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman merely trying to live a life of her choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America’s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, life in this new place is illuminated by the passionate romances of the present but haunted by society’s expectations and her ancestral past.

Blood on the River: a chronicle of mutiny and freedom on the wild coast by Marjoleine Kars

February 1763, thousands of slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice – in present-day Guyana and Suriname – launched a massive rebellion – and very nearly succeeded. For an entire year, they fought their enslavers, dreaming of establishing a free state, what would have been the first Black republic. Instead, they vanished from history. Blood on the River is the explosive story of this forgotten revolution, an event that almost changed the face of the Americas. Historian Marjoleine Kars draws on long-buried Dutch interrogation transcripts to reconstruct a rich day-by-day account of this extraordinary event, providing a rare look at the political vision of enslaved people at the dawn of the Age of Revolution.

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Sweden

Even if Everything Ends: a novel by Jens Liljestrand

Even when the climate crisis escalates beyond our worst nightmares and people become refugees, the world keeps turning and life carries on as usual: teenaged love stories, marital collapses, identity crises, and revolts against hopeless parents continue to play out. Didrik is a forty-year-old media consultant whose misguided efforts to become the family hero render him a pathetic vision of masculine incompetence. Melissa is an influencer with a suitcase full of lost dreams after denying climate change for years. André is the nineteen-year-old loser son of an international sports star who uses the erupting violence around him to orchestrate his own personal vengeance on his negligent father. And Vilja is Didrik’s teenaged daughter who steps into a leadership role in the face of adult ineptitude.

The Nordic Baker : plant-based bakes and seasonal stories from a kitchen in the heart of Sweden by Sofia Nordgren

In The Nordic Baker, Sofia Nordgren guides you through a year of plant-based Nordic cakes, buns, breads, cookies and crackers and invites readers to keep things simple, go back to basics and cook with nature in mind. Set to the backdrop of stunning location photography and interspersed with advice on embracing the Nordic lifestyle, bringing the outdoors into your home and tips on seasonal slow living, this is a charming celebration of a magical corner of the world and the wonderful food it has to offer.

The 100-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared: a novel by Jonas Jonasson

After a long and eventful life, Allan Karlsson ends up in a nursing home, believing it to be his last stop. The only problem is that he’s still in good health, and in one day, he turns 100. A big celebration is in the works, but Allan really isn’t interested (and he’d like a bit more control over his vodka consumption). So he decides to escape. He climbs out the window in his slippers and embarks on a hilarious and entirely unexpected journey, involving, among other surprises, a suitcase stuffed with cash, some unpleasant criminals, a friendly hot-dog stand operator, and an elephant (not to mention a death by elephant).

The Shadow Girls: a novel by Henning Mankell

Jesper Humlin is a mildly famous author and poet with lackluster book sales. Not even his editor will support his artistic vision, suggesting instead that he start writing crime novels in the place of poetry. In his travels, Humlin encounters three women who will change his worldview. All three have fled their home countries and settled in Sweden: Leyla from Iran, Tanya from Russia, and Tea-Bag from Nigeria. The women look to Humlin for guidance in telling their stories, learning how to shape the tales of their journeys and sacrifices. Both social comedy and social tragedy ensue from these efforts, but in the end Humlin, Leyla, Tanya and Tea-Bag all find that they have helped change one another.

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Switzerland

Lea: a novel by Pascal Mercier

It all starts with the death of Martijn van Vliet’s wife. His grief-stricken young daughter, Lea, cuts herself off from the world, lost in the darkness of grief. Then she hears the unfamiliar sound of a violin playing in the hall of a train station, and she is brought back to life. Transfixed by a busker playing Bach, Lea emerges from her mourning, vowing to learn the instrument. And her father, witnessing this delicate spark, promises to do everything and anything in his power to keep her happy. A revelatory portrait of genius and madness, Lea delves into the demands of artistic excellence as well as the damaging power of jealousy and sacrifice. Mercier has crafted a novel of intense clarity, illuminating the poignant ways we strive to understand ourselves and our families.

Helvetic Kitchen: Swiss home cooking by Andie Pilot

Food blogger Andie Pilot takes readers on a photographic tour of her favorite recipes – some just like her grandmother made and some modern takes on Swiss classics. Along the way she illuminates many of Swiss cuisine’s curiosities. This new edition of the classic Helvetic Kitchen is the best introduction to Swiss cooking available in English.

Allmen and the Dragonflies by Martin Suter

Available via OverDrive

Johann Friedrich von Allmen, a bon vivant of dandified refinement, has exhausted his family fortune by living in Old World grandeur despite present-day financial constraints. Forced to downscale, Allmen inhabits the garden house of his former Zurich estate, attended by his Guatemalan butler, Carlos. When not reading novels by Balzac and Somerset Maugham, he plays jazz on a Bechstein baby grand. Allmen’s fortunes take a sharp turn when he meets a stunning blonde whose lakeside villa contains five Art Nouveau bowls created by renowned French artist Émile Gallé and decorated with a dragonfly motif. Allmen, pressured to pay off mounting debts, absconds with the priceless bowls and embarks on a high-risk, potentially violent bid to cash them in.

Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch

Available via OverDrive

As a rainstorm rages outside, Max Frisch’s protagonist, Geiser, watches the mountain landscape crumble beneath landslides and flooding, and speculates that the town will be wiped out by the collapse of a section of the mountain. Seeking refuge from the storm in town, he makes his way through a difficult and dangerous mountain pass, only to abandon his original plan and return home. A compelling meditation by one of Frisch’s most original characters, Man in the Holocene charts Geiser’s desperate attempt to find his place in history and in the confusing and fragile world outside his window.

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A Villain’s Life for Me?

By Christina S

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Photo by Tejasvi Ganjoo

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When I was young, I was told that no matter how good you think your intentions are, no matter how kind you try to be, no matter your motivations, you will find that you are, or will be, the villain in someone else’s story. This stuck with me as I grew up and as I became an avid reader along the way.

When reading a story I often find myself having some empathy for the antagonist, even when I don’t like them or what they were doing. I find myself secretly hoping the antagonist gets resolution and perhaps closure. I wonder how the antagonist views the same events. Are they really the villain, or just the villain in the narrators perspective?

Stories, like life, are not a straightforward unbiased narrative. Rather there are often multiple sides and perspectives to an event and the tale that we read in a story is often one sided, biased, and viewed through the the lens of the protagonist, skewing our sympathies and support their way. That is why I am happy when I find stories that are re-written from the “villain’s” perspective and we get another facet in the story, and perhaps an understanding that not all villains are actual villains, but rather complicated and shaped by circumstance. I think these are some of the best stories!

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Photo by Shifa Sarguru

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Our Big Read selection this year, Circe by Madeline Miller, is an excellent example of this. In The Odyssey by Homer, we see Circe only from the viewpoint of Odysseus, who ends up drugging and taking advantage of her. Homer portrays Circe as an evil sorceress who in the end is just a woman not to be trusted and used.

In Circe, she is the protagonist and we learn of her origin, life, and tribulations that shaped her. We are allowed to see her more as the heroine survivor rather than the villainous sorceress. Someone whose motives, while not always pure and are often flawed, are certainly shaped by her experiences.

I hope that you will join us for the 2024 Santa Fe Reads this year. You can check out a copy of Circe at all three branches right now and join in the experience. We begin with the 2024 Santa Fe Reads Kick-off Concert & Celebration on Saturday, April 20th, 2024 from 12:00pm to 4:00pm.

Reading the World – Part 16

Senegal – South Africa

by Christina S

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It is no secret to my friends and family that I love cookbooks. I will read them like other people read novels. Throughout this series I have put in cookbooks when I can find country specific ones, but often many are more regional and multi-country. Therefore, I am very happy that I can include 3 cookbooks in this leg of our journey, and they look so good!

If you ever want to get to know a region or country beyond the tourist level, immerse yourself in the food and how the people relate to the food they prepare. It speaks to you about tradition, the region, and the people in a way that scholars cannot. In many ways, food is it’s own language and narrative.

I would love to inspire you to check out one or more of our many cookbooks and try some of the dishes. When you are reading a novel or biography of a certain location, it is an added dimension of the experience to be able to make and taste something referenced in the book. Don’t be shy about trying something new in your own kitchen. So many “exotic” ingredients can be found either on line or at a local specialty market and the internet is a great resource for watching videos on how to prepare and use an unfamiliar ingredient.

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Senegal

At Night All Blood is Black: a novel by David Diop

A ‘Chocolat’ soldier with the French army during World War I, Senegalese Alfa Ndiaye’s friend Mademba Diop is in the same regiment. Injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land. Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind. He sees this refusal as cowardice. To avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, every night Alfa sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, returning with the German’s severed hand. As rumors circulate that Alfa is a soul-eater, how far will he go to make amends to his dead friend?

Senegal : modern Senegalese recipes from the source to the bowl by Pierre Thiam

Senegal will transport you deep into the country’s rich, multifaceted cuisine. You’ll feel the sun at your back and the cool breeze off the Atlantic, hear the sizzle of freshly caught fish hitting the grill, and bask in the tropical palm forests of Casamance. Learn to cook the vibrant, diverse food of Senegal, such as soulful stews full of meat falling off the bone; healthy ancient grains and dark leafy greens with superfood properties; fresh seafood grilled over open flame, served with salsas singing of bright citrus and fiery peppers; and lots of fresh vegetables and salads bursting with West African flavors.

The Most Secret Memory of Men: a novel by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr

In 2018, Diégane Latyr Faye, a young Senegalese writer, discovers a legendary book in Paris, published in 1938 and entitled Le labyrinthe de l’inhumain (The Maze of Inhumanity). No one knows what happened to the author, once referred to as the “Black Rimbaud,” after his book created a scandal. Diégane is fascinated and decides to look for the mysterious T.C. Elimane. On his path, he confronts the great tragedies of history such as colonialism and the holocaust. From Senegal to Argentina to France, will he get to the truth at the center of the maze? Alongside his investigation, Diégane, becomes part of a group of young African writers in Paris. They check each other out, talk, drink, make love … a lot, and philosophize about the role of exile in artistic creation.

