For Grenada, I read Angel by Merle Collins, a novel written largely in Grenadian Creole English. This made for a slow and challenging read—but also a rich and deeply rewarding one.

Confession: I hated this book’s cover. That helicopter? And the harsh color scheme? I braced myself for some sort of military thriller, with soldiers barking orders and diving out of choppers. No offense if that’s your jam! But I am not that reader.

To my great relief, Angel is not that kind of book. It’s a deeply domestic novel that centered on the life of Angel, her mom Doodsie, and their extended family in a rural part of Grenada. Through their eyes, we get an intimate sense of what it was like to grow up on the island in the 1960s and 1970s.

But this is also a novel about revolution. As the workers organize, strike, and rise up against colonial rule, Grenada lurches through political change—overthrowing corrupt leaders, experimenting with socialism, and ultimately enduring the U.S. invasion in 1983. The brilliance of Angel lies in how it roots this sweeping history in the day-to-day experiences of ordinary people. I came away with a much deeper understanding of Grenada’s past—and of what it means to live through poverty, protest, and political upheaval while struggling to live one’s regular life.

I love this moment when a hawk steals a chicken from the family yard and Doodsie, the family matriarch, scolds the remaining chickens:

‘Youall so stupid!’ Doodsie looked around the yard empty of fowls. They were hiding in the bushes, up on the steps, under the house. ‘If you’ll would stay tegedder, the chicken-hawk won come down an do nutting! Stupes!’

Angel by Merle Collins, page 287.

Don’t you just love how the author imparts the wisdom learned from revolution and invasion with such a silly moment? Collin’s sense of humor kept me engaged throughout the entire story. In the end, Angel was the perfect pick for Grenada.

For Greece, I read Zigzag through the Bitter-Orange Trees by Ersi Sotiropoulos, translated from the Greek by Peter Green.

Zigzag is LITERARY FICTION—no excuses, no apologies. Just buckle up and prepare to be confused.

The story alternate between four different storylines:

(1) Lia, a young woman dying in the hospital from a mysterious illness;

(2) Sid, her drifter brother and only connection to the outside world;

(3) Sotoris, Lia’s nurse, awkward in every creepy way; and

(4) Nina, a dreamy 12-year-old who writes angsty poetry.

The structure is non-linear, and for me, frustratingly opaque.

When I marked this book as “Currently Reading” on Goodreads, I noticed it’s overall rating is 2.85 stars. I panicked and had an extended conversation with ChatGPT about whether I should pick something else for Greece. After lots of agonizing, I decided to press on—and regretted that decision for the first fifty pages. And the next hundred pages. To be honest, I lost track of how many times I nearly quit.

But then, about ten pages from the end, everything shifted. Zigzag went from a two star trudge to a five star revelation. After I finished the book, I obsessively read criticism and analysis of the book and fell in love with its themes and symbolism.

Isn’t it a bitch when literature does that?

If you enjoy literary fiction, I highly recommend this novel. It’s dark and convoluted, abstract and fragmented, and it will make you THINK. About humanity. About stories. About life and death and loneliness and identity–and then back to story structure and character development. It’s messy but in the best way possible.

If you don’t enjoy literary fiction? This probably isn’t the book for you. No judgment! A year ago, I probably would have despised it, but my Read Around the World quest trained me for the darkly intense psychological puzzle that is ZigZag through the Bitter-Orange Trees and I’m glad I stuck it out.

As for me? I’m so glad I ventured beyond mythology (though I do love me some Hermes and Athena!) and explored contemporary Greek literature. The journey was uncomfortable—but I loved the destination.

Something magical happened: I gave every book book I read in April 2025 5 out of 5 stars. How awesome is that?! From street kids in Brazil to doomed love affairs in East Berlin, I read eight books in April and every single book was exactly what I needed at that exact moment.

Here’s a look at what I read! (Warning: this is a graphics heavy post so it might take a moment to load…)

p.s. If you are the Month of May 2025, and you are reading this, my deepest apologies. April set the bar kind of high. I don’t expect only five star reads from you! (But I’m not complaining if that’s what you deliver…)

For France, I read The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer but my mom really, really, REALLY wanted me to read Gustave Flaubert’s classic Madame Bovary.

