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.

For Finland, I read Fishing for the Little Pike by Juhani Karila, translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers. This novel was my introduction to the Finnish Weird genre and here’s the description on the back of my edition:

In this utterly original, genre-defying, English-language debut from Finnish author Juhani Karila, a young woman’s annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.

If that description sounds intriguing, then this book is probably your jam. If not, move along. (If you are my cousin Julie, then you should read this. If you are my ninth grade English teacher Jill, definitely not.)

As the title suggests, this story has a major fishing storyline, and fishing is not something that I find interesting. I can usually summon at least a spark of curiosity for most subjects, but not fishing unless it’s part of a true crime story but then, let’s be honest: my curiosity is 100% about the true crime, and 0% about the bait or tackle or whatever that crap is called. The author’s passion for fishing, however, had me “hooked” and I was allowed to understand why some folks are intensely passionate about this sport. (And no, I will not apologize for that shameless pun.)

The author has a matter-of-fact writing style that sometimes veers into the poetic and is generously seasoned with dark humor. For example:

From the time she was in diapers, Young Lady Ylijaako always had her nose in a book. That oughta’ve been a red flag that the Filthy One had been having his way with her soul. No normal person reads that much.

Fishing for the Little Pike by Juhani Karila, pg. 136.

I don’t want to spoil the story, but there were a ton of delightfully quirky human characters having hilarious encounters with equally weird mythic characters. Over in the comments section of my video review for this book, I was told that the mythological characters (the knacky, a raskel that wants to go fishing, stripe foots, a wraith, and the fracas) are part of Finnish mythology, and now, I must make an embarrassing confession. Before my Read Around the World quest, I honestly thought I knew a lot about world mythology, but actually, I was really only familiar with Greek gods and heroes, a little bit of Viking lore, and Paul Bunyan of blue ox fame. How silly of me. My inner mythological landscape has been changing with this quest, adding in the likes of Baba Yaga and scheming talking animals from Bhutan. Thank god I have now met some of the mythological monsters of Lapland.

My life definitely needs a lot more Finnish Weird.

For Fiji, I read A Remarkable Rotuman Woman: A Memoir by Jacinta Tonga. There were not a lot of options for Fiji, but this book was a great choice for my Read Around the World quest.

This book is the author’s memoir of her grandmother Petera Veu, who lived on the island of Rotuma in Fiji. In the prologue, Tonga explains:

I did not research this book, nor did I ask my mum, uncles, aunties, cousins or any other family members for their opinions. I want this book to be my story of how I remember her and her stories that she told me.

I have asked myself if these stories could be possible — could they have really happened or did she make it up — but you know the bottom line is I don’t care. I want to remember her as she would want me to remember her and I want the same for my children, grandchildren and whoever else wants to read her story to know her as I have known her.

A Remarkable Rotuman Woman by Jacinta Tonga, page V.

I appreciated the author’s candor and bluntness, and it set me up for a very enjoyable experience with her book. If you read this book expecting one of the great works of literature, you will be disappointed. But if you read this book with an open mind, hoping to get insights into a different culture in a different part of the world, then you will be delighted by the author’s feisty grandma who raised hell at Catholic school and kept raising hell until the day she died.

On my list, Fiji comes right after Ethiopia, and my pick for Ethiopia was also a memoir written by a granddaughter. I love when these serendipities happen! There was Austria and Azerbaijan, two consecutive books about musicians. Then Bahrain and Bangladesh, two consecutive books that explored Muslim marriage with Bahrian romanticizing and idealizing the subservient wife and Bangladesh burning the institution of Muslim marriage to the ground. For Chile and China, I read a novel (House of the Spirits) and a family history (Wild Swans) but both books told the stories of multiple generations of women in the same family living during tumultuous times. I have no idea when these serendipities will happen, but they are so fun and rewarding when they occur.

The memoirs I read for Ethiopia and Fiji are very different. The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History (Ethiopia) is some of the best writing I’ve ever read. If I was teaching a class about memoirs, I would include it in my syllabus because it demonstrates the best of the genre. A Remarkable Rotuman Woman is much more conversational, and the author was a nurse who felt called to preserve her grandmother’s stories, not a writer who has studied and practiced the craft for years and years and has access to a professional editor and all the advantages of a publisher. But after reading The Wife’s Tale for Ethiopia, I was delighted to read more stories about a bad ass grandma, and I’m glad Jacinta Tonga preserved this slice of history for future generations.

Not every book needs to be Hemingway, folks. Writing and publishing accomplish many different things, and this book saved memories of life on a remote island. I think that’s a wonderful reason to write a book.

