For Cuba, I read My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a novel told in fifteen stories that are linked together–and that’s where I’m going to stop. The book cover’s blurb explains how the stories are linked, but I think I would have enjoyed the book even more if I had less information going into it. I’m going to omit any potential spoilers if you are the sort of reader who skips the book description (I’m looking right at my bookworm friend Katelin right now).

This book is a novel but it felt like a collection of wildly different short stories. One chapter was like a Biblical parable while another was a dystopian episode from 1984: The Cuba Edition. There’s a chapter written in verse about a marriage gone wrong and another chapter that feels like a fever chapter. The stories grapple with loneliness, family, immigration, and identity.

For me, the book was more about mood than story. If you only like traditional novels that follow the hero’s journey with clearly developed characters, My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog is not for you. But if you like poetry, or you want to ruminate upon the human experience, or you just want a divisive pick that will stir up debate for your book club, then holy crap, do I have a book for you!

My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog is not the sort of book I would have read before embarking on my Read Around the World quest. I was a genre fiction girl, alternating between mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, romance and the occasional thriller. I thought I loathed literary fiction and avoided it at all costs. When my muse suggested this project, I partly resisted the idea because I suspected that for many countries, the only books I would find translated into English would be literary. And I was right! For whatever reason, the literary works are more often than not the ones that are translated and made available to English-speaking audience.

Except it turns out that I enjoy literary fiction. In fact, I might be falling in love with literary fiction–but that’s another post (or podcast episode!) all together.

Maybe I won’t enjoy ever work of literary fiction that I encounter on my quest, but I thoroughly enjoyed My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog, even when it was obscure and felt like I was looking through a kaleidoscope at a painting, catching glimmers of truth, shattered glimpses of the human experience.

I continued my Brazilian bender this week, but I swear, I HAD to. Mother Gaia will soon be releasing The Posthumous Investigation, a video game inspired by four of Machado’s works– The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubás, Dom Casmurro, Quincas Borba, and The Alienist– and I had to finish Quincas Borba and The Alienist so I can play the game.

This week’s episode was inspired by Quincas Borba, a novel about a man who suddenly comes into a fortune and moves to Rio de Janeiro, where he is swindled by social climbers and avaricious leeches. What follows is a scathing satire of Brazil in the 1800s that dives into lots of interesting themes, engaging the reader in thought-provoking questions about sanity, friendship, wealth, and politics.

Of all those questions, I was most drawn to the theme of friendship, because I have been dealing with Friend Drama for the past year. As I discuss in this week’s episode, I had to distance myself from a friend because our friendship had become a source of stress and anxiety. It was toxic, but I still felt guilty drawing my boundaries.

I recorded about twenty minutes of this episode and then deleted it and started over. Then, when I had to finished episode, I almost decided to just not post an episode this week. That’s a sign that for whatever reason, I really need to share this work I’ve been processing. If it helps someone who is struggling with a friendship, amazing; but I think publishing this episode was of vital importance to my soul. It helped me release some lingering grief over a friendship that had to end even though I will always love that friend and wish her the best.

p.s. Yes, I struggled with hitting publish on these show notes as well. Big breath–here I go!

For Croatia, I read Baba Yaga Laid An Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson. Although I don’t speak Croatian, I can tell the translators did a first class job because they included a lot of rhyming verse that flowed beautifully in English. How did the translators capture the spirit and language of this book and also get the verses to rhyme in English??? Obviously someone struck a deal with the devil.

Or maybe they struck a deal with Baba Yaga.

I only recently became acquainted with Baba Yaga when Pippa and I read The Door By The Staircase by Katherine Marsh and wow, that mythical character is WILD. Baba Yaga is a crone/hag/witch who lives in the woods in a hut with chicken legs. Sometimes she is childless but sometimes she has a daughter and still other times she has forty-one daughters. She might be helpful to children or hapless heroes searching for their princess loves. Or she might cook the children in a stew.

She also flies around in a mortar.

When I was searching for my Croatian book, and this title came to my attention, I thought, Ooooh. I love witch stories. When I read a little more about the book, and learned that it is part of The Myth series, which challenges authors to retell a myth in a contemporary and memorable way, and that this particular Baba Yaga retelling had a feminist bent, I was 110% in because I am obsessed with feminist retellings of old mythical stories.