Three Strong Women: a novel by Marie NDiaye

The story of three women who say no: Norah, a French-born lawyer who finds herself in Senegal, summoned by her estranged father to save another victim of his paternity; Fanta, who leaves a contented life as a teacher in Dakar to follow her boyfriend back to France, where his depression and dislocation poison everything; and Khady, a penniless widow put out by her husband’s family with nothing but the name of a distant cousin in France. As these three lives intertwine, each woman manages an astonishing feat of self-preservation against those who have made themselves the fastest-growing and most-reviled people in Europe.

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Serbia

Dictionary of the Khazars : a lexicon novel in 100,000 words by Milorad Pavić

Written in two versions, male and female (both available in Vintage International), which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines, Dictionary is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world’s three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one’s dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.

The Book of Blam by Aleksandar Tisma

a modern-day retelling of the book of Job. The war is over. Miroslav Blam walks along the former Jew Street, and he remembers. He remembers Aaron Grün, the hunchbacked watchmaker; and Eduard Fiker, a lamp merchant; and Jakob Mentele, a stove fitter; and Arthur Spitzer, a grocer, who played amateur soccer and had non-Jewish friends; and Sándor Vértes, a lawyer who was a Communist. All dead. As are his younger sister and his best friend, a Serb, both of whom joined the resistance movement; and his mother and father in the infamous Novi Sad raid in January 1942—when the Hungarian Arrow Cross executed 1,400 Jews and Serbs on the banks of the Danube and tossed them into the river. Blam lives. The war he survived will never be over for him.

The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric

A great stone bridge built three centuries ago in the heart of the Balkans by a Grand Vezir of the Ottoman Empire dominates the setting of Andric’s stunning novel. Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, the bridge stands witness to the countless lives played out upon it: Radisav, the workman, who tries to hinder its construction and is impaled on its highest point; to the lovely Fata, who throws herself from its parapet to escape a loveless marriage; to Milan, the gambler, who risks everything in one last game on the bridge with the devil his opponent; to Fedun, the young soldier, who pays for a moment of spring forgetfulness with his life. War finally destroys the span, and with it the last descendant of that family to which the Grand Vezir confided the care of his pious bequest – the bridge.

Early Sorrows: for children and sensitive readers by Danilo Kiš

Originally published in Belgrade in 1969 and never before translated into English, Early Sorrows is a stunning group of linked stories that memorialize Danilo Kis’s childhood. Kis, a writer of incomparable originality and eloquence, famous for his books The Encyclopedia of the Dead, Hourglass, and A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, was born in 1935 in Subotica, Yugoslavia, near the Hungarian border. The twenty pieces that make up Early Sorrows strike various tones––from dreamy pastorals to exercises in horror. Kis’s ingenuity, lyricism, and tonal subtlety are caught in all their luster by Michael Henry Heim. Early Sorrows centers on Andreas Sam, a highly intelligent boy whose life at first seems secure. His mother and sister dote on him; he excels at school; when he is hired out as a cowherd to help with the family’s finances, he reads the day away in the company of his best friend, the dog. He can only sense that terrible things may be going on in the world. Soon soldiers are marching down the road, and then one day, many people from the village are herded together and taken away, among them, his father, the dreamer.

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Seychelles

The Edge of Eden: a novel by Helen Benedict

In 1960, when her husband, Rupert, a British diplomat, is posted to the remote Seychelle Islands in the Indian Ocean, Penelope is less than thrilled. But she never imagined the danger that awaited her family there. Her sun-kissed children run barefoot on the beach and become enraptured by the ancient magic, or grigri, in the tropical colonial outpost. Rupert, meanwhile, falls under the spell of a local beauty who won’t stop until she gets what she wants. Desperate to save her marriage, Penelope turns to black magic, exposing her family to the island’s sinister underbelly. Ultimately, Penny and her family suffer unimaginable casualties, rendering their lives profoundly and forever changed. Helen Benedict’s acerbic wit and lush descriptions serve up a page-turner brimming with jealousy, sex, and witchcraft in a darkly exotic Eden.

GRK – Operation Tortoise by Joshua Doder

Tim is in paradise. Vacationing with his parents, the Raffifis, and Grk in the Seychelles, he is looking forward to two weeks of fun. But one afternoon, while walking the beach with Grk, Tim stumbles over a body in the sand. Washed up from the ocean and barely alive, the man utters a few words and then dies. Frantic to help the police discover the cause of the man’s death, Tim and Grk search for clues on their own. But what starts out as a baffling mystery soon becomes a bone-chilling investigation as they encounter armed guards who’ll shoot to kill, a mad scientist’s dream laboratory, and a powerful man determined to live forever, no matter what the cost.

For Your Eyes Only: a James Bond Novel 007 by Ian Fleming

A pulse-pounding collection of stories by Ian Fleming featuring global icon and legendary spy James Bond/007. When sudden emergencies arise, James Bond is there to meet them.
Whether dealing with the assassination of a Cuban thug in America, the destruction of an international heroin ring, or a mysterious death in the Seychelles, 007 gets the job done in his own unmistakable style.
For Bond it is just routine. For anyone else- certain death.

Seychelles Idyll by Ronald Austin

Available via OverDrive

‘Seychelles Idyll’ is an evocative, gripping novella set in a remote part of the British Empire at around the time when colonial rule was coming to an end. With miniscule resources, those involved in preparing for the handover to independence in the Seychelles had to deal with problems that had arisen from years of neglect, racism, and old-fashioned colonial snobbery. The situation was made more complicated by international powers having an interest in the outcome. In order to assist in turning the Seychelles police into a modern service capable of dealing with the oncoming demands of independence, Ed Morris, a police inspector from London is sent to help. Seen through his eyes the events that take place are complicated, demanding, hilarious, and entertaining.

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Sierra Leone

Blood Diamonds: tracing the deadly path of the world’s most precious stones by Greg Campbell

First discovered in 1930, the diamonds of Sierra Leone have funded one of the most savage rebel campaigns in modern history. These “blood diamonds” are smuggled out of West Africa and sold to legitimate diamond merchants in London, Antwerp, and New York, often with the complicity of the international diamond industry. Eventually, these very diamonds find their way into the rings and necklaces and brides and spouses the world over.
Blood Diamonds is the gripping tale of how diamond smuggling works, how the rebel war has effectively destroyed Sierra Leone and its people, and how the policies of the diamonds industry―institutionalized in the 1880s by the De Beers cartel―have allowed it to happen.

Sweet Salone : recipes from the heart of Sierra Leone by Maria Bradford

As a small country on the west coast of Africa, throughout its history Sierra Leone has always embraced diversity – and this willingness to discover and grow has shaped Sierra Leone’s rich food culture. Forged by history, people and place, the cuisine is completely unique. Maria Bradford’s recipes, inspired by her grandmother’s cooking, have at their heart the traditional meals of Maria’s childhood, introducing delicious Afro-fusion dishes and flavors. Characterized by key ingredients including tamarind, beans, sesame seeds, mango, chili and pineapple, in Maria’s hands these ingredients become something truly special. Moreover, she tells the story of the cuisine and the people, shedding light on everyday life through exclusive location photography.

Radiance of Tomorrow: a novel by Ishmael Beah

At the center of Radiance of Tomorrow are Benjamin and Bockarie, two longtime friends who return to their hometown, Imperi, after the civil war. The village is in ruins, the ground covered in bones. As more villagers begin to come back, Benjamin and Bockarie try to forge a new community by taking up their former posts as teachers, but they’re beset by obstacles: a scarcity of food; a rash of murders, thievery, rape, and retaliation; and the depredations of a foreign mining company intent on sullying the town’s water supply and blocking its paths with electric wires. As Benjamin and Bockarie search for a way to restore order, they’re forced to reckon with the uncertainty of their past and future alike.

Ancestor Stones: a novel by Aminatta Forna

Abie returns home from England to West Africa to visit her family after years of civil war, and to reclaim the family plantation, Kholifa Estates, formerly owned by her grandfather. There to meet her are her aunts: Asana, Mariama, Hawa, and Serah, and so begins her gathering of the family and the country’s history through the tales of her aunts. Asana, lost twin and head wife’s daughter. Hawa, motherless child and manipulator of her own misfortune. Mariama, who sees what lies beyond. And Serah, follower of a Western made dream. Set against the backdrop of a nation’s descent into chaos, it is the take a family and four women’s attempts to alter the course of their own destiny.

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Singapore

The Great Reclamation: a novel by Rachel Heng

Set against a changing Singapore, a sweeping novel about one boy’s unique gifts and the childhood love that will complicate the fate of his community and country. Ah Boon is born into a fishing village amid the heat and beauty of twentieth-century coastal Singapore in the waning years of British rule. He is a gentle boy who is not much interested in fishing, preferring to spend his days playing with the neighbor girl, Siok Mei. But when he discovers he has the unique ability to locate bountiful, movable islands that no one else can find, he feels a new sense of obligation and possibility—something to offer the community and impress the spirited girl he has come to love. By the time they are teens, Ah Boon and Siok Mei are caught in the tragic sweep of history: the Japanese army invades, the resistance rises, grief intrudes, and the future of the fishing village is in jeopardy. As the nation hurtles toward rebirth, the two friends, newly empowered, must decide who they want to be, and what they are willing to give up.

