World Reads, continued: short stories from the Caribbean + from Exile

The stories I read this week... were from many different place. Here's a photo that gives an idea, reaching from the Carribean to the Middle East and further, and including places that were "firsts" on my reading map. Like: Tobago. Or: Jamaica.

Pepperpot:  short stories from the Caribbean
So: Jamaica. And: Bahamas. First thing that comes to mind with those names is: long white beaches, ocean breeze, Sun. Reggae music. No real idea about the places themselves, though. It's great that the 2 publishers Akashic books and Peepal Tree Press teamed up and made this collection possible. It includes stories from:

• Trinidad & Tobago
• Jamaica 
• Belize 
• Barbados
• Antigua & Barbuda 
• Bahamas 

No easy island reads, but some rather tough topics included. I guess to every place, there is an outside / touristic view, and the view of the people who actually live and work there. This collection takes you there, to this other side.

Here's more about the collection: Publisher's page: Pepperpot: Best New Stories from the Caribbean

Story  links
The opening story is also online at Granta, and gives an idea of the different view the collection offers:

The Whale House by Sharon Millar, Trinidad and Tobago
"These offshore islands rise out of the water, rugged and black with deep crevices and craggy promontories. Her father used to tell the story of building the house. Dynamite under the water to blow a hole in the hill, a false plateau appearing like a shelf, the hill buckled up behind it."

And a second story link, from an online magazine that focuses on the Carribean, too,with a focus on poetry, but they also published some stories: Tongues of the ocean – stories

Here is one of them, one that stayed with me:

"Saving Rupa" by Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming, Trinidad
"Yesterday I decide I not running no more. I can’t manage with coming last again. Ever since that time when the boy hold down Rupa, it look like I use up all the speed Maha Devi give me for this life..."

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Writing Exile
Last week, the new issue of Words Without Borders went live. And it was such a good suprise. The theme of it is: "Writing Exile".Which connects almost perfectly with my recent reads and the blog post about them: "Reading from Chile to Paris to Romania with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera & Herta Müller, or: home, exile, and fiction (blog post link)"

Here are some lines from the introduction to the Exile issue:

This month we present writing about and from exile. Although not all exiles flee political persecution or war, they have in common an involuntary departure forced by adverse circumstances. In fiction, poetry, and autobiography, writers explore the notions of departure and absence, memory and loss.

Reading it, it made me think that violence is a theme that runs through these days, too - and that exile often is a form of violence: being forced to leave your homeland.

Story links
The issue includes authors from Syria, Cuba, Uzbekistan and other places, here are some direct links:

• Fragile States: Artwork from freeDimensional: the issue also includes a virtual exhibition with artists from Iran, Burma, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Syria, and Malaysia: "Fragile States explores the physical and psychological experiences of persecution and forced displacement."
• Exiled in Europe: an interview with 3 women writers from the Middle East who currently live in Europe, with some surprise views of exile: "The Iraq that we see on TV today is not the one I was raised in and lived in. It’s like Noah’s Ark. The millions who left, not only for political reasons but in order to have freedom, took a little bit of Iraq with them and preserved it.”
• Bag of the Nation: magic realism short fiction by Osama Alomar, Syria: "I took the big bag that I had inherited from my grandfather down from the attic. It was brightly colored like a storm of rainbows. I hoisted it onto my back and went out into the street. I closed my eyes and began to choose samples at random from everything that was inside: humans and stones and dust and flowers and wind and the past and the present and the future..."

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Links + More

Reading the world:  the collected list of stories is online here: global reading, and a note on the reading journey can be found here:  reading the (missing parts of) the world 

• Previous short story post: Reading Lolita in Tehran & In Her Place
• The world in 7 books (or: mapping our world by continents)
• More reading notes in this blog: life as a journey with books
• Other book blogs: It's Monday! What are you reading? 

Reading Lolita in Tehran & In Her Place

Reading right now: a memoir in books, from a place where more and more books were banned, and stories from"In Her Place"

Reading Lolita in Tehran
I haven't read Lolita yet. But if I wanted to, I could go into the next best book shop and order it. And read it. And blog about it. And invite friends to read it together with me. We could organize a public event. And we probably would have to find a way to catch attention for it, in these days of news buzz and scandals.

It's hard to imagine to live in a place where all this is dangerous or impossible. Where books are banned, where reading Lolita is forbidden. Azar Nafisi has been there, in this place. She put her experiences and memories into words, into a book: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" is a mosaic of situations, many of them directly related to novels and stories. The book is moving back and forth in time, it is sorted not by date, but by books, and has four main sections: "Lolita", "Gatsby", "James", and "Austen". And it includes countless thoughtful paragraphs with reflections on books and reading, like this one, from the Gatsby part:

"You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.” 