Here’s the thing about my mom: the woman recommends STELLAR authors. Over the years, she has introduced me to Kerouac, Hemingway, Stegnar, Steinback, and Mahfouz–just to name a few. So when she recommended Madame Bovary, I requested the audiobook from my library immediately. Skipping Madame Bovary was never an option.

I did have a few reservations. Could my brain follow along with a nineteenth-century classic in audio format? While I listen to tons of audiobooks, most of them were written during the past 50 years, with language that’s a bit more casual and modern.

But I worried for nothing. I ended up listening to the version narrated by Ronald Pickup, from Gerard Hopkins’ translation, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So much so, that methinks a new side quest may be brewing: supplementing my Read Around the World journey with audiobook classics. I’ve never read anything by Victor Hugo (the horror, the horror), and that’s an omission I’m ready to fix. But for now, as I write this post, I’m deep into The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann–translated by John E. Woods and narrated by David Rintoul–as a bonus pick for Germany.

As for Madame Bovary? She was delightfully scandalous. Maybe not by today’s standards (and certainly not Avenida Brasil’s), but still—a deliciously dramatic trip to nineteenth-century provincial France. The fainting couches were probably working overtime.

For Ghana, I read Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo. According to the burb on the back of my volume, this book is a “prose poem” but I myself would describe it as “experimental literature that is a hybrid of prose and poetry.” Whatever the genre, I loved it.

This is the story of Sissie, who travels from Ghana to Germany as a student, and then questions why she left Africa and what she can learn from Europe. Aidoo alternates between prose and poetry in a way that I’ve never read, but it worked 110% and was such a lovely way to bring the reader into the narrator’s experience of being a black African woman in white Europe. As a writer myself, I was more than a little jealous with the way she was able to slide between prose and poetry and make it seem absolutely effortless.

When I was picking my book for Ghana, this book called to me–but I hesitated because the story is mainly set in Germany. When I created that graphic above, I prompted Midjourney to create a watercolor of a street scene in Accra, Ghana, because that was the place the author mentioned the most in regards to Ghana, but we only spent a few pages on the African continent. But I don’t regret picking this book! From Germany, Sissie was able to develop some strong ideas about conflicts between Africa and Europe, men and women, and the status quo and a desire to reform a rotten world. It was a very different and insightful perspective.

My highlighter was very busy as I read Our Sister Killjoy but this quote delivered the biggest gut punch:

Since so far, I have only been able to use a language that enslaved me, and therefore, the messengers of my mind always come shackled?

Our Sister Killjoy by Ama Ata Aidoo pg. 112.

I still get chills rereading that. As a Ghanian, Aidoo wrote in English, but English was brought to her country by the British, who colonized Ghana during the scramble for Africa. My read around the world quest has me thinking a lot about language, and Aidoo added a new angle to how language affects our thoughts, our experiences, our ways of processing the world.

A lot of people recommended that I read Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi for Ghana. That would have been another great pick (even if her family moved to the United States when she was about two years old); but my book club read Homegoing in 2018 so I took this opportunity to discover another Ghanaian author. I’m so glad I did. Aidoo’s work was challenging, lyrical, and thought-provoking and I’d love to read more of her work.

That said, Homegoing is an equally excellent pick! Seven years later, I still remember that my book club had a very lively discussion about it, and I feel the echoes of the agony and sorrow it evoked in my heart. Excuse me while I add Gyasi’s second novel Transcendent Kingdom to my TBR.

For Germany, I read Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. In 2024, this book won the International Booker Prize, and damn, it truly deserved the honor.

Kairos is the story of a passionate but difficult love affair that takes place in East Berlin at the end of the 1980s. Katharina is only nineteen years old when she meets Hans, who is married and ten years older than her father. He moved to Berlin during World War II; she has only ever known a city divided into East and West by one of the most famous walls in history.