The Fraud Squad by Kyla Zhao

For as long as she can remember, Samantha Song has dreamed of writing for a high-society magazine—and she’d do anything to get there. But the constant struggle to help her mom make ends meet and her low social status cause her dream to feel like a distant fantasy. Now Samantha finds herself working at a drab PR firm. Living vicariously through her wealthy coworker and friend, Anya Chen, is the closest she’ll get to her ideal life. Until she meets Timothy Kingston: the disillusioned son of one of Singapore’s elite families—and Samantha’s one chance at infiltrating the high-society world to which she desperately wants to belong. To Samantha’s surprise, Timothy and Anya both agree to help her make a name for herself on Singapore’s socialite scene. But the borrowed designer clothes and plus-ones to every glamorous event can only get her so far. The rest is on Samantha, and she’s determined to impress the editor in chief of Singapore’s poshest magazine.

How We Disappeared: a novel by Jing-Jing Lee

Singapore, 1942. As Japanese troops sweep down Malaysia and into Singapore, a village is ransacked, leaving only two survivors and one tiny child. In a neighboring village, seventeen-year-old Wang Di is strapped into the back of a troop carrier and shipped off to a Japanese military brothel where she is forced into sexual slavery as a “comfort woman.” After sixty years of silence, what she saw and experienced still haunts her. In the year 2000, twelve-year-old Kevin is sitting beside his ailing grandmother when he overhears a mumbled confession. He sets out to discover the truth, wherever it might lead, setting in motion a chain of events he never could have foreseen.

Now You See Us: a novel by Balli Kaur Jaswal

Available via OverDrive

Corazon, Donita, and Angel are Filipina domestic workers—part of the wave of women sent to Singapore to be cleaners, maids, and caregivers. An explosive news story shatters Singapore’s famous tranquility—and sends a chill down the spine of every domestic worker. Flordeliza Martinez, a Filipina maid, has been arrested for murdering her female employer. The three women don’t know the accused well, but she could be any of them; every worker knows stories of women who were scapegoated or even executed for crimes they didn’t commit. Shocked into action, Donita, Corazon, and Angel will use their considerable moxie and insight to piece together the mystery of what really happened on the day Flordeliza’s employer was murdered. After all, no one knows the secrets of Singapore’s families like the women who work in their homes

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Slovakia

Dark Dreams by Michael Genelin

Jana and Sofia were best friends in school. Sofia suffered a brutal crime at the hands of a Communist Party bigwig, whom Jana vowed to bring to justice someday. Jana is now a commander in the Slovak police force, and Sofia is a member of parliament, engaged in a scandalous affair with a married fellow MP. One day, Jana walks into her living room to find an enormous diamond dangling from the ceiling. Who has left her this gift, and what does it mean?

Seeing People Off: a novel by Jana Beňová

Available via Hoopla

There is a liveliness and effervescence to Jana Benová’s prose that is magnetic. Whether addressing the loneliness of relationships or the effectiveness of rat poison, her voice and observations call to mind the verve and sophistication of Renata Adler or Jenny Offill, while remaining utterly singular. Seeing People Off follows Elza and Ian, a young couple living in a humongous apartment complex outside Bratislava where the walls play music and talk, and time is immaterial.
Drawing on her memories, everyday interactions, observations of post-socialist realities, and Elza’s attraction to actor, Kalisto Tanzi, Seeing People Off is a kaleidoscopic, poetic, and deeply funny portrait of a relationship.

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Slovenia

The Fig Tree by Goran Vojnovic

Available via OverDrive

The Fig Tree is a novel composed of the intertwining stories of the family of Jadran, a 30-something who tries to piece together the story of his relatives in order to better understand himself. Because he cannot understand why Anja walked out of their shared life, he tries to understand the suspicious death of his grandfather and the withdrawal of his grandmother into oblivion and dementia. With all his might, Jadran tries to understand the departure of his father in the first year of the war in the Balkans as he also tries to comprehend his mother, with her bewildering resentment of his grandfather, and her silent disappointment with his father.

Slovenian Cuisine: from the Alps to the Adriatic in 20 ingredients by Janez Bratovž

Winner of the Gourmand Award for Best Chef Book; a love-letter to the region, by the internationally-renowned chef and father of modern Slovenian cuisine. With beautifully written introductory essays for each new stop and robust narrative elements, it follows a road trip around Slovenia in search of the finest ingredients in the country, and the best producers of them. Each chapter profiles an ingredient key to the culture, and the passionate producer or farmer who supplies it, before delving into two select recipes for each—one interpretation of a traditional Slovenian dish and one modern presentation—which highlight the product and showcase its versatility.

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Solomon Islands

Devil-Devil: a Sister Conchita and Sergeant Kella mystery by Graeme Kent

Available via OverDrive

It’s not easy being Ben Kella. As a sergeant in the Solomon Islands Police Force, as well as an aofia, a hereditary spiritual peacekeeper of the Lau people, he is viewed with distrust by both the indigenous islanders and the British colonial authorities. In the past few days he has been cursed by a magic man, stumbled across evidence of a cargo cult uprising, and failed to find an American anthropologist who had been scouring the mountains for a priceless pornographic icon. Then, at a mission station, Kella discovers an independent and rebellious young American nun, Sister Conchita, secretly trying to bury a skeleton. The unlikely pair of Kella and Conchita are forced to team up to solve a series of murders that tie into all these other strange goings-on. Set in the 1960s in one of the most beautiful and dangerous areas of the South Pacific.

Solomon Time: adventures in the South Pacific by Will Randall

Available via OverDrive

Will Randall, a young English schoolmaster, had such a chance — and took it. He uprooted his conventional First World life and let himself be blown to one of the farthest and most beautiful corners of the earth, the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific. In the entertaining tradition of Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country, this is the story of Solomon Time.
From the first, it’s an improbable journey. In a chance encounter on a rugby field, Randall meets a doddering old man known as “the Commander,” who has retired to England after running a cocoa plantation in the South Pacific for thirty years. Six months later, the Commander dies and his will is read: he wants someone to travel to his beloved, long-missed island — where his plantation has fallen into ruin — and devise a way for the natives to support themselves. If successful, they might avoid poverty, build a new school, and even fend off the greedy developers circling their peaceful waters.
It’s a mission of noblesse oblige, yet possibly a fool’s errand, too. Randall agrees to go.

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Somalia

Gifts by Nuruddin Farah

The war in Somalia transforms a simple village girl into a self-confident woman who even swims and drives a car. She is Duniya, a widow with three children. Gifts is a beguiling tale of a Somali family, its strong matriarch, and its past wounds that refuse to heal. As the story unfolds, Somalia is ravaged by war, drought, disease, and famine, prompting industrialized nations to offer monetary aid—”gifts” to the so-called Third World.

Desert Flower: the extraordinary journey of a desert nomad by Waris Dirie

Available via OverDrive

Waris Dirie ran away from her oppressive life in the African desert when she was barely in her teens, illiterate and impoverished, with nothing to her name but a tattered shawl. She traveled alone across the dangerous Somali desert to Mogadishu—the first leg of a remarkable journey that would take her to London, where she worked as a house servant; then to nearly every corner of the globe as an internationally renowned fashion model; and ultimately to New York City, where she became a human rights ambassador for the U.N.

Crossbones: a novel by Nuruddin Farah

A dozen years after his last visit, Jeebleh returns to his beloved Mogadiscio to see old friends. He is accompanied by his son-in-law, Malik, a journalist intent on covering the region’s ongoing turmoil. What greets them at first is not the chaos Jeebleh remembers, however, but an eerie calm enforced by ubiquitous white-robed figures bearing whips. Meanwhile, Malik’s brother, Ahl, has arrived in Puntland, the region notorious as a pirates’ base. Ahl is searching for his stepson, Taxliil, who has vanished from Minneapolis, apparently recruited by an imam allied to Somalia’s rising religious insurgency. The brothers’ efforts draw them closer to Taxliil and deeper into the fabric of the country, even as Somalis brace themselves for an Ethiopian invasion.

Call Me American: a memoir by Abdi Nor Iftin

Abdi Nor Iftin first fell in love with America from afar. As a child, he learned English by listening to American pop artists like Michael Jackson and watching films starring action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger. When U.S. marines landed in Mogadishu to take on the warlords, Abdi cheered the arrival of these real Americans, who seemed as heroic as those of the movies. Sporting American clothes and dance moves, he became known around Mogadishu as Abdi American, but when the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab rose to power in 2006, it suddenly became dangerous to celebrate Western culture. Desperate to make a living, Abdi used his language skills to post secret dispatches to NPR and the Internet, which found an audience of worldwide listeners. But as life in Somalia grew more dangerous, Abdi was left with no choice but to flee to Kenya as a refugee. In an amazing stroke of luck, Abdi won entrance to the U.S. in the annual visa lottery, though his route to America was filled with twists and turns and a harrowing sequence of events that nearly stranded him in Nairobi. Now a proud resident of Maine and on the path to citizenship, Abdi Nor Iftin’s dramatic, deeply stirring memoir is truly a story for our time: a vivid reminder of why western democracies still beckon to those looking to make a better life.

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South Africa

Cat Tales for Mariette: an unexpected friendship on the Camdeboo Plains of South Africa by Michael Brown

Set in the dusty Karoo desert town of Aberdeen, South Africa, “Cat Tales for Mariette” tells of the unexpected friendship that forms between Michael Brown and a dying woman, Mariette Van Wyk. The two bond over Michael’s sharing cat stories from his many years of life shared with cats. Mariette’s unfulfilled longing to experience the presence of cats in her life comes to fruition through cat tales over tea and cookies in the hospital. As Mariette takes the final steps of her journey, these stories magically bring insight, healing, and resolution to her past and also to Michael’s.

Born a Crime: stories from a South African childhood by Trevor Noah

Noah’s path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist, his mother is determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life. With an incisive wit and unflinching honesty, Noah weaves together a moving yet funny portrait of a boy making his way through a damaged world in a dangerous time.