The story is structured as a triptych. In part one, the story is told from the first person by a character who is the author of the book. She is dealing with her aging mother and then goes on a trip with Aba Bagay, a young folklore graduate student who annoys the crap out of the author. In part two, there is a story of three older women who visit a spa turned wellness center. Finally, the third section is a letter from Dr. Aba Bagay to the editor of the book, explaining the symbolism and imagery of the story in Part 2.

This was a chewy intellectual read that would make for the subject of a very interesting college essay. If I had encountered this book during my college days, it might have tempted me to abandon my history major and find a way to study folklore instead. Perhaps as a minor in our women’s studies department? (At the time I attended Dartmouth, we were not allowed to major in women’s studies.) (And as you can see, I’m giving this tangent a lot of serious thought, as if in an alternate dimension, there is a Courtney who pursues graduate studies in folklore.)

But as I was trying to say in the last paragraph, this book would make for an interesting discussion in a college essay, but it’s hard to pin it down in a blog post. I feel as if I should be explaining all the imagery and symbolism and the way Ugrešić put the reader on high alert because the novel is called Baba Yaga Laid an Egg but we are immediately thrown off balance by the absence of an obvious Baba Yaga, so we become determined to spot Baba Yaga’s appearance, not quite certain if the author’s mother is an iteration of Baba Yaga, or if the three older women at the wellness center combine to be a single Baba Yaga, or if they each stand alone as her own version of Baba Yaga. Then, in regards to the final part of the triptych, I kept flip-flopping between thinking (1) the author is taking the piss out of academia and (2) the author is deadly serious and this analysis is sincere and intended to challenge our understanding of folklore. In the end, it was probably a bit of both.

At least I can make this point: this book made me think and ponder and ruminate, especially about the ways that folklore influences our sense of self and culture, and how the stories of hags lurking the woods were told to tame women into dutiful wives and mothers. I’m still thinking about it weeks later as I try to tame its plot and characters into a blog post. But perhaps I’m missing the point. Instead of trying to tame Baba Yaga Laid An Egg into a concise analysis, I should let it be the wild creature it is. Let the story trample the woods, evade an easy analysis, and be gloriously wild and free as all women should be.

This is my first draft of these show notes but I am planning to add links and photos when I have more time but just want to get something posted before I pick up my kids from school.

10. Guarana Antartica – my new favorite soda!

9. The colors! People warned me that São Paulo is grey but that was not my experience. Yes, there’s plenty of concrete as one would expect from the fourth biggest city in the world, but I’ve never seen so many murals packed into a city.

8. The music, especially while visiting Avenida Paulista on Sunday.

7. Biblioteca Parque Villa-Lobos, an absolutely gorgeous vibrant library that was a wonderful gathering place and teeming with life on a Sunday.

6. Ibirapuera Park

5. The museums! Especially the Jewish Museum, the Portuguese Language Museum, and MASP.

4. Getting the chance to really practice my Portuguese. Brazilians are so encouraging and they did not make fun of my redneck accent.

3. The food, oh my god, the food.

2. The literature of course! Brazilian literature is the side quest for my Read Around the World project and with every book I read, I fall in love with it even more deeply.

1. THE PEOPLE. Brazilians are warm, friendly, enthusiastic, and just ridiculously awesome. The world can learn so much about being human from Brazil.

Am I really famous in Brazil? Despite the hundreds of messages I’ve received from Brazilians insisting I am, I still don’t believe it. It’s just too surreal for my brain to process. This surely must be a highly ambitious prank pulled by several bored teenagers in South America.

Here’s the abbreviated version of how I became “famous???” in Brazil:

• I posted a roundup of all the books I was reading for the B countries on my Read Around the World quest.
• I had decided to read The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis for Brazil.
• TONS of Brazilians responded with comments like, You are going to love that! and Best book ever!
• By the time I got to Brazil, I worried that the book had been overhyped and I would be disappointed.
• I started the book.
• Within a few pages, I was OBSESSED. Best. Book. Ever.
• With only 100 pages left, I felt inspired to make this video:

And then that video went viral–and I didn’t even realize the scope of what was happening at the time, because it had been shared on X and then effected Amazon sales and then it was reported by the Brazilian news. I think I finally realized that Something Big was happening in my life when a journalist at Brazil’s CNN contacted me for a television interview.