Nafisi gave the book the subtile: "A memoir in books", and what makes the book so special is that Nafisi is a wanderer between worlds: she lived in the Iran before the revolution, she lived in the US, and she lived in the Iran after the revolution. And was a literary professor at the university of Tehran.

“It is only through literature that one can put oneself in someone else’s shoes and understand the other’s different and contradictory sides and refrain from becoming too ruthless. Outside the sphere of literature only one aspect of individuals is revealed. But if you understand their different dimensions you cannot easily murder them.”

In the book, she tells about the way life changed in Iran, from an open society to a fundamentalist state that cut down one freedom after another, banned books and veiled women, and left more and more people stranded at home, isolated and afraid. At some point, Nafisis started to invite some of her former students to meet up and read together. Which was both a thing that helped them to stay mentally sane, but also had to be kept secret. She notes:

“The novels were an escape from reality in the sense that we could marvel at their beauty and perfection. Curiously, the novels we escaped into led us finally to question and prod our own realities, about which we felt so helplessly speechless.”

To imagine that: reading as a dangerous and forbidden activity.

Azir Nafisi lives in the US now. While reading the book, I also watched an interview with her - or rather a book talk with her. It is about Lolita, about life in a totalitarian state, about her own book, and about novels and the layers of life they include. And how stories are essential to our survival. here's the link: Interview with Azar Nafii, Reading Lolita in Tehran

Altogether, this book summary adds it up beautifully (and painfully): “In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature."

There's s goodreads page with quotes from "Reading..", it includes 4 pages with reflections on reading and books, like this one:

“A novel is not an allegory, I said as the period was about to come to an end. It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel; you inhale the experience. So start breathing.” 

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In Her Place, or: Getting Around
More experiences: Earlier this year, i read a collection of travel stories called "Be There Now". Unfortunately, the anthology doesn't include biographies of the authors or links to their websites, but with the help of Google&co, i found some of the author blogs and links to other stories of the authors - and i found another story collection, one that is online: "In Her Place" - Stories about Women Who Get Around". 

Here's their concept: "We recently had a call for submissions and received a huge response by some very talented authors. We read them all and selected a handful of the stories that we felt answered the call: “In what ways does being female affect one’s sense of place, placement, and/or (dis)location?”

So glad I followed links, got around, and arrived there, at this beautiful and thoughtful place. The author that brought me there is "Once in a Lifetime" by Terri Elders, and it is about a rare encounter. The plan now is to follow some more story links, see where they take me. I am still focusing on short stories, trying to read around the globe and visit places I haven't been to before in stories (more about that here: reading the world) - and In Her Place now added Guatemala and Puerto Rico to the map. 

Here are some direct links to stories from "In Her Place":

Guatemala
"Once in a Lifetime" by Terri Elders
"In l990 when I first moved to Antigua, Guatemala, my birder knowledge was…for the birds. Or at least my housemate, Kelly, saw it that way.."

Iraq / Mexico
"¿Cómo Se Dice Gravy?" by Huda Al-Marashi
"You are twenty-one years old. You have a college degree, and you were friends with your husband before you married him. Pull yourself together. Make a good memory for today, and then you can be sad again tomorrow..."

India
"Ebony has many shades", by Mira Desai
"Aruna’s skin burned, scorching seven layers, as she shaded her eyes and watched the black flecks circle overhead, wingspan spread, almost motionless as they rode invisible air currents. Death birds. Birds of prey..."

Romania 
"A Popular Passport" by Avra Kouffman
"Try to get comfortable. It’s your first month in eastern Europe and you’re about to take a 14-hour train trip from Moldova to Bucharest, Romania. This overnight journey will be mired in the deepest humidity and where you actually want to go is Ukraine..."

Puerto Rico / Spain
"Spanish Flies" by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro
"In Spain, the flies do not leave, even if you try to scare them, whipping up your hands. They are different from the ones in Puerto Rico, where, at the slightest provocation, the insect flutters its wings and flies away..."

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Links + More

Reading the world:  the collected list of stories is online here: global reading, and a note on the reading journey can be found here:  reading the (missing parts of) the world 

• Previous short story post: Women Who Destroy Science Fictionu
• The world in 7 books (or: mapping our world by continents)
• More reading notes in this blog: life as a journey with books
• Other book blogs: It's Monday! What are you reading? 

reading the world, or a trip around the globe in short stories

There are so many books out there - and so many countries. Since I travelled to Asia and around Europe, I also started to travel more in reading - looking for books from other countries, preferably written from authors who live there.

To keep track of the countries and books I've read, I started an online list, it's up here: "Books from around the world". For a while, I looked for "missing countries", but then the focus shifted a bit towards graphic novels (job-related), and towards gender balance, inspired by the #readwomen2014 initiative (more here, in a reading note: "can a hashtag change reading habits?").