Coldsleep Lullaby: a mystery by Andrew Brown

In the sleepy Cape Winelands of South Africa the body of a young woman is found drifting in a river, and Detective Eberard Februarie is called in to investigate the case. It doesn’t help matters that the young woman―Melanie Du Preez―was the daughter of a prominent local citizen. Professor du Preez is a lecturer in the University’s Faculty of Law, and a conservative activist in the defense of the Afrikaans culture. Has a murder happened here, and if so, is the motive politics or something much more personal?

The Promise: a novel by Damon Gaigut

A modern saga that could only have come from South Africa, brilliantly written by Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut. Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family gradually comes apart after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of a changing South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled promises; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt. Reunited by three funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country — an atmosphere of resentment, renewal, and possibility. The Promise is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of history.

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How the Santa Fe Public Library Saved Me

A Much Needed Third Place

By K.O.

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Photo by Ally Aran

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This is not a gentle Third Place story. Nor is it academic. It is vulnerable. It is mine.

I was always sweating excessively back then. My car did not have air conditioning and only some of the windows worked. I had left my house full of roommates for the opportunity of quiet and air conditioning. I had brought an old, small computer to the Southside Library to apply for a second job.

I sat in the leftmost study carrel, tucked away in the back of the library, and breathed. If I was ever going to pay off my crippling college debt, I needed a second job. I would soon work up to fifty-five hours a week seven days a week, but not yet. In that moment, there was only quiet and air conditioning, my old, small computer, and my earnest attempt to prove to the City of Santa Fe that I was worth making a library technician. (I graduated into the Recession, capital R. I knew what it was like to apply to fifty jobs and never hear back from any of them.) Instead of rushing over to grab my holds before the library closed after I was finally free from work, I wanted to stay in my Third Place. Instead of being grateful for stolen moments of quiet and air conditioning, free access to the books I devoured voraciously as a college graduate with an English degree who could not afford them, not even the used ones, I wanted to work at the library.

It was a very tender hope that my second job could also be one that I loved. It was a very tender hope that my second job would not reduce me to pain-riddled immobility as my first one frequently did. I hoped that I could survive a second job long enough to pay my way to freedom.

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Photo by Ally Aran

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I did get the job, by the way. I became a part-time, temporary library technician without benefits. I would lift thousands of pounds at my first job, then shelve thousands of books at my second. I lived on $25-$35 a week in groceries. When my car didn’t start, I walked to work regardless of weather or time of day. The soles of my shoes had holes in them. I mended my own clothes.

I took on difficult projects. I never stopped learning. The library became my permanent, full-time job. It was the first job I ever had that came with benefits. I had been without health insurance for a while.

Years passed. I paid off my college loans. I put myself through graduate school without any and the library became my Third Place again. I would come back on my weekends after my work week was done, I would stay after my shifts had ended, and my coworkers would ask what I was doing there. Appreciating the quiet, appreciating the air conditioning, and attempting to carve out a future for myself, fueled by the smallest shred of hope that I dared not address: that it wouldn’t always have to be so hard.

Full-time graduate school and full-time work is not the easiest of feats. There were mornings after too little sleep where I stared at myself in the mirror and thought, I don’t want this to be my life. I would always pause and then tell myself, Then hold on.

I did not look ahead. I was too worried my luck would not hold and I would not make it.

I took on more difficult projects. I never stopped learning. I graduated. I became a librarian.

I took on more difficult projects. I never stopped learning. I became a library manager.

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Photo by Ally Aran

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My husband and I have our own home now. We have a human daughter and a canid son. My coworkers still find me in the stacks and ask what I am doing there; some of them even seem pleasantly surprised when I reply that I am looking for books, I want my daughter to see me reading them. I am also most likely basking in the quiet and the air conditioning, a small break before the hard work resumes. I will teach my daughter that the library is her Third Place, where she can always come back through pain, through hardship, through hopes so tender and so tentative they cannot be voiced lest they shatter under scrutiny.

The library will always have a comfortable chair where you can scheme and claw your way out of chaos. The library will always have a book that speaks to you where you are, that can provide the words you need to hear to keep going. The library will always have free computer access and free Wi-Fi so you can get your schoolwork done, apply for another job, or attempt to find a too-crowded home for just a few years because the sacrifice will be worth it. The library doesn’t charge membership or access fees. The employees will not look askance at you if you happen to be there all day. They may begin to give you a smile of recognition, however, if you make a habit of it. But if you work there, they may tell you that you need to go home eventually. (Don’t worry. Since having my daughter, I always leave promptly, though I reserve the right to return with her whenever we need to.)

My Library Life

by Zoe W.

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Photo by Johnny McClung

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In August of 2006, my family and I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. My mom was starting a new job, I was starting second grade at a new town in a new school, and my dad was very sick. It was a time of changes. Money was tight, as it has continued to be for my entire life so far. We couldn’t afford luxuries. What we could afford was a trip to the public library.

The Main Branch of the Santa Fe Public Library was much as it is today: a large, open building that was historically a combination fire station/courthouse/jail. It was filled with books, and it was quiet and dry, and a shelter from the outside world.

For the rest of my childhood, that library was my frequent refuge, and of course, a source of both knowledge and entertainment. I read every single kids book about dragons that I could find. I was variously obsessed with owls, Greek mythology, mermaids, and portal fantasy, and I read all of those books too.

Every time I have moved somewhere new, getting a library card has been one of my first priorities. In college, when I studied abroad, when I lived with my grandfather in 2020—I have always found joy and stability in the simple fact of owning a library card and having access to that space.

On my first day working at the Santa Fe Public Library, I walked through the staff door at the Main branch for the first time. I met my coworkers. I learned our systems. The library tech who signed me up for my library card in 2006 is now my coworker and a reference librarian. The realization was very strange for both of us on my first day.

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Photo by Gaelle Marcel

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Libraries have been a crucial third place for me all my life. They have been the place where I go to do homework, apply to jobs, use free Wi-Fi, and of course, find books to read and to check out. I am an avid user of Libby and Hoopla for e-books and e-audiobooks, formats I otherwise would have never gotten into because I could not and would not pay for them.

The Santa Fe Main Library is no longer just a third place for me. It is my place of work. I have crossed the barrier between patron and library employee, and my relationship to the space has shifted a lot. But my belief in its importance has grown, not shrunk.

Every day I work at the library, I interact with dozens of patrons, from unhoused people to tourists, from children to retirees. I see the entire range of the human experience in this town in the span of fifteen minutes. I see the joy of a patron checking out a museum pass to show their visiting family members a good time while they’re here. I fill out paperwork for a Wi-Fi hotspot to help someone have internet access at home. I help a kid find books about dragons. I lend someone a sharpie so that they can write on their cardboard sign. Sometimes, they are nasty incidents, but this is inevitable in customer service and in life. People won’t always be happy with the services we provide or with the context we exist in, and this too is inevitable.

There are very few places in our society where people can go to hang out, to be safe and warm and use free Wi-Fi and read a book. There are even fewer places where people can do all that without paying for goods or services. Patrons are constantly astounded that everything at the library is free, from events to books to tax help, because it is so ingrained that everything costs money.

Librarians often do triple duty, helping people with technology and job applications, staying calm in crisis situations, and generally providing more services than one space ever should have to. The cost of living has skyrocketed, and I promise you, no one works at a library for the money. We do it because there is meaning in this work. Because all of us have needed a library, and all of us know that the rest of our community needs the library, too.

Reading the World – Part 15

Republic of the Congo – Saudi Arabia

by Christina S

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You may being saying “Wait a minute Tina, didn’t we already see Congo and Samoa in earlier posts?!” The answer is both yes you did and no you didn’t, and it has everything to do with Colonialism.

The territory that was once known as Belgium Congo was split into two separate nations on June 30, 1960 at the end of the Belgium colonial rule. These countries are The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and The Republic of Congo.

The archipelago known collectively as Samoa was colonized and controlled by both the Germans and the Americans and in 1899 the Tripartite Convention was signed giving German control over the Western Islands and American control over the Eastern Islands. In 1915, Germany handed the governance of Western Samoa to a joint rule of the British and New Zealand. In January 1, 1962 Western Samoa became an independent nation and in 1997 they changed their name from Western Samoa to just Samoa, while the eastern islands are still known as American Samoa and governed by the United States.

We covered both American Samoa the The Democratic Republic of Congo in earlier posts, but this week we visit The Republic of Congo and Samoa.

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Republic of the Congo

Black Moses: a novel by Alain Mabanckou

Available via Hoopla

It’s not easy being Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. There’s that long name of his for a start, which means, “Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors.” Most people just call him Moses. Then there’s the orphanage where he lives, run by a malicious political stooge, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, and where he’s terrorized by two fellow orphans, the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala. But after Moses exacts revenge on the twins by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft. What follows is a funny, moving, larger-than-life tale that chronicles Moses’s ultimately tragic journey through the Pointe-Noire underworld and the politically repressive world of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970’s and 80’s.

Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou

Alain Mabanckou’s riotous new novel centers on the patrons of a run-down bar in the Congo. In a country that appears to have forgotten the importance of remembering, a former schoolteacher and bar regular nicknamed Broken Glass has been elected to record their stories for posterity. But Broken Glass fails spectacularly at staying out of trouble as one denizen after another wants to rewrite history in an attempt at making sure his portrayal will properly reflect their exciting and dynamic lives. Despondent over this apparent triumph of self-delusion over self-awareness, Broken Glass drowns his sorrows in red wine and riffs on the great books of Africa and the West.