For Ethiopia, I read The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History by Aida Edemariam. I recently created my latest list of “Top Ten Faves” from my Read Around the World quest, and this book did not make my top ten, but damn, that was a close call. Every few months, I redo that list, and as time passes, my opinions about books shift and change. I wouldn’t be surprised if this book eventually moves into my Top Ten Fave–and this is an excellent problem to have with my quest! I was so naive when I started this journey in 2023, thinking I would read a few boring books and then happily return to my rut of reading books by American and English authors, but that’s another post. Let’s talk about The Wife’s Tale!

The Wife’s Tale is both the intimate memoir of Yetemegnu, the author’s grandma who lived for nearly a century (1916-2013), and the history of Ethiopia during those decades. The story is lush and gorgeously written with sensory details and a novelistic style that pulls the reader into the setting. Yetemegnu is a child bride, and although the marriage is not consummated until she is older, she still lives the vast majority of her life as a wife. Too often, history recounts the story of the Men in Charge. As a traditional wife, Yetemegnu is very much not in charge of Ethiopia’s government, but her experiences–how she feeds her family; how she keeps her children alive; how she gets them educated– are just as important to know. This is the version of history that my soul craves.

My only complaint about this book is that it made me long to write something similar about my Grandma Shirley, who died at the age of ninety-six in 2022, but my grandma did not like to tell stories about her past. Whenever I tried to tease out her memories, she shared a sentence or two at most and then changed the subject. Shirley was much more interested in enjoying the present, but I would love to be able to share stories about her childhood in New York during the Great Depression; the trauma of seeing friends go to Europe during World War II; her marriage and then divorce from my grandfather; her bad ass single years; and on and on. At least we have a lot of her photos which offer glimpses into her life.

I’m so glad that Yetemegnu shared so many intimate details of her life with her granddaughter Aida Edemariam, and that Edemariam recognized the value and importance of these stories and turned them into this magnificent personal history. The absence of female voices throughout history is regrettable, and books like The Wife’s Tale are crucial in filling those gaps. They remind us that history isn’t just about wars and rulers—it’s about the everyday lives of women like Yetemegnu, whose strength, resilience, and love shaped generations.

For Eritrea, I read Gratitude in Low Voices: A Memoir by Dawit Gebremichael Habte. In this memoir, Habte describes his childhood in Eritrea (before its independence from Ethiopia) and then how he journeyed to Kenya and eventually obtained asylum in the United States. As an adult, he eventually returned to Eritrea to help rebuild the country after it achieved independence from Ethiopia. 

This book sounded like it would be a very interesting read.

Alas.

It was not.

The book ended up being a brutally long thank you note to all the people who have ever helped him in his life. He would stop the narrative, again and again, to share a biography of someone who gave him a library card or a teacher who pushed him to apply to college or an American employer who showed interest in Eritrea, but I was not reading this book to hear about how Nancy from H.R. enjoys singing with her church choir and was so brave when she needed knee surgery in her forties. If I was curious about Nancy from H.R., I would have read her memoir!

When Habte described his journey from Eritrea to Kenya, he focused on the boring logistics and glossed over the interesting bits. Apparently, he encountered a lion during this journey, but this was all he wrote: “For the first time I’d had close encounters with wild animals–his highness the king of the jungle (lion), zebra, giraffe, and, of course, the sneaky snake.” That’s it. That’s the entire lion story. He shares nothing else about that experience, and I do not mean to complain, but–

TELL US ABOUT THE LION!!!

Where were you? How far away was the lion? Was it night or day? Was your life in peril? Did you piss your pants or speak gibberish or beg for mercy from a higher power? Why do I know about who he met at the airport lobby when he was leaving Eritrea and nothing about this lion??? If I ever write a book about the craft of writing, I’ll have to include this guideline: always always ALWAYS tell us about the freaking lion.

Habte is a software engineer, and he has an inspiring story to share. Alas, he just needed a ghost writer or at least a co-writer to help tease out the interesting episodes of his life and downplay the dull tangents. On the bright side, he does know a lot about Eritrean history and he did an excellent job describing how the country was colonized first by Italy and then Ethiopia, making Eritrea the only African country to have been colonized by another African country. He also did a wonderful job explaining the negative effects of colonialism.

I just really wish he had told us about the freaking lion.

For Equatorial Guinea, I read La Bastarda: A Novel by Trifonia Melibea Obono, translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel. This book is a fast read that packs a huge emotional punch while covering a broad range of difficult issues.