Now, as the calendar reached the halfway-point of the year, I reflected on the books I've read so far this year, and put a list together, it's on top of the country list: 2014 Reads. So far I've read 37 books. 15 were written by women, 18 by men -- which gives the answer to the question "can a hashtag change reading habits?"

From a global perspective, though, the 2014 reads offer not many "new" regions. there's a mix of UK, US, Germany, France, Brazil, Japan, Spain... yet the only new territories that come in book-size are North Korea and Ukrania. To get more "wordly" again, I looked for a world list, to print and mark. Here's the plain list: Countries listed by continents.

In the picture above, you see a snapshot of the list with marks. Just reading through it and marking the countries I've been to literally made me curious for the ones that are still "missing". Also, the marking brought back a memory: I actually have read a story from Bangladesh this year. It was part of the collection "One World" reading note . I even listed the countries in the post... but then, didn't include them in my Book List. Same goes for the other global anthologies I read this year:  "Be There Now", "Her place", "Poetry of 3000 years"...

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Summer Reading, or a trip around the globe in short stories

That's how the "reading map" for this summer found its shape: for the next weeks, I want to focus on short stories, and look for stories from the places I haven't read from yet. Following that thought, I googled a bit - and arrived at the page of the Caine Prize for African Writing. They currently have the shortlist for 2014 up, and inlcuded the nominated stories as PDF to read.

So that's the startig point for my summer reading trip: Caine Prize Shortlist 2014

Here are the stories and the reading links: 

• Diane Awerbuck (South Africa) "Phosphorescence" 
  Read Phosphorescence
• Efemia Chela (Ghana/Zambia) "Chicken" 
  Read Chicken
• Tendai Huchu (Zimbabwe) "The Intervention" 
  Read The Intervention
• Billy Kahora (Kenya) "The Gorilla's Apprentice" 
  Read The Gorilla's Apprentice
• Okwiri Oduor (Kenya) "My Father's Head" 
  Read My Father's Head

Not sure yet how to "map" the list best - will see. Also, I want to revisit and add the links to the stories I've read in the last months, too, especially the ones with a strong element of place, like "Wakulla Springs", the Nebula nominated storyt that is set in Florida...  And reading the first story, the thought came up: I could check out the current issues of international magazines like Asymptote or Words Without Borders, and also browse their archives... ah, wor(l)d journeys!

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Update 1, July 14: Stories of migration
Here's the next blog post, with short stories on migration and a long-time walking/writing project: Reading (+crowdfunding) a global walk through time & stories of migration


Update 2, July 21: Hugo Award + Stories Between Borders
Reading this week: the nominated short stories of the Hugo Award  2014 (which are rather international this year), stories from between borders, and more: Reading: Hugo Award Stories + Between Borders + Nadine Gordimer

More Links

• The world in 7 books (or: mapping our world by continents)
• Just found this hasthag on twitter: #readingtheworld
• More reading notes in this blog: life as a journey with books
• Other book blogs and their current reads: It's Monday! What are you reading? (join by blogging and adding your link)

book phone box reads: poetry of 3000 years & a true diary, or: smallworld + #readwomen2014

The books I read this week... were chance reads, brought by the phone book box again. After the luck I had there with books the last time (finding "The Lake" by Banana Yoshimoto, and a new edition of timeless essays, here's more), I went there again to bring some own books. And again, I was lucky and found 2 interesting books - a poetry collection that covers 3000 years, and an autobiographic paperback:


Poetry Collection .. #readwomen
The poetry collection is just perfect for the #readwomen2014 theme: the title of it is also its concept "Gedichte von Frauen aus drei Jahrtausenden" - "Poems by Women written during three thousand years".  It covers all regions and epoches, and leads from Sappho (Greece) to Emily Dickinson (US), and from Ono Komachi (Japan) to Adelia Prado (Brasil) and Amrita Pritam (India), and on and on...

This will be a summer companion book for me, to read at a slow pace of 2 or 3 pages / poems a day.

A short poem that touched is from Rose Ausländer, on the beauty and challenge that words can be: the labyrinth and the door they present: "In Wonder"

I lose myself

in the jungle of words

Find myself again
in the wonder
of the word.

... here's a webpage that features a set of Auländer's poems, with the German and English version next to each other: Rose Ausländer Links & Poems

(and nice to find another poet with the almost same name, one i know... hello, Rose Auslander)

back to the phone box books: here's the open page with the German vesion of Ausländer's poem, and beneath it, a poem by Zuzanne Ginzanka...

 

Ginzanka is a poet i havn't know, from Poland. Born in 1917, she had to face the world war, and died at 27. It's a small solace that at least her words remain. here's more about her, and a translated poem, in the literature section of the Polish magazine biweekly.pl: Something of Other - Portrait of Zuzanna Ginczanka (interesting article that also is about the difficulty of translation).