Johnny Mad Dog: a novel by Emmanuel Dongala

Available via Hoopla

Life During Wartime, As Seen Through the Eyes of Two Congolese Teenagers. Set amid the chaos of West Africa’s civil wars, Emmanuel Dongala’s striking novel tells the story of two teenagers growing up while rival ethnic groups fight for control of their country. At age sixteen, Johnny is a member of the Death Dealers, a rebel faction bent on seizing power. Even as he is drawn into the rebels’ program of terror, Johnny Mad Dog, as he calls himself, retains his youthful exuberance-searching for girls, good times, and adventure. Sixteen-year-old Laokolé, for her part, dreams of finishing high school and becoming an engineer, but as rogue militias prepare to sack the city, she is forced to leave home with her mother and brother-and then finds herself alone and running from the likes of Johnny.

Little Boys Come From the Stars: a novel by Emmanuel Dongala

Available via Hoopla

The peculiar and moving story of a Congolese boy’s coming-of-age amid the political strife of postcolonial Congo. His nickname is Matapari, which means “trouble.” He is an African child of the ’90s-brilliant, mischievous, postcolonial, postmodern-caught in the crossfire of a chaotically liberated African country. Matapari grows up in a world of talking drums, the Internet, and satellite TV, a world of dictators who remake themselves as democrats overnight. His uncle is a stooge for the dictator; his father is a scholarly recluse obsessed with proving that blacks played key roles in Western history. Matapari is a young man in the middle-but the shrewdness and wit with which he tells his often riotously funny story set him apart from his relatives and countrymen.

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Romania

The Fox Was Ever the Hunter: a novel by Herta Müller

Romania — the last months of the Ceausescu regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara’s lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on all of the group. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another occasion it’s the hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilated fur is a sign that she is being tracked by the secret police — the fox was ever the hunter. Images of photographic precision combine into a kaleidoscope of terror as Adina and her friends struggle to keep mind and body intact in a world pervaded by complicity and permeated with fear, where it’s hard to tell victim from perpetrator.

Carpathia: food from the heart of Romania by Irina Georgescu

The first book to celebrate the culturally diverse and delicious cuisine of Romania. A true fusion of East and West, where traditional recipes are given a truly modern twist Romania is a true cultural melting pot, its character rooted in many traditions from Greek, Turkish, and Slavic in the south and east, to Austrian, Hungarian, and Saxon in the north and west. Carpathia, the first book from food writer Irina Georgescu, aims to introduce readers to Romania’s unique, bold and delicious cuisine. Bringing the country to life with stunning photography and recipes, it will take the reader on a culinary journey to the very heart of the Balkans, exploring Romania’s history, traditions, and food, one mouth-watering recipe at a time.

Nadia Comăneci and the Secret Police : a cold war escape by Stejărel Olaru

Nadia Comăneci is the Romanian child prodigy and global gymnastics star who ultimately fled her homeland and the brutal oppression of a communist regime. At the age of just 14, Nadia became the first gymnast to be awarded a perfect score of 10.0 at the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games and went on to collect three gold medals in performances which influenced the sport for generations to come, cementing Nadia’s place as a sporting legend. However, as the communist authorities in Romania sought an iron grip over its highest-profile athletes, Nadia and her trainers were subjected to surveillance from the Securitate, the Romanian secret police. Drawing on 25,000 secret police archive pages, countless secret service intelligence documents, and numerous wiretap recordings, this book tells the compelling story of Nadia’s life and career using unique insights from the communist dictatorship which monitored her.

No One is Here Except All of Us: a novel by Ramona Ausubel

In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it.

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Russia

Russia and the Russians: a history by Geoffrey A. Hosking

From the Carpathians in the west to the Greater Khingan range in the east, a huge, flat expanse dominates the Eurasian continent. Here, over more than a thousand years, the history and destiny of Russia have unfolded. In a sweeping narrative, one of the English-speaking world’s leading historians of Russia follows this story from the first emergence of the Slavs in the historical record in the sixth century C.E. to the Russians’ persistent appearances in today’s headlines.

Salt & Time: recipes from a Russian kitchen by Alissa Timoshkina

A collection of delicious modern recipes from Siberia and beyond. Salt & Time will transform perceptions of the food of the former Soviet Union, and especially Siberia-the crossroads of Eastern European and Central Asian cuisine-with 100 inviting recipes adapted for modern tastes and Western kitchens, and evocative storytelling to explain and entice. In Alissa Timoshkina’s words: “Often we need distance and time, both to see things better and to feel closer to them. This is certainly true of the food of my home country, Russia-or Siberia, to be exact. When I think of Siberia, I hear the sound of fresh snow crunching beneath my feet. Today, whenever I crush sea salt flakes between my fingers as I cook, I think of that sound.”

A Flame Out At Sea by Dmitry Novikov

Available via Hoopla

The protagonist of A Flame Out at Sea heads to the stores of the northern lakes and the White Sea in search of its present, which unexpectedly proves to be inseparable from its recent past. Against the backdrop of the powerful northern elements, the drama of a single individual in the here and now begins to seem tiny and insignificant but the tragedy of the nation irredeemably large.

The Big Green Tent: a novel by Ludmila Ulitskaya

With epic breadth and intimate detail, Ludmila Ulitskaya’s remarkable work tells the story of three school friends who meet in Moscow in the 1950s and go on to embody the heroism, folly, compromise, and hope of the Soviet dissident experience. These three boys―an orphaned poet; a gifted, fragile pianist; and a budding photographer with a talent for collecting secrets―struggle to reach adulthood in a society where their heroes have been censored and exiled. Rich with love stories, intrigue, and a cast of dissenters and spies, The Big Green Tent offers a panoramic survey of life after Stalin and a dramatic investigation into the prospects for individual integrity in a society defined by the KGB. 

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Rwanda

Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga

Kibogo’s story is reserved for the evening’s end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge. Kibogo’s tale is at once an origin myth, a celestial marvel, and a source of hope. And for the white priests who spritz holy water on shriveled trees, it’s considered forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor’s hoax. Everyone energetically debates Kibogo’s twisted story, but deep down secretly wonders: Can Kibogo really summon the rain?

The Eternal Audience of One: a novel by Rémy Ngamije

“Nobody ever makes it to the start of a story, not even the people in it. The most one can do is make some sort of start and then work toward some kind of ending.“
One might as well start with Séraphin: playlist-maker, nerd-jock hybrid, self-appointed merchant of cool, Rwandan, stifled and living in Windhoek, Namibia. Soon he will leave the confines of his family life for the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town, in South Africa, where loyal friends, hormone-saturated parties, adventurous conquests, and race controversies await. More than that, his long-awaited final year in law school promises to deliver a crucial puzzle piece of the Great Plan immigrant: a degree from a prestigious university. But a year is more than the sum of its parts, and en route to the future, the present must be lived through and even the past must be survived.

A Thousand Hills to Heaven: love, hope, and a restaurant in Rwanda by Josh Ruxin

Newlyweds Josh and Alissa were at a party and received a challenge that shook them to the core: do you think you can really make a difference? Especially in a place like Rwanda, where the scars of genocide linger and poverty is rampant? While Josh worked hard bringing food and health care to the country’s rural villages, Alissa was determined to put their foodie expertise to work. The couple opened Heaven, a gourmet restaurant overlooking Kigali, which became an instant success. Remarkably, they found that between helping youth marry their own local ingredients with gourmet recipes (and mix up “the best guacamole in Africa”) and teaching them how to help themselves, they created much-needed jobs while showing that genocide’s survivors really could work together.

An Ordinary Man: an autobiography by Paul Rusesabagina

As Rwanda was thrown into chaos during the 1994 genocide, Rusesabagina, a hotel manager, turned the luxurious Hotel Milles Collines into a refuge for more than 1,200 Tutsi and moderate Hutu refugees, while fending off their would-be killers with a combination of diplomacy and deception. In An Ordinary Man, he tells the story of his childhood, retraces his accidental path to heroism, revisits the 100 days in which he was the only thing standing between his “guests” and a hideous death, and recounts his subsequent life as a refugee and activist.

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Saint Kitts & Nevis

The Night of the Rambler: a novel by Montague Kobbé

Available via LL

A sympathetic and often humorous account of an obscure episode in the history of the remote island of Anguilla, in the northeast Caribbean, The Night of the Rambler revolves around a haphazard attempt by a dozen or so locals to invade neighboring St. Kitts in an effort to topple the government of the recently established Associated State of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla. Ostensibly, the action maps the fifteen hours that lapse between the moment when the “rebels” board The Rambler, the thirty-five-foot motorboat that will take them across the strait to St. Kitts, and the break of dawn the following day, when it becomes obvious that the unaccomplished mission will have to be aborted. The novel is at turns highly dramatic and hilarious, all the while bringing deep honesty to the often-unexamined righteousness of revolution.

My Early Life On St. Kitts and Nevis: an autobiography of the first 22 years by Clement Bouncin Williams

Available via OverDrive

Being first generation Kitty-Nevy I don’t have the privilege of the oratory exchange between one generation and another about life on St. Kitts and Nevis in years gone by. This book provides me with that oratory exchange; ranging from food and beverage preparations to reasons for the creation of communities which I pass often on my current day’s journey to aspects of our Health, Education, Economic and Political systems. Thus presenting great evidence of the tremendous strides our Federation has made over the decades. Whether from the Federation or the wider Caribbean this book will cause some to reminisce, others to be educated and for all to take pride in the wisdom of our people!

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Saint Lucia

The Bounty: poems by Derek Walcott

The Bounty was the first book of poems Derek Walcott published after winning the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Opening with the title poem, a memorable elegy to the poet’s mother, the book features a haunting series of poems that evoke Walcott’s native ground, the island of St. Lucia. “For almost forty years his throbbing and relentless lines kept arriving in the English language like tidal waves,” Walcott’s great contemporary Joseph Brodsky once observed. “He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.”

To Carnival!: a celebration in Saint Lucia by Paul Baptiste

Available via Hoopla

The sights, sounds and tastes of vibrant Saint Lucia come to life in this cumulative tale of a girl’s journey to Carnival. When a series of unexpected delays disrupts her journey to the big parade, Melba must adjust both her expectations and her route to the festivities. Who will she meet and what will she learn along the way?