The protagonist Okomo is an orphaned teen who lives with her grandparents in a small Fang community with rigid norms and expectations. She is already an outcast by virtue of being an orphan, but then she also dares to be a queer tomboy in a polygamous culture that devalues women. Although her grandparents would like to control and tame her, Okomo rebels against the constraints of her society so that she can walk her own path.

The book’s dedication sums up its themes nicely:

For all those who suffer due to, or advocate in favor of, a way of life adapted to individual and collective freedoms.

La Bastarda is banned in Equatorial Guinea because it has lesbian characters. Ugh. This quest keeps reminding me, again and again, that not all peoples around the world experience the same liberties that I do. That my freedom of speech is a sacred right in a world that often silences the prophets and dissidents.

There were some harsh (even cruel) reviews of this book on Goodreads, but I give this book four out of five stars for being a howl of dissent against a suffocating culture. Not every book needs to be written by Hemingway or Shakespeare to merit a good review. La Bastarda is not the best novel I’ve ever read, but the author spoke up bravely, fiercely, and clearly about important issues and made me think. She did such a good job of undermining her country’s status quo, her book was banned. Bravo! May we all be so brave as to write books that are banned.

Thanks to my Read Around the World quest, I no longer judge or review books based on rigid rubrics handed down by professors who live in towers. This book was written by an oppressed minority in a country whose “government” commits human rights violations to silence any dissent, and the author brought the setting and themes to life. Perhaps the story could have been better developed. Perhaps an editor could have helped the author improve her writing style. But who cares? Not every book needs to impress my old literature professors who were obsessed with Shakespeare and Hemingway.

For El Salvador, I real Solito, a gut-wrenching memoir by Javier Zamora about his harrowing journey to the United States as an unauthorized immigrant. His parents had already moved to the United States, so he undertook this journey with a group of strangers at the age of nine AND HE DID NOT EVEN KNOW HOW TO TIE HIS SHOES.

That detail really destroyed me as I am the mother of a nine-year-old boy who also does not know how to tie his shoes. As I read through Zamora’s ordeals, I kept thinking, How could my son do this? At nine? How?!?! Zamora’s memoir brought me right into his agonizing border crossing and every chapter, sometimes every page, I felt my heart breaking again.

Immigration has been a pervasive theme in my Read Around the World quest. A short story in Uncertain Kin (The Bahamas) completely altered my understanding of the immigrant experience. American Visa (Bolivia) is a madcap novel all about a man’s desperate attempts to join his son in Florida. Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (Bulgaria) is a work of nonfiction that deftly weaves together the author’s personal journey through the borderlands of Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece with the stories of people who desperately tried to cross those borders. The theme of immigration also popped up in my picks for Belarus, Benin, and Burkina Faso — and that is just the B countries!

Since the beginning of my quest, I have been pondering the meaning of words like “country” and “borders” and “immigration.” Yet maybe “pondering” is not the right word, because “pondering” suggests a mental activity, but this is more than an intellectual exercise. This “pondering” is something I feel in my body in the way my blood moves and my skin tingles, the pressure of some unknown force pushing against my skull, a tightening of muscles in my neck and shoulders, and in my lungs and throat and breath. It is more poetry than prose, and as I write this, I worry that I am not articulating my feelings about immigration coherently — but perhaps that is my former life and training as a lawyer kicking up? Back in my lawyer days, I worked on several pro bono cases for immigrants seeking political asylum, and perhaps that has influenced this compulsion I have to support any statements I have about immigration with evidence, laws, and statistics but UGH, I do not want to talk about immigration from the perspective of a lawyer or a politician.

I want to talk about it as a human.

And as a human, my heart breaks when I read about the difficulties that people like Zamora face when they try to leave their country. Why are we bound and divided by invisible imaginary lines? Why is this such a polarizing political issue?

I don’t know all the answers about immigration. Hell, I don’t even know all the “right” questions. I don’t know all the statistics and I don’t know how immigration impacts the economy, but I do know that Zamora’s story broke my heart. What would happen if all the politicians in Washington, D.C. read this memoir before they issued decrees and laws about “illegal immigration”? Have any of those politicians considered their family trees and their immigration roots? What makes their immigration story legal and Zamora’s illegal?

Solito raises a lot of uncomfortable questions, and it left its fingerprints all over my heart. May my heart, mind, and soul get filthy with the fingerprints of authors like Solito, and may I carry their stories and let them change the architecture of my soul.

I might be starting to understand why my Muse was so insistent that I undertake this quest.