As I began Kairos, I was swept back in time to 1999 when I studied history for a semester in London. Over a long weekend, I visited Berlin with my friend Amy, who was studying French in Paris. We visited the remains of the Wall, had coffee in a posh old hotel, nearly saw Barry White in concert, and had an unfortunate encounter with jellied meat. It’s always exciting to read a book for a country I’ve already had the luck to visit IRL. I went looking for my old photos but couldn’t find them, but if and when I dig them up, I’ll post them here. (Since I took these photos when I was in college, there’s a chance they were absorbed into my parents’ boxes of photos, and if that happened, my Berlin photos were unfortunately lost in the Palisades Fire.)

Back to Kairos! I loved this book for so many reasons — the analysis of life in East Berlin; the character development; the dissection of a disastrous love affair — but what I really want to talk about is the STYLE.

Many, many years ago, when I was in the 11th grade, my English teacher was a self-righteous grump who spent several lessons lecturing about “writing style.” I don’t remember much of what he said (it was 1995!!) but I do recall a handout that listed “icons with style,” and the list included David Bowie and Madonna. We were exhorted to write an essay that exhibited our own personal writing style, and after reading our essays, the teacher declared NONE OF YOU HAVE STYLE, with an undertone indicating that we should be deeply ashamed of ourselves and give up on any ambitions we had to be writers.

For years after this class, I was haunted by the fear that my writing lacked style. Ugh. Like doctors, all writer teachers should be admonished, above all, TO DO NO HARM.

It’s been thirty years since I absorbed those unfortunate lectures on writing style, but I’d like to take this opportunity to get a few thoughts off my chest: (1) my teacher was a pompous jerk; (2) you can’t expect teenagers to have finely honed their own writing style; and (3) my teacher was probably a frustrated writer who puffed up his own ego by telling his students that they weren’t any good.

That was a bit of a tangent, but I swear, I’m getting back to Kairos. As much as I was traumatized by my teacher’s lecture on writing style, he did impress upon me its importance. There’s no mathematical equation to determine whether an author has style, but I do know this: Kairos has it in spades. It’s not flashy, or self-consciously clever, but Erpenbeck’s writing style does feel deeply intentional. The prose, as translated by Michael Hofmann, is fragmented and fluid at the same time. There’s a rhythm to it that at first felt like nails on a chalkboard but but after reading a few pages, I surrendered and let the writing carry me along until I found myself wondering, Why aren’t all books written this way?

Erpenbeck has this way of writing a paragraph that captures a character’s inner and outer world. We get snippets of dialogue and then flashes of inner monologue; sensory details of a restaurant or train and then feelings related to the love affair. A single paragraph might touch on a dozen different moments but it manages to weave them together into a single feeling, or thought, or epiphany. I’m not going to even attempt to quote a passage from Kairos because the book is a symphony, each sentence playing its own dissonant tune, yet somehow coming together to create a novel of haunting beauty. I’d be doing you and Erpenbeck a huge disservice if I tried to capture the book’s style in a single passage.

Kairos was absolutely extraordinary, and I’m so glad I picked it for my quest–but full disclosure: it was really difficult to pick a single book for Germany! There’s just so many possibilities. I’ve already decided to listen to the audiobook for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few months, I look back and realize Kairos was the beginning of a German side quest.

For Georgia, I read The Eighth Life (For Brilka) by Nino Haratischvili. It was translated from German to English by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, and their translation won the English PEN award. I cannot emphasize enough (1) how much I loved this book and (2) how inadequate I feel to capture its essence in a blog post.

Let’s address the book’s length first since that will be the biggest stumbling block for most readers. The English edition weighs in at 934 pages, but these pages will suck you in and leave you wanting more. It took me about three and a half weeks to read The Eighth Life (For Brilka) in March 2025, which is a long time for me, but my days were ridiculously busy thanks to my kids’ sports schedules. I was basically a part-time chauffeur with all their practices and games. That fact that I managed to finish this book in March 2025 is testament to just how damn good it is. If I’d been reading it during the summer, I probably would have inhaled it in less than two weeks.