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Samoa

Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel

Available via ILL

A bestseller in New Zealand and winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize, Sia Figiel’s debut marks the first time a novel by a Samoan woman has been published in the United States. Figiel uses the traditional Samoan storytelling form of su’ifefiloi to talk back to Western anthropological studies on Samoan women and culture. Told in a series of linked episodes, this powerful and highly original narrative follows thirteen-year-old Alofa Filiga as she navigates the mores and restrictions of her village and comes to terms with her own search for identity. 

The Story of Laulii, Daughter of Samoa: an autobiography by Laulii Willis

Available via Hoopla

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important.

The first known native born Samoan to live and become educated in the US in the early 19th Century. Laulii recounts numerous stories of her youth growing up in Samoa, which in many respects is not so different from normal civilized society. She provides descriptions of the domestic customs, habits, amusements, and legends of her native land. It is one of the earliest native Samoan narratives. Originally published in 1889.

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San Marino

The Hero’s Way: walking with Garibaldi from Rome to Ravenna by Tim Parks

Available via OverDrive

In the summer of 1849, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Italy’s legendary revolutionary, was finally forced to abandon his defense of Rome. He and his men had held the besieged city for four long months, but now it was clear that only surrender would prevent slaughter and destruction at the hands of a huge French army. Against all odds, Garibaldi was determined to turn defeat into moral victory. On the evening of July 2, riding alongside his pregnant wife, Anita, he led 4,000 hastily assembled men to continue the struggle for national independence elsewhere. Hounded by both French and Austrian armies, the Garibaldini marched hundreds of miles across the Apennines, Italy’s mountainous spine, and after two months of skirmishes and adventures arrived in Ravenna with just 250 survivors.

Best-selling author Tim Parks, together with his partner Eleonora, set out in the blazing summer of 2019 to follow Garibaldi and Anita’s arduous journey through the heart of Italy. In The Hero’s Way he delivers a superb travelogue that captures Garibaldi’s determination, creativity, reckless courage, and profound belief. And he provides a fascinating portrait of Italy then and now, filled with unforgettable observations of Italian life and landscape, politics, and people.

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São Tomé and Príncipe

Chocolate Islands: cocoa, slavery, and colonial Africa by Catherine Higgs

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe—the chocolate islands—through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era.

No Gods Live Here: poetry by Conceição Lima

(On Order – release April 2024)

The first book-length poetry collection by a woman from São Tomé to appear in English, is grounded in the lush islands’ history of slavery, colonialism, and independence. A career-spanning collection from a giant of Santomean poetry Conceição Lima, No Gods Live Here catalogues and memorializes the cruelties and triumphs of the country’s past alongside the poet’s own childhood. Poems set against the tiny island nation’s distinctive flora and geography. Through vivid imagery, Lima evokes São Tomé and Príncipe, from popular Santomean music to imagery of fishermen on the beach, while remaining ever aware of the subjective meeting of memory, time, and place. Through poetry, Lima unites past and present to resurrect hope in human creation and the possibility of metamorphosis.

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Saudi Arabia

Girls of Riyadh by Rajāʼ ʻAbd Allāh Ṣāniʻ

When Rajaa Alsanea boldly chose to open up the hidden world of Saudi women—their private lives and their conflicts with the traditions of their culture—she caused a sensation across the Arab world. Now in English, Alsanea’s tale of the personal struggles of four young upper-class women offers Westerners an unprecedented glimpse into a society often veiled from view. Living in restrictive Riyadh but traveling all over the globe, these modern Saudi women literally and figuratively shed traditional garb as they search for love, fulfillment, and their place somewhere in between Western society and their Islamic home.

The Arabesque Table: contemporary recipes from the Arab world by Reem Kassis

In her personal, engaging voice, Reem bridges past and present to open up the world of Arabic cooking today, showcasing a mosaic of 130 delicious, accessible home recipes. Organized by primary ingredient, the recipes and vivid photographs bring the dishes to life while her narrative offers not only a sense of taste, but a sense of time and place as well. More than just a compilation of modern Arabic recipes, The Arabesque Table celebrates the evolution of Arab cuisine and the stories of cross-cultural connection it recounts, paying tribute to the history and journey that have led to this point.

Finding Nouf: a novel by Zoë Ferraris

When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing, her prominent family calls on Nayir al-Sharqi, a pious desert guide, to lead the search party. Ten days later, just as Nayir is about to give up in frustration, her body is discovered by anonymous desert travelers. But when the coroner’s office determines that Nouf died not of dehydration but from drowning, and her family seems suspiciously uninterested in getting at the truth, Nayir takes it upon himself to find out what really happened.

A Girl Like That: a novel by Tanaz Bhathena

Sixteen-year-old Zarin Wadia is many things: a bright and vivacious student, an orphan, a risk taker. She’s also the kind of girl that parents warn their kids to stay away from: a troublemaker whose many romances are the subject of endless gossip at school. You don’t want to get involved with a girl like that, they say. So how is it that eighteen-year-old Porus Dumasia has only ever had eyes for her? And how did Zarin and Porus end up dead in a car together, crashed on the side of a highway in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia? When the religious police arrive on the scene, everything everyone thought they knew about Zarin is questioned. And as her story is pieced together, told through multiple perspectives, it becomes clear that she was far more than just a girl like that.

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Reading the World – Part 14

Pakistan – Qatar

by Christina S

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This week features one of the more humorous titles I have seen while compiling these BLOGS. I hope we can agree that At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig by John Gimlette is a pretty great title that gets your attention and maybe garners a smirk, or dare I say a chuckle?

The title of a book can impact it’s success. It sets up expectations for the reader as to the tone of the book and genre. A title that is too obscure and odd can be off-putting. A title that is too common can be less appealing and can easily get confused with other books. A title should be related to the subject matter of the book, but unique enough that it stands out among the hundreds, if not thousands, of titles that someone is browsing through to find that perfect read for that moment.

I hope that you are intrigued enough by some of the titles in this series to check out the books they belong to.

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Pakistan

I Should have Honor: a memoir of hope and pride in Pakistan by Brohi Khalida

From a young age, Khalida Brohi was raised to believe in the sanctity of arranged marriage. Her mother was forced to marry a thirteen-year-old boy when she was only nine; Khalida herself was promised as a bride before she was even born. But her father refused to let her become a child bride. He was a man who believed in education, not just for himself but for his daughters, and Khalida grew up thinking she would become the first female doctor in her small village. Khalida thought her life was proceeding on an unusual track for a woman of her circumstances, but one whose path was orderly and straightforward. Everything shifted for Khalida when she found out that her beloved cousin had been murdered by her uncle in a tradition known as “honor killing.” Her cousin’s crime? She had fallen in love with a man who was not her betrothed.

Summers Under the Tamarind Tree: recipes & memories from Pakistan by Sumayya Usmani

Former lawyer-turned-food writer and cookery teacher Sumayya Usmani captures the rich and aromatic pleasure of Pakistani cooking through more than 100 recipes as she celebrates the heritage and traditions of her home country and looks back on a happy childhood spent in the kitchen with her grandmother and mother. While remaining uniquely its own, Pakistani food is influenced by some of the world’s greatest cuisines. With a rich coastline, it enjoys spiced seafood and amazing fish dishes; while its borders with Iran, Afghanistan, India and China ensure strong Arabic, Persian and varied Asian flavors.

A Thousand Questions by Saadia Faruqi

Mimi is not thrilled to be spending her summer in Karachi, Pakistan, with grandparents she’s never met. Secretly, she wishes to find her long-absent father, and plans to write to him in her beautiful new journal. The cook’s daughter, Sakina, still hasn’t told her parents that she’ll be accepted to school only if she can improve her English test score—but then, how could her family possibly afford to lose the money she earns working with her Abba in a rich family’s kitchen? Although the girls seem totally incompatible at first, as the summer goes on, Sakina and Mimi realize that they have plenty in common—and that they each need the other to get what they want most.

The Blind Man’s Garden by Nadeem Aslam

Growing up as brothers in a small town in Pakistan, Jeo and Mikal were inseparable; however as adults their paths have diverged sharply. Jeo is newly married and a dedicated medical student, while Mikal, in love with a woman he can’t have, has adopted the life of a vagabond. Nonetheless, when Jeo decides to slip across the border into Afghanistan to help civilians caught in the post-9/11 clash between American and Taliban forces, Mikal goes with him. But their good intentions cannot keep them out of harm’s way.

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Palau

Vanished: the sixty-year search for the missing men of World War II by Wil S. Hylton

From a mesmerizing storyteller, the gripping search for a missing World War II crew, their bomber plane, and their legacy. On September 1, 1944, a massive American bomber carrying eleven men vanished over the tiny Pacific archipelago of Palau, leaving behind a trail of mysteries. For more than sixty years, the U.S. government, the children of the missing airmen, and a maverick team of scientists and scuba divers searched the archipelago for clues with cutting-edge technology and unyielding determination. They crawled through thickets of mangrove and slogged into groves of poison trees, flew over the islands in private planes shooting infrared photography, trolled the water with magnetometers and side-scan sonar, and launched grid searches on the seafloor, but the trail seemed to lead nowhere.

The Diver Who Fell From the Sky: The story of pacific pioneer Francis Toribiong by Simon Pridmore

Available via Hoopla

When his country needed him most, Palauan Francis Toribiong came along and helped the Pacific island nation find its place in the world and become an independent, forward-looking 20th century state. And he achieved this, improbably, via the sport of scuba diving. This is the inspiring tale of an absolutely unique life, illustrated with images (black & white in this, the standard paperback version) of the beautiful islands of Palau, above and below the water. Maverick, innovator, entrepreneur, environmentalist and sheer force of nature, Francis Toribiong is the father of Palau tourism, a scuba diving pioneer and an effective, tireless ambassador for both his country and its abundant marine and land resources. He was born poor, had no academic leanings and no talent for diplomacy. Yet he was driven to succeed by a combination of duty, faith, a deep-seated determination to do the right thing and an absolute refusal ever to compromise his values.