For Egypt, I could have easily read something by Naguib Mahfouz who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, but I have already read (and LOVED) several books by him so I wanted to try someone new (and preferably female). There were many good options, but I was drawn* to the work of Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed, a graphic novel that was written, drawn, and then translated into English by the author herself. The English-language version is printed the same way as it was in Arabic, so it is read “backwards” for the Western reader. For me, this was awkward and weird — and I totally loved it.

The title of this book, Shubeik Lubeik, is the fairy-tale rhyme that means “your wish is my command” and this graphic novel is about a world where wishes are commodified and literally for sale. Expensive wishes are rare, sold in glass bottles at prices beyond the means of most consumers, while cheap wishes are readily available in cans, but buyer beware. If you wish to lose weight, but only purchase a canned wish, you might end up literally losing an arm. Technically, your wish came true but maybe not on the terms you imagined…

I loved so many things about this book. The premise is original and utterly delightful, and from that premise, the author created a mesmerizing story with complicated messy characters. She uses the novel’s fantasy world to explore so many compelling issues including: the history of Egypt; poverty, wealth, and socioeconomics; mental health and the practice of psychology; politics; religion; and colonialism and its aftermath.

As soon as I finished this book, I looked for more work by Deena Mohamed, but alas, she is only thirty (a baby!) and this is her first book. I am now stalking following her on Instagram @itsdeenasaur because I want to consume any and all work she creates. If you would like to peek inside Shubeik Lubeik, check out her gorgeous website.

Bottom line: this was an absolutely incredible pick for Egypt and it’s one of the most gorgeous graphic novels I’ve ever devoured.

* This pun was not intended but I am very proud of it nevertheless.

For Ecuador, I read Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker, and oh my god, this book was so creepy!

Many, many people recommended this book for Ecuador. It was the overwhelming pick of the popular majority but it’s a horror book and I don’t do horror. Seriously. This scientific chart demonstrates where I land on he Tolerance for Horror Spectrum:

So although the description and recommendations for Jawbone were compelling, I really love sleeping at night, so I reluctantly ordered a different book for Ecuador.

Then I sent my newsletter and asked folks to send any recommendations they had for the E countries and Sarah Booker emailed back and said:

Love what you are doing! Might I humbly recommend Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda (in my translation) for Ecuador? And check out Melibea Obono Trifonia’s La bastarda (tr. Lawrence Schimel) for Equatorial Guinea. Happy reading!

Plenty of people ask me to read their book or their mom’s book or their friend’s brother’s book, and alas, there are just not enough hours in my lifetime to read everything that is recommended. As a lifelong people pleaser, I have had to train myself to resist my compulsion to read every suggested book, and by the time Sarah’s email arrived, I had the ability and backbone to say, Thanks, but no thanks! My intuition, however, decided it was time to ignore my placement on the Tolerance for Horror Spectrum and read Jawbone.

It turns out that while I may not have the stomach for Stephen King’s brand of horror, and I certainly cannot watch movies like Saw (unless I actually want to have insomnia for the rest of my life), I do enjoy Jawbone’s brand of horror, which I would describe as creepy and psychologically intense in the context of an all-girls high school. (Yes, my intuition is gloating.)

As I was reading this book, I often had to look up the meaning of words in English and as I did, I marveled at the work translators like Sarah Booker do. Seriously, translation is a sort of witchcraft. I’m fluent in English, but I do not by any stretch of the imagination know every single word in the English dictionary. Now, let’s say I am someday fluent in Portuguese–that doesn’t mean I will have mastered every single word in the Portuguese language. My god! If you consider the vastness of language, it is like contemplating infinity. Even if I am someday fluent in both English and Portuguese, I could be translating a text, encounter a Portuguese word that I do not know, and discover that the best translation for the Portuguese word is an English word I also do not know. Seriously, how do translators navigate these complexities and still pick the words and phrases that best capture an author’s energy???

And folks think that AI can translate.

But I digress! Jawbone has a feral energy that explores teenage anxiety and self-consciousness, and damn, it yanked me back into my own days as an awkward teen at an all-girls Catholic high school. And this feels weird to admit, but I enjoyed this experience, like a literary time-traveling back to the days of acne and bitchy girls in uniforms. (Hypothetical question: is this a red flag that I should mention to my therapist?)

The story is dense with quirky details that brought me into the setting, story, and lives of the girls. There is an intense mother-daughter obsession that makes Norman Bates look like a well-adjusted young man, and oh, just thinking about Jawbone months later makes me shudder but in a delightful way. Maybe I should be concerned, but sometimes, we need to plunge into the darkness to reckon with our humanity.