At first, I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by the response, but as I explain during this episode, the experience of going viral in Brazil has opened my heart to a flood of love and made my soul sparkle like a disco ball. Because did you know Brazil is the most loving corner of the internet? My siblings were reading the comments on my videos and could not believe that they were 99.9% positive. I was pleasantly surprised because when I saw that there were thousands of comments, I assumed that folks would be trashing my review/project/face/etc. because that’s how American trolls operate.

Americans could learn a thing or two from Brazil.

In the viral video, I joked that I now had a side quest to learn Portuguese. Many Brazilians took this literally, and tons of people offered to give me free Portuguese lessons. I freaked out again. Me? Learn Portuguese? It’s supposed to be an incredibly difficult language to learn! Besides, I’ve been using Duolingo to learn French for several years now. If I really wanted to learn Portuguese, I could do that after I became fluent in French,.

And yet, the idea of learning Portuguese became as intriguing and persistent as my call to embark on this Read Around the World quest, so I took Duolingo’s first Portuguese lesson. And then another and another until I was hooked, and had abandoned French completely, and after I was invited to speak at a literary festival in São Paulo, I found an app called Preply and signed up for one-on-one Portuguese lessons with a lovely Brazilian lady.

Agora eu falo português como um bebe.

But I’m learning and I’m obsessed with this side quest. My fifteen minutes of Brazilian fame has lasted much longer than I could have ever predicted, and at the beginning of my quest, I never thought one of my book reviews could go viral in such an exuberant and effervescent way. I’m loving this new twist to my Read Around the World adventure and shimmering with excitement for my trip next week to São Paulo! And no matter how this goes, I’m obsessed with the Portuguese language. But that’s another episode.

For Côte d’Ivoire, I read Aya, a graphic novel by Marguerite Abouet (writer) and Clément Oubrerie (illustrator). It was translated from French by Helge Dascher with lettering by Tom Devlin.

Growing up, I never had a comic book phase, but I LOVE graphic novels. Before I talk about Aya, I’d like to list some of my all-time faves:

• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (and anything else by Bechdel)
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (a long time ago, in an apartment far far away, I picked this for my book club)
• Blankets by Craig Thompson  
• Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
• Nimona by N.D. Stevenson
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
• Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh (I will read anything this woman writes)
• The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang
• Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley (and literally everything else she has ever written)
• Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell (if you want a cozy fall read, get this! I regret giving this book away and might buy myself a new copy for October.)

(Technically, the books above are not all graphic novel. A few are memoirs, but if Goodreads classifies them as graphic novels, who am I to argue?)

I loved Aya as much as any of the books on my list above. It’s the story of the post-adolescent romantic adventures of three women, about age 19, who live in post-colonial Côte d’Ivoire when the country was flourishing (late 1970s). Alicia Grace Chase, PhD wrote Aya’s preface and summarized it much more eloquently than I can:

The amorous hi-jinks narrated in Aya seems so familiar, so nearly suburban in their post-adolescent focus on dance floor flirtations, awkward first dates, and finding just the right dress for a friend’s wedding, that to many western readers it may be difficult to believe that they take place in Africa.

Preface to Aya, by alisia Grace Chase, Phd

So far, the overwhelming majority of the books I have read for Africa deal with heavy, weighty topics like government corruption (Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic), extreme poverty and famine (Cabo Verde), and genocide (Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo). In my pick for the Comoros, the narrator is lost at sea, clinging to a fuel tank for dear life, with very bleak prospects. In my pick for the Republic of the Congo, the narrator Broken Glass is an alcoholic relating the tragicomic lives of the patrons of a bar.

After all the picks that preceded it, Aya was a breath of fresh air. I’ve been enjoying my African picks for my Read Around the World quest, and it’s important to grapple with these important issues, but Africa is not all genocide and government corruption. It’s also music and dancing and flirting and fighting over boys with your girlfriends. It’s sibling squabbles and teens drinking too much alcohol and making out with the cute guy you met at midnight and choosing schoolwork over sleazy guys because damnit, you want to be a doctor. Africa is so much more than the American media suggests, and Aya expanded my literary experience with Africa in a delightful and enchanting way.

If I had to describe Aya in just a sentence, I’d say it’s Sex in the City: The Côte d’Ivoire edition. If you ever enjoyed the hijinks of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, then you’ll adore Aya, Adjoua, and Bintou.

I’ve already ordered Aya’s sequel and I’m impatiently awaiting its arrival.