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Panama

Stepmotherland: poems by Darrel Alejandro Holnes

Darrel Alejandro Holnes’s first full-length collection, is filled with poems that chronicle and question identity, family, and allegiance. This Central American love song is in constant motion as it takes us on a lyrical and sometimes narrative journey from Panamá to the USA and beyond. The driving force behind Holnes’s work is a pursuit for a new home, and as he searches, he takes the reader on a wild ride through the most pressing political issues of our time and the most intimate and transformative personal experiences of his life.

Come Together, Fall Apart: a novella and stories by Cristina Henríquez

With eight short stories and a novella that travel from dusty city streets to humid beaches, Cristina Henríquez carves out a distinctive and unforgettable vision of contemporary Panama. The stories of Come Together, Fall Apart combine to create a seamless fictional world in which the varied landscapes and shifting culture of a country in transition—and the insistent voices of its young people—are vividly represented.

Sincerely Sicily by Tamika Burgess

Available via Hoopla

Sicily Jordan’s worst nightmare has come true! She’s been enrolled in a new school, with zero of her friends and stuck wearing a fashion catastrophe of a uniform. But however bad Sicily thought sixth grade was going to be, it only gets worse when she does her class presentation.
While all her classmates breezed through theirs, Sicily is bombarded with questions on how she can be both Black and Panamanian. She wants people to understand, but it doesn’t feel like anyone is ready to listen-first at school and then at home. Because when her abuela starts talking mess about her braids, Sicily’s the only one whose heart is being crumpled for a second time.
Staying quiet may no longer be an option, but that doesn’t mean Sicily has the words to show the world just what it means to be a proud Black Panamanian either. Even though she hasn’t written in her journal since her abuelo passed, it’s time to pick up her pen again-but will it be enough to prove to herself and everyone else exactly who she is?

Panama on a Plate: favorite foods from my birthplace by Yadira Stamp

Available via Hoopla

“Panama On a Plate” is the debut cookbook from renowned Chef Yadira Stamp, an expert in authentic Panamanian cooking. In this must-have cookbook, Chef Yadira teaches you how to prepare authentic, traditional dishes and desserts with explosive flavors that are unforgettable-just as they are made in Panama. Ranging from quick classics to exciting culinary adventures, this delectable cookbook features more than 50 of Chef Yadira’s most popular recipes, including gluten-free, vegetarian, and vegan variations for all to enjoy. Chef Yadira’s “Panama on A Plate” offers a genuine taste of Panamanian cuisine with Latin American, and Caribbean fusion that will keep you coming back for more.

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Papua New Guinea

Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations. So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.

New Guinea Moon by Kate Constable

Available via OverDrive

It had started almost as a joke, as a challenge to her mother during one of their endless arguments. She can’t even remember now what Caroline had said to spark it off, but Julie snapped back, hot with fury, “Well, maybe I should go and live with Tony for a while and see how that works out!” and Caroline, suddenly calm, had said, “Maybe you should.” And the next thing Julie knew, she was on her way to meet a father she doesn’t know in a country she’s never been to. What will she find when the tiny plane touches down in the lush tropical highlands of New Guinea? She might expect culture shock, she might hope for first love, but the secrets she uncovers make for a truly unforgettable summer.

Euphoria: a novel by Lily King

In 1933 three young, gifted anthropologists are thrown together in the jungle of New Guinea. They are Nell Stone, fascinating, magnetic and famous for her controversial work studying South Pacific tribes, her intelligent and aggressive husband Fen, and Andrew Bankson, who stumbles into the lives of this strange couple and becomes totally enthralled. Within months the trio are producing their best ever work, but soon a firestorm of fierce love and jealousy begins to burn out of control, threatening their bonds, their careers, and, ultimately, their lives…

A Death in the Rainforest: how a language and a way of life came to an end in Papua New Guinea by Don Kulick

As a young anthropologist, Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can’t study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he returned again and again to document Tayap before it disappeared entirely. Here he takes us inside the difficult-to-get-to village of two hundred people in the middle of a tropical rainforest. In doing so he looks at the impact of Western culture on the farthest reaches of the globe

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Paraguay

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The News from Paraguay: a novel by Lily Tuck

The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano—the future dictator of Paraguay—begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde. Ella follows Franco to Asunción and reigns there as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover’s ill-fated imperial dream—one fueled by a heedless arrogance that will devastate all of Paraguay.

Invisible Country: a mystery by Annamaria Alfieri

A war against Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay has devastated Paraguay. Ninety percent of the males between the ages of eight and eighty have died in the conflict and food is scarce. In the small village of Santa Caterina, Padre Gregorio advises the women of his congregation to abandon the laws of the church and get pregnant by what men are available. As he leaves the pulpit, he discovers the murdered body of Ricardo Yotté, one of the most powerful men in the country, at the bottom of the belfry.

Ada’s Violin: the story of the Recycled Orchestra of Paraguay by Susan Hood

Ada Ríos grew up in Cateura, a small town in Paraguay built on a landfill. She dreamed of playing the violin, but with little money for anything but the bare essentials, it was never an option…until a music teacher named Favio Chávez arrived. He wanted to give the children of Cateura something special, so he made them instruments out of materials found in the trash. It was a crazy idea, but one that would leave Ada—and her town—forever changed. Now, the Recycled Orchestra plays venues around the world, spreading their message of hope and innovation.

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: travels through Paraguay by John Gimlette

Haven to Nazis, smugglers’ paradise, home to some of the earth’s oddest wildlife and most baroquely awful dictatorships, Paraguay is a nation waiting for the right chronicler. In John Gimlette, at last it has one. With an adventurer’s sang-froid, a historian’s erudition, and a sense of irony so keen you could cut a finger on it, Gimlette celebrates the beauty, horror and–yes–charm of South America’s obscure and remote “island surrounded by land.”

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Peru

The Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa

Flora, the illegitimate child of a wealthy Peruvian father and French mother, grows up in poverty, and after fleeing a brutal husband, journeys to Peru to demand her inheritance. On her return, she makes her name as a popular writer and a champion of the downtrodden, setting herself the arduous task of touring the French countryside to recruit members for her Workers’ Union. Paul, struggling painter and stubborn visionary, abandons his wife and five children for life in the South Seas, where his dreams of paradise are poisoned by syphilis, the stifling forces of French colonialism, and a chronic lack of funds, though he has his pick of teenage Tahitian lovers and paints some of his greatest works.

The Food & Cooking of Peru: traditions, ingredients, tastes, techniques, 60 classic recipes by Flor Arcaya de Deliot

Peruvian cuisine is considered to be one of the most diverse in the world, and on a par with French, Chinese and Indian cuisine in terms of sophistication. With this eclectic variety of traditional dishes, 28 different climates, and terrain that includes coasts, mountains, forest and jungle, Peruvian gastronomy is in constant evolution.

César Vallejo: selected poems

César Vallejo was a Peruvian poet who lived in Paris and Spain for much of his adult life. His body of work, which is deeply rooted in his European, Peruvian, and indigenous heritage, is increasingly recognized as a major contribution to global modernism. Although he published only two books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language

You Shall Leave Your Land by Renato Cisneros

Available via Hoopla

Renato Cisneros’s great-great-grandmother Nicolasa bore seven children by her long-term secret love, who was also her priest, raising them alone in nineteenth century Peru. More than a century later, Renato, the descendent of that clandestine affair, struggles to wring information about his origins out of recalcitrant relatives, whose foibles match the adventures and dalliances of their ancestors. As buried secrets are brought into the light, the story of Nicolasa’s progeny unfolds, bound up with key moments in the development of the Republic of Peru since its independence.

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Philippines

The Boy with a Snake in his Schoolbag: a memoir from Manila (or something like that) by Bob Ong

Available via Hoopla

This humorous coming-of-age memoir follows the author from kindergarten through high school and college to his own experiences as a young teacher. Set in Manila, it explores universal themes of friendship, love, school life, depression, academic struggles and personal successes. A National Bestseller in the Philippines, the book also includes illustrations by award-winning cartoonist Freely Abrigo, a concept artist for Warner Brothers. This collection of warm and humorous essays candidly chronicles Bob Ong’s experiences growing up in the Marcos-era Manila of the 1980s. The author casts a satirical and nostalgic eye on the events of everyday life.

7,000 Islands: cherished recipes and stories from the Philippines by Yasmin Newman

Despite the Philippines’ location right in the middle of Southeast Asia, most people know very little about the country and even less about the cuisine. For Filipinos, food is more than a pleasurable pursuit; it is the cultural language. It can be seen through the prism of its unique and colorful history, with influences from Malaysia, Spain, China, Mexico, and the US adding to the cuisine’s rich texture. In this collection of more than one hundred recipes, Yasmin Newman takes a culinary journey through the Philippines and uncovers an intriguing nation of 7107 islands where the people’s love of eating is as big as their hearts. Filipino food can be seen through the prism of its colourful and unique history.

Monsoon Mansion: a memoir by Cinelle Barnes

Told with a lyrical, almost-dreamlike voice as intoxicating as the moonflowers and orchids that inhabit this world, Monsoon Mansion is a harrowing yet triumphant coming-of-age memoir exploring the dark, troubled waters of a family’s rise and fall from grace in the Philippines. It would take a young warrior to survive it. Cinelle Barnes was barely three years old when her family moved into Mansion Royale, a stately ten-bedroom home in the Philippines. Filled with her mother’s opulent social aspirations and the gloriously excessive evidence of her father’s self-made success, it was a girl’s storybook playland. But when a monsoon hits, her father leaves, and her mother’s terrible lover takes the reins, Cinelle’s fantastical childhood turns toward tyranny she could never have imagined.