..more to come from this book in a future book post. i think this might be not only a slow read, but an interconnected read, one that makes me google more about the single poets. i also think it's great that this anthology is so international.

**

the other book is a German version, but I guess the title is easy to read anyway:


"The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie
When I saw the book, I remembered that I heard of it somewhere, and picked it - and later, when I added it to my Goodreads book list, I noticed a book review by fellow blogger Jessie Carty, who wrote: "'I'd highly recommend this one and I'd love to teach it someday because there is so much to discuss regarding race, poverty, thinking as a creative person, and simply on how to be good to others.... This is another great example of a young adult novel that will be a fanststic read for an adult (review link)."

I can only second that, and today, after having finished the book, I looked for a youtube clip with Sherman Alexie - in the book, he's a schoolboy, living in a Res(ervat), and trying to find his way - which for him means, to cross the border to the next town, and go to school there. The book includes illustrations, which also point at a young style. Such a surprise to play the video and see the grown-up author he has become:



Another thing I learned: Alexie also writes poem. Here's his page at Poetry Foundation.

And to close the circle... here's a poem by the other Rose Auslander, on the magic and difficulty of words:

Your spine unrolls
and flattens
my heart.

We have no words
for this...

The full poem is online here: THIS - it is published in Referential Magazine, which is edited by Jessie Carthy (the one who wrote about Alexie). The world sometimes is a box of unexpected connections. 

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Currently Reading + More Reads:

For 2014, i didn't join a specific reading challenge, but i try to read books / authors from different countries and continents, and also follow the “readwomen2014” initiative. Here’s more about it: 2014 - year of reading women

For more reading notes in this blog, click here: life as a journey with books- and a reading list by regions is online at: World Reads by country

Other book blogs and their current reads: It's Monday! What are you reading? (join by blogging and adding your link)

reading: Shakespeare, 1984, and Nebula Award winner Aliette de Bodard

Recent reads... came in shorter bits and pieces that turned out impressive and fascinating. The very short version of it: i am still stunned by Nebula-Award Winner Aliette de Bodard. Didn't know her work until now - so glad I arrived there. Check out her page, the Nebula read is a free download, and her essays on culture and diversity and stereotypes are important, vivid and heartfelt.

And here is the longer reading note:

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Litro Magazine "Shakespeare" 
Litro Magazine from London celebrated Shakespear's 450th birthday with an own issue. Opened it, thought it probably isn't really for me, then read the introduction - and the essay by Ben Crystal about playing / being Hamlet: "To be or not be..." 

For brief excerpts, visit the online version of the issue: Litro Magazine "Shakespeare" 

And this is the from the introduction: "But perhaps all this celebrity glamour is blinding us to the real issue: does Shakespeare speak to our minorities? Is Othello all he has to offer for Britain’s new multicultural landscape? Should we pay attention to the celebrities flocking to play his great heroes – or the men and women who take on the smaller roles, who toil behind the scenes to keep Shakespeare’s words alive for today’s audiences?"

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1984 - U-Comix 
A theme issue of the different kind: the U-Comix collection was a free comic day read. It honors Orwell and his visionary writing - 1984 was 30 years ago, and still it is timely, maybe more than ever. The first comic story of it includes a joke about reading 1984 on a mobile device: Big Brother is watching you read...

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Nebula Award - Best Novelette: ‘‘The Waiting Stars,’’ Aliette de Bodard

Reading the 1984 stories made me remember that the Nebula Awards are on - here's the Nebula Award page with a list of all winners:  Nebula Award Winners 2013

I already read one of the novellas recently; "Wakulla Springs" (more here), and now picked the winning novellette to read next: ‘"The Waiting Stars" by Aliette de Bodard. Such a fascinating and different read: woven into it is the theme of culture, with a relation to Vietnam culture. Aliette de Bodard herself lives in France. And the main characters are all: female. It made me think of Readwomen2014 again, especially in relation to SciFi and the heated discussions that developed in this genre and writer associations earlier this year,,, okay, I won't go into all the discussion, for more check out the Kickstarter Project "Women Destroy Science Fiction" by Hugo-Award nominated magazine Lightspeed.

But back to the Stars: here's a quote from the novelette:

There were tales, at the Institution, of what they were. She’d been taken as a child, like all her schoolmates–saved from the squalor and danger among the savages and brought forward into the light of civilisation – ...  Rescued, Matron always said, her entire face transfigured, the bones of her cheeks made sharply visible through the pallor of her skin. Made safe.  ...  Catherine had asked what she was safe from. They all did, in the beginning–all the girls in the Institution, Johanna and Catherine being the most vehement amongst them...

