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The Kanak Apple Season

June 12, 2017June 11, 2017 ~ Kelly Dunagan ~ 2 Comments

The Kanak Apple Season: Selected Short Fiction of Déwé Gorodé, Déwé Gorodé, translated and edited by Peter Brown, 2004

New Caledonia, #3
Borrowed from SF public library
Read: February 2016
Rating: 3.5/5
Recommended for: studious rabble-rousers

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Les Contes de Poindi: Tool-making crows and living dead eels

May 31, 2017 ~ Kelly Dunagan ~ 5 Comments

Les Contes de Poindi, Jean Mariotti, 1941

New Caledonia, #1
Paperback, $4.67 from Amazon
Read July 2016
Rating: 4/5
Recommended for: wise children

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A slightly belated #burmese #bookstack

I have been reading this book since November. It’s not terrible or anything; in fact it’s a pretty compelling story of a young woman who marries a man who doesn’t understand her and treats her like a doll, determining what she eats, what she wears, when she sleeps, and (most harrowingly) whether and how often she can see her family. The heroine’s passivity in the face of all these ever-tightening restrictions is a little frustrating to me, but it’s set in Burma in the 1930s, where women were pretty much expected to be passive and compliant all the time. It’s not exactly a page-turner, but I don’t think that’s why I’ve stalled out on this book. I don’t know whether to blame the pandemic or just life with two small children, but for perhaps the first time in my life I just haven’t felt like reading. Might as well say “I haven’t felt like breathing,” but there it is. But at last I’m nearly finished with “Not out of Hate,” and I decided to download the Kindle edition of “Letters from Burma” and the audiobook of “Burmese Days” so that hopefully I can get a little more reading done during the long long hours I spend nursing my toddler to sleep in a dark room. I would very much like to reach a stage where parenting and reading are not in conflict, but I’m afraid that day might never come.

It’s been a long time since I wrote a blog post. Frankly it’s been a while since I read anything that wasn’t by NK Jemisin or Stephen King. But I still have all these books from Southeast Asia that I’ve read and haven’t written about, so I jumped back in with quick takes on a whole bunch of books from the Philippines, including this fantastic buddy-cop serial killer mystery starring two Jesuit priests.

Folsom Street Fair, 2015

#tbt to my last blog post of 2019: America Is in the Heart, by Carlos Bulosan

Drawings from today’s blog post, Philippine Food and Life by Gilda Cordero-Fernando. Link in profile.

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