(For those of you following my Brazilian side quest, you already know I’m obsessed with Avenida Brasil. I just finished Episode 132. Well, this book was so freaking good, I sometimes skipped my daily dose of Carminha and Nina so I could spend more time in Georgia. If you’ve watched Avenida Brasil, then that’s all you need to know. You can skip the rest of this post and just get the book already.)

The Eighth Life is a family saga that begins in the country of Georgia at the beginning of the Red Century. We begin with Stasia, whose father has created a chocolate recipe that is so dangerously delicious, it might be cursed, The novel follows the lives of Stasia and her descendants during the rise and fall of the Soviet Union and travels from the countryside of Georgia to Georgia’s capital Tbilisi and then even farther afield to Moscow, Berlin, Vienna, and London. Haratischvili brings these settings to life in a way that reminded me of Isabel Allende and The House of the Spirits (Chile).

Haratischvili masterfully weaves together fiction and nonfiction. The story is mostly fiction, detailing the romances and tragedies of a family, but there are beautiful passages that explain the relevant history and politics. By the end of the book, the fictional family saga felt so real, I was convinced that Haratischvili must have been inspired by her own family’s stories. It’s some of the best historical fiction I’ve ever read, bringing me into the experience of trying to stay human during the Soviet era. The story conveys such anguish, I wish I could pretend that Haratischvili was just trying to craft a “good story” but alas, having read Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (Belarus), I know that Haratischvili’s fiction conveys the truth of what actually happened.

I could sing the praises of this book all day — the writing! the characters! the feelings! — and I’m so grateful that folks on social media were vocal about this recommendation. If I could travel back in time, I’d love to take a college course on post-Soviet literature and write a paper about this book–except the author is a few years younger than me, so I couldn’t have read this in college–but maybe somewhere in the multiverse… This book left its fingerprints on my soul and made me want to spend the next five years of my life writing a big sprawling family saga, The world needs more books like The Eighth Life (For Brilka) and we also need translators like Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin, who are ready, willing and able to translate these masterpieces.

For The Gambia, I read Reading the Ceiling by Dayo Forster. This book was recommended by folks on social media, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The novel begins with a Prologue. It is Ayodele’s 18th birthday, and she is determined to lose her virginity by the time she goes to bed. She has a list of candidates for her deflowering, and the choice she makes will determine the path her life takes. After the Prologue, the novel has three stories, each following Ayodele’s life depending on the choices she made (or didn’t make) on that fateful birthday.

From that premise, the author spun an absolutely delightful and compelling novel. It’s beautifully written with a wicked sense of humor, and Forster dives into all sorts of meaningful issues. Some are universal, like dealing with aging parents and grief. Others are more specific to the African experience, like going abroad for graduate education and polygamy. (Well, polygamy is an issue that goes way beyond Africa, but this novel explores polygamy within The Gambia.)

Reading the Ceiling would be such an interesting book club pick. You could discuss:

• Do you really think one decision can have such impact on the course of a life?
• Looking back at your own life, what decisions were pivotal?
• Of the three versions of Ayodele’s life, which do you think was “best”?
• Although the three stories are very different, what stayed the same?

I only have one complaint about this book: it was published in 2007, but Forster hasn’t published any more novels!

But in all seriousness, I’m so glad I picked this book for The Gambia. And as a writer, I might have to use this format in a novel some day. There should just be a new “Reading the Ceiling” genre. I know the multiverse has been explored many different times in different ways, but Forster used the concept to craft a meaningful and thought-provoking experience for the reader.

For Gabon, I read The Fury and Cries of Women by Angèle Rawiri, translated from the French by Sara Hanaburgh and wow, this book was INTENSE. It may not be the darkest book I’ve read for my quest–that award probably goes to The Piano Teacher (Austria) — but it definitely deserves an honorable mention.

I do not often gives trigger warnings, but this book basically needed trigger warnings at the beginning of every chapter. The story begins with a graphic and disturbing scene of a miscarriage and that’s just the beginning of all the bad shit that happens. When I was in high school, if I needed to “process my dark feelings,” I listened to Portishead. The Fury and Cries of Women is the closest literary equivalent I’ve ever found to Portishead’s energy.

