One of my sorority sisters was Armenian, and she talked about being Armenian a lot. She was involved in different Armenian cultural groups off campus, and her formal dates were always fellow members. I was kind of like, whatever, it’s nice that she’s interested in the country of her ancestry, but it’s also kind of… [Read More]
Blog
Category: Rest of the World
Azerbaijan: The Orientalist
I was searching for books about Azerbaijan and skipped over the country’s most famous novel, Ali and Nino: A Love Story, because I didn’t know it was the country’s most famous novel. I was worried about getting stuck with some dreck. Then I saw that The Orientalist: In Search of a Man Caught Between East… [Read More]
Antarctica: A Year On Ice
Antarctica isn’t a country, but I am writing about it anyway. My blogging challenge, my rules, right? Antarctica A Year On Ice is a documentary about life in Antartica over the winter. The continent has about 4,000 residents in the summer season, peaking in December – February, and roughly 1,000 people the rest of the… [Read More]
Antigua and Barbuda: Annie John
The Caribbean islands of Antigua and Barbuda were British colonies until 1981. Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Annie John in 1985, although it originally appeared as a series of short stories in The New Yorker. Annie John is a coming of age story about a girl who lives on Antigua. The exact time is never specified, but… [Read More]
Andorra
Andorra: A Novel is not set in the real Andorra, which is disappointing. It’s set in a fictionalized version of it that takes some liberties with geography. The real Andorra is a land-locked country situated between Spain and France. It has 77,000 people who live in its capital, Andorra La Vella, or in the surrounding… [Read More]