The light of civilisation, and the way it asks minorities to adapt to it. It relates back to Shakespeare again:
To be or not to be. And if to be, then how to be, and how much to let go of ones being.

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"Hidden - A Child's Story of the Holocaust" 
Following the theme, I read the graphic novel "The Hidden Child" by  Loic Dauvillier, who tells the story of a Jewish family in France, and starts a generation later: "In this gentle, poetic young graphic novel, Dounia, a grandmother, tells her granddaughter the story even her son has never heard: how, as a young Jewish girl in Paris, she was hidden away from the Nazis by a series of neighbors and friends who risked their lives to keep her alive when her parents had been taken to concentration camps."
Here's more, in an NY Times article: Stories of Resistance and Escape. 

To imagine to grow up in such circumstances, in a light of a civilisation that turns to darkness.

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Currently Reading + More Reads:

For 2014, i didn't join a specific reading challenge, but i try to read books / authors from different countries and continents, and also follow the “readwomen2014” initiative. Here’s more about it: 2014 - year of reading women

For more reading notes in this blog, click here: life as a journey with books- and a reading list by regions is online at: World Reads by country

Other book blogs and their current reads: It's Monday! What are you reading? (join by blogging and adding your link)

reading: #readwomen, poetry podcast, and A Room of One's Own

"Can a hashtag change reading habits?"

That was the question posed by Joanna Walsh in January, who declared 2014 as her year of reading women in the Guardian's Women's Blog. The hashtag went viral, probably as it was a direct way of reacting to a frustrating situation that has been addressed in repeating articles (and statistics, like the one by Vida Count), without much change.

Now, several weeks after the start, the readwomen-hashtag is still brimming with new entries: blog notes, reading suggestions, photos, quotes. Just looking at the tagboard gives the answer to the question "Can a hashtag change reading habits?" - Have a look: #readwomen2014

The great thing about the hashtag approach is that it's easy to join, and that it creates an impulse on a direct reader-level. Magazines and bookstores now start to pick up the trend, too. Parallel to that, the twitter-list itself is turning to a starting place to explore writing by women authors in all kind of formats.

Here are some of direct links:

• Out with the Old - a poetry podcast by Poetry Foundation: "Dorothea Lasky's charming, powerful poetry takes readers by surprise." (also, great to discover the Poetry podcast series altogether)
• Dignity by Suzen Rita Chang: a short story, with additional audio version included: "I didn’t come here on a boat...."
• VIDA Lit  Count 2013:  "First, the good news: A couple of giants in the original VIDA Count have begun to move..." + Charts overview
• A list of classic women writers, from 17th century to the 19th century
• For more, try the hashtag #readwomen2014 or visit the readwomen tagboard

A Room of One's Own 

The book I am reading right now is inspired by the hashtag, too: Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own". It' s from 1929, but the starting lines could be from today, addressing not a room in the first place, but the topic of women and fiction:

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction — what, has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. -- The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light..."

There's an online version available through the wiki-page A Room of One's Own + online edition. 

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Currently Reading + More Reads:

I am currently joining the “readwomen2014” initiative. Here’s more about that: 2014 - year of reading women

For more reading notes in this blog, click here: life as a journey with books

A reading list by regions is online at: World Reads by country

& Other book bloggers and their current reads: It's Monday! What are you reading?

reading notes: Alice Munro (Nobel Prize 2013) & In Her Place (web stories)

(snapshot from Frankfurt International Bookfair in October 2013,
this was an hour after the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced)

"So i guess i will join #readwomen, too, and will read more books from women this year, starting with a book i had picked up in November, after the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Alice Munro: "Dear Life"...that's what I wrote two weeks ago, and reading Munro now brought back several memories of reading her stories:

Alice Munro, "Dear Life" and other stories
The first Munro-story I read was recommended to me by a friend: "The Bear Came Over The Mountain", included in the New Yorker. I still remember how after reading it,with all the turns and layers it included,  I was amazed by it, and felt like having read a novel. (I just looked, the New Yorker put it online again, it's up here). After reading more of her work, I got curious for the person behind the stories. When her new story collection was released, "Dear Life", I was surprised when I read about her age:

"Munro is now in her 80s. The timelines in her stories have become longer, and the sense of fatedness has stretched to match. Some of the stories in her new collection, Dear Life, begin with the cultural and economic shift that happened after the second world war and end anytime around now. It is as though the events of that time loosened peoples lives up just enough to make them their own.... Munro is interested in how we get things wrong. Age she says, changes your perceptions "of what has happened – not just what can happen but what really has happened". 