This book was published in 1989, and Rawiri used it as a platform to discuss all sorts of difficult (and often taboo) subjects that faced African women in the 1980s, like infertility infidelity, tensions between older and younger generations, and feminism. It is a feminist novel, but it’s not the feminism I was taught as a young woman attending an all-girls Catholic high school in Los Angeles in the 1990s. That’s not to say this book’s version of feminism is “bad” or “wrong.” It’s just different, and yet another reminder of why my Read Around the World quest feels so urgent.

If you are a feminist looking for a challenging book, then I heartily recommend The Fury and Cries of Women, but I’m not going to be forcing this book on everyone I know and love. You have to be in the right mindset for it. Even though I wanted to read it, it was brutal and I had to read it as quickly as possible because this is the sort of book that drains my energy and leaves me feeling devastated for fictional women I’ll never meet.

For France, I read The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer.

There are a lot of gaps in my experience with French literature. I’ve read Proust, but not Victor Hugo; tons of Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, but nothing by Jean-Paul Satre or Simone de Beauvoir, and the list of authors I have NOT read goes on and on, so embarrassingly long. Not for the first time, I lamented the fact that my high school literature classes were called “English” and we never ventured beyond American and British authors. I felt a little panic when I was choosing my book for France–so many options! how could I choose one?!–but then I remembered this does not have to be the last French book I will ever read. I am not in school and can read whatever I damn please and if that means crossing all the neglected French authors off my TBR list, than so be it! (But we should probably not tell Brazil that.)

When I learned that a female French author won the Nobel Prize in 2022, I knew I had to at least consider her books for this project. When I did a little digging and learned Ernaux’s work is known for blending autobiography with sociology, I knew I had found my author. My mom really wanted me to read Madame Bovary but my intuition was screaming for Ernaux, and when it comes to this quest, I never apologize for my intuition. Even when that means reading a biography about Eva Perón for Argentina instead of Borges or rejecting my mom’s suggestion for France.

We now interrupt this blog post for a brief tangent! As I continue my Read Around the World quest, I am becoming more and more convinced that I will someday turn this experience into a book, but this is just a foggy notion. The book’s anatomy has not yet emerged. Will it be memoir? Or something less personal that examines world literature? Or will I blend the two together? With those questions quietly humming in my mind’s background, I was naturally drawn to Ernaux. Okay, now back to our regular programming.

For my quest, I picked The Years, a personal narrative of the years 1941 to 2006 that feels like a collective memoir of France while also being a very intimate examination of Ernaux’s life. This is not your conventional memoir. It is told from different points of view, shifting between the first person plural “we,” which makes it feels like Ernaux was elected as spokeswoman for an entire generation of France, and the third person “she” which cultivates a sort of emotional detachment, like you would find in an academic paper. I loved both perspectives.

Like Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time (Belarus) and Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale (Ethiopia), this book presented a much more feminine version of history than was taught by my college professors twenty-five years ago. It’s the sort of history that speaks to my soul, shifting easily between international events and the domestic sphere. After all, history is so much more than who was in charge and what weapons were used during a particular battle.

We see through Ernaux’s astute observations how the experiences of her generation shifted over time. Sometimes, Ernaux examines old photographs of herself and describes her changing outfits, hair styles, and demeanor, so we see how she grows from small child to grandma. These descriptions were extra poignant for me because I read this book only a couple weeks after my parents’ house was completely destroyed by the Eaton Fire, turning most of my childhood photos to ash.

Other times, Ernaux describes the dinner conversations at family gatherings, and we see how the subjects change. When Ernaux is a small child, World War II was the focus of these gatherings, but as the decades passed and memories faded, talk shifted to new matters. While reading The Years, I found myself often ruminating on time, memory, and change and applauding the way Ernaux crafted such an original style.

By the time I reached the twentieth page of The Years, I knew I will have to read everything Ernaux has written. My intuition demands it and when it comes to reading, my intuition knows her stuff.