books i read this week (from Leaving India to The Little Prince)

experiments in book videos -- click to see a brief video tour of the books i read this week :)
usually i note the weekly reads in words, but as this january is about experimenting with video, so i tried a clip, which also makes it much easier to include a look inside the books. here's my usual book review series

the books with links
and here some additional book notes with links & notes:

• "Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents" by Minal Hajratwala
  my first read for the 7 continents reading challenge. an outstanding book. so much included in it - biographies that lead from India to South Africa, to Fiji, to America. longer review to follow. here's the Goodreads link: Leaving India
• "Stone in a Landslide" by Maria Barbal:
  short but intense, on life in the Catalan Pyrenees before and during the Spanish civil war, told through the life story of a farmer's woman, from childhood to old age. (Goodreads)
• "This is Water" by David Foster Wallace.
  2 years ago, i read David Foster Wallace's thought-provoking commencement speach at New Year morning: "This is Water". which now turned into a kind of returning read for the day. here's a blog entry on it with link to the speech: This is Water
• "Reise nach Trulala" by Wladimir Kaminir
  wiki-bio: "a Russian-born German short story writer, columnist, and disc jockey of Jewish origin" - there is no English translation of his books, but they are as wild and colorful as his bio suggests, a mix of comedies, tragedies, fables and urban myths.
• "The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
  while sorting the bookshelf, i arrived at my copy of “The Little Prince”, and opened it – such a beautiful tale. so i am reading it again.

***

Reading 2013: Global reads & book joys

now i look forward to a year of gloabl reads in 2013, with the 7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books - Reading Challenge 2013, which will start in India for me... and with some other books ordered and on the way already. such a joy, to line up books :)

here's more if you are interested:





















7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books - Reading Challenge 2013
The idea of this reading challenge is to explore the world by books from different continents and countries, and by visiting various world lists while planning the reads, to encounter the one or other unknown angle and fact about our world.