We Belong by Cookie Hiponia Everman

Stella and Luna know that their mama, Elsie, came from the Philippines when she was a child, but they don’t know much else. So one night they ask her to tell them her story. As they get ready for bed, their mama spins two tales: that of her youth as a strong-willed middle child and immigrant; and that of the young life of Mayari, the mythical daughter of a god. Both are tales of sisterhood and motherhood, and of the difficult experience of trying to fit into a new culture, and having to fight for a home and acceptance.

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Poland

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .

The Sweet Polish Kitchen: a celebration of home baking & nostalgic treats by Ren Behan

A collection of traditional and modern Polish baking and dessert recipes including babkas, cheesecakes, tarts, pastries, and all things sweet and celebratory. A collection of traditional and modern Polish baking and dessert recipes including babkas, cheesecakes, tarts, pastries, and all things sweet and celebratory.

Road-Side Dog by Czesław Miłosz

I went on a journey in order to acquaint myself with my province, in a two-horse wagon with a lot of fodder and a tin bucket rattling in the back. The bucket was required for the horses to drink from. I traveled through a country of hills and pine groves that gave way to woodlands, where swirls of smoke hovered over the roofs of houses, as if they were on fire, for they were chimneyless cabins; I crossed districts of fields and lakes. It was so interesting to be moving, to give the horses their rein, and wait until, in the next valley, a village slowly appeared, or a park with the white spot of a manor in it. And always we were barked at by a dog, assiduous in its duty. That was the beginning of the century; this is its . I have been thinking not only of the people who lived there once but also of the generations of dogs accompanying them in their everyday bustle, and one night-I don’t know where it came from-in a pre-dawn sleep, that funny and tender phrase composed itself: a road-side dog

Snow White and Russian Red by Dorota Maslowska

Available via Hoopla

The international bestselling novel of nihilistic youth in post-Communist Poland. When his girlfriend Magda dumps him, Andrzej “Nails” Robakoski’s life begins to unravel. A track-suited slacker, Nails spends most of his time doing little more than searching for his next girl, next line of speed, next proof for his conspiracy theories about the Polish economy. A xenophobic campaign against the Russian black market is escalating across Poland, culminating in No Russkies Day—or is that just in Nails’s fevered mind?

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Portugal

Journey to Portugal: in pursuit of Portugal’s history and culture by José Saramago

The Nobel Prize–winning author explores his homeland. In 1979, José Saramago decided to write a book called Journey to Portugal-and dedicated himself to obtaining the fullest meaning of his title. More than merely journeying in or through his native country, he wanted to achieve a deep encounter with it, foregoing the conventional assumptions and the routines of tourist guides. Instead, he scoured the country with the eyes and ears of an observer fascinated by the ancient myths and history of his people. Recording his experiences and observations across the length and breadth of Portugal, Saramago brings the country to life as only a writer of his brilliance can.

The Implacable Order of Things : a novel by José Luís Peixoto

A mesmerizing tale of love and jealousy by Portugal’s most acclaimed young novelist.

Set in an unnamed Portuguese village against a backdrop of severe rural poverty, The Implacable Order of Things is told from the various points of view of two generations of men and women, hardened by hunger and toil and driven by a fate beyond them to fulfill their roles in the never-ending cycle of violence, retribution and death.

The High Mountains of Portugal: a novel by Yann Martel

In Lisbon in 1904, a young man named Tomás discovers an old journal. It hints at the existence of an extraordinary artifact that — if he can find it — would redefine history. Traveling in one of Europe’s earliest automobiles, he sets out in search of this strange treasure. Thirty-five years later, a Portuguese pathologist devoted to the murder mysteries of Agatha Christie finds himself at the center of a mystery of his own and drawn into the consequences of Tomás’s quest. Fifty years on, a Canadian senator takes refuge in his ancestral village in northern Portugal, grieving the loss of his beloved wife. But he arrives with an unusual companion: a chimpanzee. And there the century-old quest will come to an unexpected conclusion.

The Wind Whistling in the Cranes: a novel by Lidia Jorge

With the grand sweep of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, this enduring tale transports us to a picturesque seaside town haunted by its colonial past. Set in the now-distant 1990s, tells the story of the landlords and tenants of a derelict canning factory in southern Portugal. The wealthy, always-scheming Leandros have owned the building since before the Carnation Revolution, a peaceful coup that toppled a four-decade-long dictatorship and led to Portugal’s withdrawal from its African colonies. It was Leandro matriarch Dona Regina who handed the keys to the Matas, the bustling family from Cape Verde who saw past the dusty machinery and converted the space into a warm―and welcoming―home.

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Qatar

Love From A to Z: a novel by S. K. Ali

Eighteen-year-old Muslims Adam and Zayneb meet in Doha, Qatar, during spring break and fall in love as both struggle to find a way to live their own truths.
Zayneb’s teacher won’t stop reminding the class how “bad” Muslims are. But Zayneb, the only Muslim in class, isn’t bad. She’s angry. When she gets suspended for confronting her teacher, and he begins investigating her activist friends, Zayneb heads to her aunt’s house in Doha, Qatar, for an early start to spring break. Her path crosses with Adam’s. Since he got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in November, Adam has stopped going to classes, intent on keeping the memory of his mom alive for his little sister. They’ve been playing roles for others, keeping their real thoughts locked away in their journals … until they meet

The Girl Who Fell to Earth: a memoir by Sophia Al-Maria

When Sophia Al-Maria’s mother sends her away from rainy Washington State to stay with her husband’s desert-dwelling Bedouin family in Qatar, she intends it to be a sort of teenage cultural boot camp. What her mother doesn’t know is that there are some things about growing up that are universal. In Qatar, Sophia is faced with a new world she’d only imagined as a child. She sets out to find her freedom, even in the most unlikely of places.

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The Third Place

by Aaron O.

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When people think of libraries, the first thing that often comes to mind is a warehouse of books, a place to do research for school projects, or a quiet study spot. However, libraries have been metamorphizing over the past few decades to embody a concept referred to as a “Third Place.” The term comes from a framework used by sociologists for thinking about places people engage with others that identifies the home as the “First Place,” the workplace as the “Second Place,” and then venues where they interact with others more informally and participate in public life as the “Third Place.” While the concept is a bit amorphous, it generally refers to a relaxed, informal setting where people can engage in civic life.

As people have retreated from public life over the past several decades and particularly during and after the pandemic, there has been a decline in participation in social organizations, a reduction in volunteering, a drop in church attendance, an increase in online shopping, and a withdrawal into the algorithmic moderated world of social media and computer interactions. This trend was documented in the book “Bowling Alone: the collapse and revival of American community” by Robert Putnam as far back as 2000, and the end result has been a significant increase in loneliness and loss of community participation that has contributed to a cultural divide that is wreaking havoc on our social and political institutions. To counteract these changes, a community needs, now more than ever, an inviting place that is open to all where they can take part in public life.

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Fortunately, during this same period of withdrawals, there has been a countervailing trend in libraries, which have been working to position themselves as a community hub where people can pursue their interests, whatever they might be, by themselves or with others. In the democratic spirit of equality, libraries have been growing their role as a location that welcomes people from ALL walks of life regardless of their socioeconomic status, age, race, nationality, creed, color, religion, or other identifiers, a place where everyone is equal and for which there are no prerequisites to participation, no monetary barriers to prevent taking part, no shared belief system necessary, and no need for expertise or seniority to join in, a place that provides equal access to all ideas and points of view and lets its users decide what is right for them.

Traditionally, libraries have served an educational and entertainment role by providing access to various kinds of media that meet people’s interests to learn new things and be informed as well as be amused. For example, libraries champion early literacy efforts to insure that people are equipped with this most fundamental of skills needed to participate in the economy. They also provide resources that support school curriculum as well as the studies of home schoolers. As a result of such efforts, they have been called the “People’s University” as a way to identify their mission to be an equally accessible source of knowledge. These will continue to be important roles as the pace of societal change accelerates in the face of growing economic inequality and demands more knowledge and training for people to stay viable in the economy of the future.

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To embrace these ideals and fulfill such a Herculean task, libraries have worked to engage the populace by expanding their offerings beyond media to include a variety of cultural activities that align with the community’s needs and interests. Whether it is arts and crafts activities, a book discussion group, a learned lecture, musical or poetry performances, space to hold meetings, film screenings, or an art exhibit by local talent, they sponsor a number of engaging and thought provoking activities that encourage people to join in and share in the city’s cultural life.

In the distant past, many libraries were privately owned and a means for individuals to display their knowledge and prosperity. Libraries today perform similar functions but at the community level. A library is a means for a city to display it’s cultural stature, not only through its collection and programmatic offerings, but more importantly through its citizens’ utilization of its services. A heavily used library system reflects the community’s interest in learning, reading, and artistic pursuits. Santa Fe repeatedly shows its love of the city’s three library branches by its high turnout for the public programs being offered. Whether its children’s Storytimes, Drop-In Watercolor painting, or a demonstration of fiber arts processes, the City Different shows up to participate. In particular, many of the author talks and lectures require multiple bookings in order to accommodate all the interested people, interest that suggests a need for expanded facilities.

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Looking to the future, the Santa Fe Public Library will continue to fulfill its mission as the informal venue the community uses to take part in civic life or “Third Place.” However to do so effectively, it will need to continue to refine and develop its facilities to be able to fulfill the many roles libraries now play in a community. Any future for the library will need the input of its citizens to insure that the any new or remodeled facility meets the growing needs of the city. When the opportunity arises, please be sure to share your opinion to help create the library system you want in Santa Fe.