Read the World

Pachinko - Min Jin Lee - 2017  I loved this book. It is a bit of everything: happy, sad, informative, fictional.  If you are someone who needs storyline with every page turn, you may need to be a little patient with this one. The beauty of this book is not that it is full of plot and twist; rather it is a history book, presented as a fictional story.  The book follows a Korean family from their roots in the Korea of the turn of the century (that is, 19th-20th). It follows the family through Japanese imperialism in Korea, the subsequent separation of the two sides of Korea after Communism took its hold in the north of the peninsula, and finishes off somewhere in the mid-1980s, in the United States.  While there are some parts of the story that did make my jaw drop (I will not spoil it for you, though), this book really was just something to get lost in and enjoy the process of.  I am not well-versed in the history of Korea or Japan, so for me, and someone geeky l...

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma (2015, Nigeria) Obioma's debut novel, set in his home country of Nigeria, centres around four brothers: Ikenna, Boje, Obembe and Ben Agwu,  who live in the western town of Akure. Although they live in the Yoruba-speaking part of Nigeria, the brothers, and by extension their parents and two younger siblings, come from an Igbo family. Part of why I began this project of 'reading the world' was to learn about different countries, cultures and stories, so Obioma's description of Akure and the setting of the scene of an Igbo family living in Yorubaland Nigeria is something I found fascinating.  Through the novel's narrator, nine-year-old Ben, the fourth of the Agwu children and the youngest brother of the titular characters, Obioma is able to make the references to politics, history and culture understandable for all readers, regardless of their background and any existing knowledge they may or may not possess of Nigeria . Juggling plot l...

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia The first book I read in my quest to "Read the World" was Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, released in 2020.  Moreno-Garcia was born in Baja California, Mexico, but moved to British Columbia, Canada, in her early twenties. In Canada, she studied at the University of British Columbia and gained a Master's in science and technology studies.  Her studies, and her origin, are evident in Mexican Gothic . Although it is not Moreno-Garcia's first work (she is a prolific author of short fiction and novels with  Mexican Gothic  being her fifth) it seems her Mexican identity and her love of the sciences are happily wed in this gothic horror novel.  Through her main protagonist, pretty but brainy socialite Noemí Taboada, the reader experiences an eerie mystery concerning Noemí's cousin, Catalina, and Catalina's recent decline in health. Catalina lives on an old colonial-era estate owned by an English family, the Doyles....

Read the World - #1 Holy dung, I'm blogging again.  I say again, I don't think it really counted the first three thousand times I attempted to do so. Who knows, maybe this time won't count either, unless I continue to at least attempt to take it seriously.  However, I did want to begin anew as, in the craziness of pandemic mania, a new way of working, of living and of existing in the increasingly blurry lines between the two, I have come to find a major source of relaxation and reconnecting with myself: reading. Namely, reading fiction  books.  Understandably, for a lot of people this isn't exactly groundbreaking or innovative, but for me it is a really pivotal phenomenon.  Even before the days of pandemic, when the world was still in easy-enough mode, I really struggled to read fiction books.  I think for most people this might be a bit strange. Fiction is escapism, even before we were cooped up in our own homes for days, weeks, months on end, fiction was...