The passage above is from a  Guardian review written by Anne Enright, here's the whole article: Dear Life by Alice Munro. Now I finally read the collection myself, and again, Munro impresses with both the stories, and her writing talent. Her short stories are brimming with layers and depth, and reflect the large themes of the world in a small town-perspective. At the end of the collection, she has included 4 stories based of her own life, which for me turned to my favs of the collection, with the hints they gave into the personal world Munro wrote from. 

In one of those unexpected parallels in theme, I was reading Cheryl Strayed's "Wild" just a bit later, and learned that she was inspired by Munro. In an interview, Strayed mentioned how she actually wrote to Munro after having her first story published, to thank her - and then later received a letter from her. And she wrote an essay: Munro County. For me, those cross-connections are often as interesting as the stories themselves: the way words on a page turn into an own story.

On the day the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded last year, I was at the Frankfurt international book fair. I still remember the vibe that went through the fair: short story writer + female author gets the award! When I later walked past the booth of the publisher that features her books in Germany, camera crews were there, and a woman sat right next to the copies of Alice Munro’s book, eyes on the books and the people walking past them. “You are bodyguarding them?” I said. “Yes!” she said, smiling.

In Her Place, or: Getting Around
From Nobel-Prize story collections to online reads: in January, i read an anthology of travel stories called "Be There Now". Unfortunately, the anthology doesn't include biographies of the authors or links to their websites, but with the help of Google&co, i found some of the author blogs and links to other stories of the authors. That's how I arrived at "In Her Place" - Stories about Women Who Get Around": an online anthology. Here's their concept: "We recently had a call for submissions and received a huge response by some very talented authors. We read them all and selected a handful of the stories that we felt answered the call: “In what ways does being female affect one’s sense of place, placement, and/or (dis)location?”

So glad I followed links, got around, and arrived there, at this beautiful and thoughtful place. The author that brought me there is "Once in a Lifetime" by Terri Elders, starting with those words: "In l990 when I first moved to Antigua, Guatemala, my birder knowledge was…for the birds."  The plan now is to follow some more links, see where I arrive at. 

And here are some direct links to stories from "In Her Place":

Guatemala
"Once in a Lifetime" by Terri Elders
"In l990 when I first moved to Antigua, Guatemala, my birder knowledge was…for the birds. Or at least my housemate, Kelly, saw it that way.."

Iraq / Mexico
"¿Cómo Se Dice Gravy?" by Huda Al-Marashi
"You are twenty-one years old. You have a college degree, and you were friends with your husband before you married him. Pull yourself together. Make a good memory for today, and then you can be sad again tomorrow..."

India
"Ebony has many shades", by Mira Desai
"Aruna’s skin burned, scorching seven layers, as she shaded her eyes and watched the black flecks circle overhead, wingspan spread, almost motionless as they rode invisible air currents. Death birds. Birds of prey..."

Romania 
"A Popular Passport" by Avra Kouffman
"Try to get comfortable. It’s your first month in eastern Europe and you’re about to take a 14-hour train trip from Moldova to Bucharest, Romania. This overnight journey will be mired in the deepest humidity and where you actually want to go is Ukraine..."

Puerto Rico / Spain
"Spanish Flies" by Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro
"In Spain, the flies do not leave, even if you try to scare them, whipping up your hands. They are different from the ones in Puerto Rico, where, at the slightest provocation, the insect flutters its wings and flies away..."

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Currently Reading + More Reads:

I am currently joining the “readwomen2014” initiative. Here’s more about that: 2014 - year of reading women

For more reading notes in this blog, click here: life as a journey with books

A reading list by regions is online at: World Reads by country

& Other book blog and their current reads: It's Monday! What are you reading?

2014: The Year of Reading Women: #readwomen2014

Can a hashtag change reading habits?

2014 has been declared as the year of reading women by the Guardian in an article - and that article now went viral with the hashtag: #readwomen 2014, with more and more readers joining, and new notes and links appearing continually in the twitterstream

Here's the key line from the original article: "Female authors are marginalised by newspapers and literary journals, and their books are given 'girly' covers. Take action against this inequality by making sure the next book you read is by a woman."

The thing is, for a while i had made it a habit to read a well-gender-balanced mix of authors. But then my focus had shifted towards the region the author is coming from. Now i just did a count of the books i read in 2013: 19 were written by women, 27 by men. and this january, i happened to read mainly male authors.

So i guess i will join #readwomen, too, and will read more books from women this year, starting with a book i had picked up in November, after the Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Alice Munro: "Dear Life".

Taboos, Wisdom, and other recommended reads 
I now started to mark some of my favourite books by female authors with a tag, here are some direct links:

• Taboos & Role Models: reading Wetlands by Charlotte Roche with some notes on "female books"
• Leaving India by Minal Hajratwala: fascinating family story that tells a lot about migration
• Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman: reflections on reading
• The Wisdom of no Escape by Pema Chodron this book keeps accompanying me
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed: from lost to found

Click here to visit the collected posts: life as a journey - recommended reads for #readwomen2014

Links

• For more, visit the feature with several links in the blueprint lit blog:
  #readwomen2014: who will you read in 2014? 
• the Guardian article is online at: Will #readwomen2014 change our sexist reading habits?

