Rope of Ash, Shahnon Ahmad, 1965
The Last Days of the Storyteller, Anwar Ridhwan, 1979
Sejarah Melayu, Tun Seri Lanang, 1612 (approx), trans. John Leyden
I’ve gotten myself into a bit of a quandary about this blog. I started out behind–I was writing about books roughly a year after I’d read them. I thought I would catch up, but I remained about a year behind for nearly four years, through moving to the US and having my first kid. But then we moved again, had a second child, the pandemic hit, and for a little while I didn’t read very much and wrote almost nothing at all. When the dust settled, I found that I remembered very little about the books I had been reading when this blog timed out. I’ve continued to read–I’m currently on Taiwan, which means I have almost all of Southeast Asia to write about, as well as Macau and Hong Kong. I have told myself that I should just write about what I’ve read most recently and come back to the other stuff later at some point, but I find that I am constitutionally incapable of moving on out of order. I did it once, with Laos, and it just didn’t feel right.
Continue readingI had a very long travel day this week, so I got most of my reading done while stuck on a plane holding a sleeping or nursing baby. Jet lag is way more brutal when there are two little (also jet-lagged) people in your house and no one seems to want to sleep at the same time, so I got very little done the rest of the week. Continue reading
There are many ways in which America tells you you don’t belong. The eyes that slide around to find another face behind you. The smiles that appear only after you have almost passed them, intended for someone else. The stiffness in the body as you stand beside them watching your child and theirs slide down the pole, and the relaxed smile when another white mother comes up to talk. The polite distance as you say something about the children at the swings and the chattiness when a white parent makes a comment. A polite people, it is the facial muscles, the shoulder tension, and the silence that give away white Americans’ uneasiness with people not like them. The United States, a nation of immigrants, makes strangers only of those who are visibly different, including the indigenous people of the continent. Some lessons begin in infancy, with silent performances, yet with eloquent instructions.
In my ongoing effort to achieve gender parity in my list (as well as my somewhat less successful effort to pare the list down to a more manageable size) I’ve made a few changes to the list in the past month. I’ve also changed my reading order for Southeast Asia. I had originally intended to go from Thailand to Cambodia and then to Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Macau; I decided it would make more geographical sense to go Thailand-Myanmar-Laos-Cambodia-Vietnam-Macau. Vietnam and Macau don’t share a border (there’s a bit of China between them), but they’re a hell of a lot closer than Macau and Myanmar.
Here are my additions and subtractions, with the occasional explanation: Continue reading
Around the World in 2000 Books 