Most travelers go to Malta for the gorgeous weather or the history. Because of its strategic location in the Mediterranean, the island has been taken over by one group after another. History forms literal layers that you can see almost everywhere you look. And among those layers are lots of coins. If you’re interested in… [Read More]
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Category: Rest of the World
Indonesia: Beauty is a Wound
Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan is a magical-realist centered on Indonesia in the years after Suharto’s fall in 1998. It opens with the main character emerging from her grave to check up on what’s happened to her daughters and grandchildren, and it’s not pretty. The family is dealing with a lot of drama,… [Read More]
Cyprus: The Island of Missing Trees
I’m working through my global books project and realizing that this could turn into a lifetime of work! For the island nation of Cyprus, I read The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. Cyprus is an island nation located in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. Like many nations in that part of the world, it… [Read More]
Bolivia: A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism
I first learned about Bolivia in second grade. One of the priests at my parish had served as a Maryknoll missionary in Bolivia, and he visited our classroom to tell us about it. Bolivia had two capitals, La Paz and Sucre, and the women wore bowler hats. To second graders, these were things that made… [Read More]
Spain: An Englishman in Madrid
I suppose my ongoing Velvet recaps could count as reviewing culture from Spain, but I went with a book in the spirit of reading around the world. And that brings me to An Englishman in Madrid, a spy novel set in pre-Franco Spain. The protagonist, Anthony Whitelands, is an English art historian. In 1936, he… [Read More]
