Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, his novel about a Dominican family haunted by a fukú, a multi-generational curse. Like his protagonists, Díaz has split his time between the US and the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispañola with Haiti. Haiti is a bit of… [Read More]
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Burundi: Small Country
Burundi, indeed, is a small country in East Africa, with about 14 million people across 27,830 square kilometers. It was under German and Belgian colonial rule until 1962. The country has two primary ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. The Germans and Belgians kept the Tutsi monarch intact, but the Belgians began cutting off… [Read More]
Mexico: Pedro Paramo
This episode of reading around the world brings me to Mexico and Pedro Paramo. It’s a country that I’ve spent a lot of time in, as a tourist and a Fulbrighter, and I love it so much. This book is a classic of magical realist literature in a new translation that shows why it has… [Read More]
Monaco: meet Me in Monaco
I found Meet Me in Monaco: A Novel of Grace Kelly’s Royal Wedding in a Little Free Library and grabbed it, because Monaco is a country and I have a long list of countries to read about. This is a fun read that moves along at a nice pace, about people who are tangentially involved… [Read More]
Bangladesh: The Good Muslim
I started this books around the world project in the pandemic, when travel was off limits. It’s taken longer than I thought it would, in part because there are so many countries! It’s a big world out there, and not every place has a lot of good books written about it. Take Bangladesh. I had… [Read More]