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More Reads:

For more reading notes in this blog, click here: life as a journey with books

A reading list by regions is online at: World Reads by country

& Other book blog and their current reads: It's Monday! What Are You Reading? link list

"Where do we go from here?" - reading: Jane Austen in Baghdad, self-discovery in France, holidays & wars, and more

This blog post is inspired by the general joy of reading, the 7 continents reading challenge, and a blog series. More, at the bottom of this post.



Last week brought some world-reading, with a book that leads from UK to Baghdad, and one that leads from Germany to France.... both dealing with the large questions of life: "How to go on?"


Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad
This book is about an unusual mail friendship between women who live in very different hemisphere and circumstances: it starts when BBC journalist Bee Rowlatt looked for citizens in Baghdad in 2007 to interview about their situation and how daily life can go in a time of invasion, with its difficult, war-ridden circumstances. and one of the persons she interviews is from the university: May Witwit, a lecturer of English – and from that interview, a mail dialogue develops that leads through years.  

Reading through the ongoing mail conversation, I also kept thinking of the situation in Iraq now, and of Egypt and Syria: so many families are trapped in those places of turmoil, hoping things will return to peace, and wishing they had fled earlier, and just stuck there, in a world that turned upside down, where shops close, where streets are blocked, where justice and security and normality walked away. The mails from May are contrasted by Bee’s mail from UK, who talks about the life there. And when reading, is also contrasted by my own life. The way I can drive to places, access the internet, be able to go jogging, or go for a walk, a life that comes with problems and frustrations, too, and illness and dramas, but on a very different level. 
Here's the Goodreads-link to the book.


Where do we go from here?
This is one of the chance books I wouldn't have picked myself, but it stood there in the telephone box book exchange - it's from Doris Dörrie, the German filmmaker with the “Hamami” film that is set in Japan. And just like the Hamami film, this book deals with the big life questions: how to deal with life, our dreams, and the reality that sometimes leaves us stuck in situations that seem like a self-created knot.  What when we don't feel at home in the life we created for ourselves? 

Writing this, I just noticed this parallel to Hamami: that the story starts in the West, but leads to the "East", in this book: to a buddhist retreat in France which is key to the story.

I just wished they had given the book a different cover than the one with the chic dancing couple in the photo above. Yet when I saw the English edition, I had to smile: it looks like a different novel, but also doesn't really catch the book and its mood. Here's the book description, and mostly, this really is a humorous and thoughtful journey of self-discovery that takes the reader along the way.

Meet Fred Kaufmann, disillusioned husband of thoroughly competent Claudia and father of surly teenager Franka. His dreams of being a movie director have long ago been shelved for marriage and a child. While Claudia sells her successful vegetarian take-out restaurant to a fast food chain and buys into Buddhism, Fred is trapped in the throes of a classic midlife crisis, made worse when Franka falls madly in love with a young guru. With the hope that brown rice and hardcore meditation will cure Franka's obsession, Fred chaperones his daughter to the meditation center in the South of France. But as a bizarre set of events unfolds, he embarks on a journey of self-discovery that only a special kind of hero can survive. Funny, incisive, and ultimately forgiving, "Where Do We Go From Here?" is a masterpiece of ironic social comedy from one of Germany's leading writers and filmmakers. (the book at Goodreads)

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Holidays, borders, war & this world

From books to film and to the news: the theme of the two worlds in "Austen in Baghdad" continued after I read the book, in a film that was featured in TV: “The Color of the Ocean”. The film tells the parallel storis of  boat migrants from Africa who try to make it to the Canary islands, and of a tourist who is trying to help when they are washed ashore. The contact creates a difficult connection between those worlds, and shows the twisted identity of the shore as both a holiday-bath-in-the-sun place, and a dangerous crossing line into Europe. Here’s the film page with trailer: http://www.diefarbedesozeans.de/

While reading the Baghdad book, the situation in Egypt got worse, and on Friday, the German travel agencies announced that all upcoming package journeys are cancelled until September. It was one of the main news items of that day, as Egypt still is well-visited from Europe. So you had the bizarre combination of news from Kairo with the almost civil-war-like scenes, and the death toll of 500 and rising. And then you had the travel warning, and frustrated families at the airport who had to go back home instead of boarding their holiday flight. Which, thinking of it in relation to the people who live in Cairo and what they are going through, isn’t really a drama.