For Costa Rica, I read Where There Was Fire : A Novel by John Manuel Arias. I don’t always share the covers for the books I read, but let’s take a moment to admire this one:

Bravo to the cover designer! This cover perfectly captured the book’s energy, story, and themes. I’ve designed the covers for three of my four published books, and damn, I really need to hire a cover designer for the next one. (Although I have a feeling my next book will be published traditionally… just putting that vibe out into the Universe.)

Although Spanish is the official language of Costa Rica, this book was written in English; but the author used the inverted question mark (¿) in the dialogue to remind the reader that the character would have been speaking Spanish. In a comment on my TikTok post for this book, someone raised an objection:

Hi! I’m Costa Rican and I love this series but I wish you had done better research before choosing this as the book from my country. It wasn’t originally written in Spanish nor was it published here…

I see the point this TikToker was making, but I also stand by my choice. I’m on a quest to read a book by an author from every country in the world in alphabetical order, because my muse/inner voice/intuition would not stop nagging me to do this project. Since my muse is the instigator of this whole epic endeavor, I’m doing my best to lean into my intuition when I pick the book for each country. That means I’m not ticking off boxes of imaginary criteria to please the masses and critics. Instead, I’m listening to suggestions, reading tons of book descriptions, and then choosing the book that screams, “Me! Me! Me!” For Costa Rica, that was Where There Was Fire.

And I’m so glad I read this book!

It was lush and vibrant and saturated with magic. The story alternates between 1995 during an epic hurricane and 1968 when a banana plantation burnt to the ground. The third person narrative shifts amongst characters, both major and minor, in a way that deepens the reading experience (and makes me, as a writer, intensely jealous). John Manuel Arias is also a poet, and the way he chose words and manipulated language made my skin tingle.

This novel is in the tradition of magical realism, and I could tell Arias was influenced by Allende and Márquez, but he also owned the genre and made it his own. Towards the novel’s end, he even tipped his hat to Márquez in a description of San José:

A lottery ticket vendor whose wife has cancer smiles with every piece sold, every cólon that will go toward her treatment. A café owners named Shakespeare recites lines from The Comedy of Errors; his patrons munch on croissants with their eyes closed, content. A stout, devout woman flits from passerby to passerby, quoting the good book–not the Bible but One Hundred Years of Solitude, she says.

Where There was Fire pg. 264

What a lovely ode to Gabo! And if you like magical realism, then you should definitely run and get a copy of Where There Was Fire immediately if not sooner. Although be warned: you’ll never look at a banana quite the same way again.

For the Republic of the Congo, I read Broken Glass: A Novel by Alain Mabanckou which was translated from French by Helen Stevenson.

Broken Glass is the name of a 64-year-old former schoolteacher who frequents a bar called Credit Gone West. The owner of the bar gives Broken Glass a notebook and urges him to write, so Broken Glass fills the notebook with the stories of the patrons of Credit Gone West, eventually leading to his own tale.

The novel is written in the voice and style of a drunk, with no periods and sporadic capitalization. For example, here’s the opening line:

let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I–Broken Glass–can turn out a book,

Broken Glass at pg. 1

I picked a random spot to end that opening line because it just keeps going, a rambling run-on sentence of drunken chaos, but there are also references to literary classics sprinkled throughout the book, reminding the reader that Broken Glass was once a schoolteacher, and beneath the inebriation and despair, there’s a really intelligent man lost to alcoholism.

The book takes place in the town of Trois-Cents in the Republic of the Congo, but this is a universal story about alcoholism and addiction. The patrons of Credit Gone West are addicted to alcohol (for Broken Glass, it’s all about the red wine) but they are also desperate to have their stories recorded in Broken Glass’s notebook.

I do have to give one warning about this book: it discusses in excruciating detail some scenes that involve excrement and urine. I’ve been exposed to a lot of scatological humor by way of reading Day Pilkey with my son Julian, but there were a few scenes that would shock even my eight-year-old boy. I LOVED THIS BOOK and it made me think a lot about alcoholism, but if you are enjoying a quiet lunch and want some reading material… chose something else.

I’ll definitely be reading more books by Alain Mabanckou. Just maybe not while I’m eating lunch.

I did it! I recorded a podcast episode!

I know, I know, it’s been over a half year. Where have I been? READING AROUND THE WORLD.

At the end of 2023, I started a quest to read a book by an author from every country around the world in alphabetical order and I embarked on that journey with lots of trepidation, hesitation, and reluctance. My muse had been nagging me for over two years to start this quest, but I had excuses and concerns. (For example, there are too many countries. Also, the books would probably be boring. p.s. Did I mention how many countries there are? 197!)