Watching the reports, it seemed like 2 views on one place, one from inside as citizen, and one from the “but-we-want-our-summer-holiday-as-planned”-view. But i guess this is how the human mind works, that we see the world through the filter of our life, and that books like Austen in Baghdad help to show a view that you seldom see in the news: the difficult everyday life of people trapped in an occupied zone. 

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France & Finding Books

Upcoming... when all works out, I will heading to France next week, and I am currently figuring out which book to take along - will blog about them before leaving. I really enjoy this literal discovery-tour of the world. For some helpful resoursec, try this list of links that i pieced together earlier this year: Finding books by country: helpful links + resources


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Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently  reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there.

Around the world is a challenge by book blogger Giraffe Days. Here's the challenge overview link, and here the Belgium reading challenge page.

More monday reads from other bloggers: link list at book journey

And my own new book... is Worl(d)s Apart. True.

reading: Blue Hours + Yellow + (non)-Fairy Tales + film critics by Hulk

This blog post is inspired by the general joy of global reading, a blog series, a new online lit course and a reading challenge. More, at the bottom of this post.



This week's reads indeed are old and new, borrowed and blue...

Blue
I went to the library a couple of days ago, browsing books and hoping to find the right read without being able to name it - and found it: "Blue Nights" by Joan Didion, which is titled "Blue Hours" in German.
It’s a book that is both melancholic and so full of life: the whole book is a life reflection, non-fiction, a dealing with growing older, and being the one left of the family she and her husband and their adopted daughter were.

Here's a quote that sums up the theme and mood:

“Vanish.
Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.
Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.
Go back into the blue. I myself placed her ashes in the wall.
I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.
I know what it is I am now experiencing.
I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.
The fear is not for what is lost.
What is lost is already in the wall.
What is lost is already behind the locked doors.
The fear is for what is still to be lost.”
 ― Joan Didion, Blue Nights

For more about the book, and more quotes, try the Goodreads page: Blue Nights 

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Yellow
From color, Didion's "Blue" book reminded me of a book i have here since a while: "Yellow" by Don Lee, a book of short stories that are interconnect in a fictional city, and all circle the theme of immigration / culture / race from different angles. Don Lee's family is from South Korea, and he lived both in Seoul and in Tokyo as a child, and now lives in Boston. The book is called “Yellow”, and of course, comes with a yellow cover. so it’s blue yellow reads for this weekend.
Not an easy read, but intense and human, the stories form a window and sometimes a door into being someone who has no easy, single answer to the question: "Where are you from?" and "What are you?" - someone who is called with the words "'ello, 'ello", and thinks the other means "Hello" - until the understanding sinks in that the 'ello is mocking him as "yellow". -

The most important painful question the book poses probably is: how to deal with a world that comes with prejudices, and how not to let those prejudices narrow your world view, and start to be the theme of your days, turn into the narrative of your life story. Which is masterfully done, by stories that circle exactly this narrative.

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Fairy Tales
While looking for some web link, I came across a story again that remained in my mind since the first time I read it, a story that is set in Haiti, and like Yellow, opens a window into another world: "Things I Know About Fairy Tales" by Roxane Gay is an exceptional non-fairy-tale-story that also is about what we weave into the narrative of our life, and what we pull out:

"Once upon a time, not long ago, I was kidnapped and held captive for thirteen days. Shortly after I was freed, my mother told me there was nothing to be learned from what had happened to me. She told me to forget the entire incident because there was no moral to the story."

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Hulk Film Critic, or: The importance of Story and Character
And now, a very different read: an essay on modern superhero movies. Which, in fact, is an essay on much more: it's a reflection on story, character, the ethos of blockbusterdome, fakes, growth and truth.

It's written by Hulk. And it starts with this neat introduction:

PART ONE - A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE INTRODUCTIONS 

PLEASE NOTE: THIS ESSAY HAS FOUR DIFFERENT INTRODUCTIONS. SORRY BOUT THAT, IT'S JUST THAT WE'RE ULTIMATELY GOING TO NEED THEM ALL.

...and includes priceless passages on mankind and subjectivity like this on:
BUT WHILE EVERYONE IS CERTAINLY ENTITLED TO THEIR OPINION THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO THEIR OPINION BEING RIGHT. 

Don't get tricked by the all-capital sentences, or by the title. By the way, a good way to read it, is to copy it and read it on an e-book reader.

Film Critic Hulk Smash: The importance of dramatizing character

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Book Links, Previous Reads & Finding Books

Previous reading blog entries are collected here: bookshelf: currently  reading... there also is a visual bookshelf, just click it to get there.

Reading around the world - i really enjoy this literal discovery-tour of the world, and it now made me go and pull some useful links together in a blog post: Finding books by country: helpful links + resources

More monday reads from other bloggers: link list at book journey

And my own book... is Worl(d)s Apart. True.