But my muse would not relent, and as my new quest built momentum, I stopped podcasting and instead shared my journey on TikTok. That was a new endeavor and it took a lot of bandwidth to get used to filming and editing videos. I didn’t have the time or inclination to podcast while I was doing that. Besides,I was already talking a lot on Tiktok–what more could I possibly say during a podcast episode? How much talk from Courtney Henning Novak does the world actually need?

Yet I missed podcasting, and once my Read Around the World quest had sufficient momentum, my muse nagged me to resurrect Adventures With My Forties. I told my muse I needed to clean the bathroom. She told me to hire cleaners. I told my muse that the people who enjoy my TikToks would not be interested in my podcast episodes. My muse rolled her eyes and told me to stop whining and record an episode already.

So here I am.

Why did I start my Read Around the World quest? Because my muse would not leave me alone.

And now why I am podcasting again? Same damn reason.

My muse is a relentless diva who gives zero figs about back to school nights and errands and cluttered countertops, but she was right about the Read Around the World quest. DID I MENTION I’M GOING TO BRAZIL IN TWO WEEKS??? Since my muse knows how to generate some interesting adventures, I’m going to lean in again and answer the call to podcast.

Hello. How’ve you been??

For the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I read How Dare The Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child by Sandra Uwiringiyiman with Abigail Pesta. The story begins in a refugee camp in Burundi the night it is attacked by rebels who are brutally murdering the members of minority tribes. The rebels set fire to the refugees’ tents and shoot Sandra’s mother and six-year-old sister. While she’s trying to escape, a rebel points a gun at Sandra’s head–and that’s just the first chapter.

The writing style is conversational, almost like meeting a beloved friend for coffee, and I was sucked right in despite being apprehensive about the subject material. It’s not easy to read about a ten-year-old escaping a burning refugee camp with dead bodies everywhere when your own children are in the next room playing Minecraft, but thanks to Sandra and her co-author Abigail, I did not want to stop reading and inhaled this one in just a few days.

Sandra describes her childhood in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the harsh realities of living in a war-torn country. Her family belongs to a minority tribe, the Banyamulenge, who were first driven out of Rwanda and then had to flee the DRC. After the massacre at the refugee camp in Burundi, Sandra’s family, along with the other survivors, are invited to immigrate to the United States. Sandra’s family is resettled in Rochester, New York where Sandra begins middle school knowing barely any English. (In other words, they layered trauma upon trauma.)

Despite such a dark beginning, How Dare the Sun Rise is ultimately a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and our ability to overcome traumatic experiences. In high school, Sandra became an activist and a voice for her people and all refugees. Along with several of her siblings, she now runs the Jimbere Fund, a nonprofit that works to empower female entrepreneurs who live in the Congo. I was so moved by Sandra’s story, I donated $100 to the Jimbere Fund as soon as I finished her memoir, and as my social audience builds, I hope I can inspire more people to donate to causes inspired by my Read Around the World quest.

There were so many parts of Sandra’s story that made me cry or sent shivers down my spine, but this one quote keeps echoing in my mind:

[A]s I watched the people in the church cry, I had a realization: They cared. I had assumed that people in America did not care. But in that instant, I realized they did. They just didn’t know our story. They didn’t know what life was like in a refugee camp, or how it felt to endure a massacre. In America, we live in a world where Kim Kardashian dominates the news, not massacres in Africa.

how dare the sun rise, by sandra uwiringiyimana with abigail pesta, pg. 189.

Sandra is right. People care about people, but the news is a business focused on making money, so the media will always feature the content that brings in viewers. I personally could not listen to stories about massacres all day, every day, but I believe that bearing witness to other peoples’ stories of grief, anguish, and trauma makes me a better person and enriches my life. Sometimes we need the distraction of some Kardashian drama, but our hearts are also vast enough to bear witness to the atrocities of the world and as we bear witness, we change ourselves, and as we change ourselves, we change humanity.

This is definitely a book I plan to give to my children when they are a little older. Anyone who takes the time to read this memoir will want to donate to the Jimbere Fund so Sandra’s family can continue their important work.

If you are interested in reading this book, or any others from my Read Around the World quest, you can check out my Amazon shop. I receive a tiny percentage of any books purchased through the shop at no extra cost to you.