Peter Hessler and I started out in the wrong voice – literally. I stuck River Town (the first of Hessler's "China Trilogy," made up of River Town, Oracle Bones, and Country Driving) in my ears and nearly threw the iPod off the cliffs in the first half...
The first thing you need to know is that this story is real. And although it was first published eight years ago – and six years before the tragic January 12, 2010 Haitian earthquake – Sélavi is an even more urgent call for help for Haiti's children. A...
I'm the first to admit that I'm no oenophile, in spite of the years we lived in Northern California when we wandered the wineries of Napa, Sonoma, and even the tiny boutique arbors scattered through the Santa Cruz Mountains (the Loma Prieta earthquake on October...
Another confession: While recently listening to Rupert Degas narrate parts of Hari Kunzru's Gods without Men, I got such a nostalgic pang to hear Degas read Haruki Murakami (after experiencing A Wild Sheep Chase, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and select stories from The Elephant Vanishes thus far in Degas'...
Guy Delisle is a graphic genius who draws what he sees – simply and unadornedly – with droll, minimal commentary, and creates some of the most poignant, effective, resonating memoirs ever. French Canadian Delisle has undoubtedly found international fame as a traveling artist: he recreated his temporary assignments...
Most of the time, I love stories that require fitting together seemingly disjointed pieces; my brain feels delightfully tickled with the challenge. And, of Hari Kunzru's novels – Gods being his fourth and latest – I much appreciated both The Impressionist and Transmission [no, I've not yet read My...
Ready for some Saturday fun? Turn off all those screens and power up with your ever-more powerful imagination instead! Come join Zane as he turns things ordinary into magical adventures! What Zane sees as a flying saucer's crest, Lamar mistakenly calls a hubcap. No, Zane's...
Mixed in with the many death-and-destruction titles I've been reading the last few months, my most recent choices inadvertently seem to have an added layer of death-and-destruction-in-the-name-of-God. Too many books, regardless of genre or target audience, seem to offer irrefutable proof that the rules and...
"One starry night in old Kabul ...
In a sentence, American Dervish is about a young boy's indoctrination into Islam – the religion he was born into, but from the practice of which his parents have lapsed (by choice) – and his eventual withdrawal from his fervent childhood devotion. By extension, the novel...
I had quite the challenging training day on Tuesday – five hours of driving to the mountains and back, with 5.5 hours running up and down two summits in the rain, rain, rain – but the miles couldn't have gone faster thanks to Suspect X stuck in my...
"The last part of the trip to Auntie Yang's always took forever," recalls older sister Jinyi as her family drives from small-town Indiana to the outskirts of Chicago. But they made the journey often because Jinyi's mother and Auntie Yang were the only two siblings...
At 19, Nina Simonds more or less became Asian. The New Englander dropped out of college in the 1970s and headed far east to Taiwan "to study food, language, and culture." She was taken in by a surrogate Chinese family, in which the mother happened...
Ed Lin is not Robert Chow, his fictional alter ego who has starred in three of Lin's four books. If nothing else, Lin is just too young, too happy, and too funny to resemble the Vietnam War veteran-turned Chinatown, New York City cop. The other...
Who knows how it happened, but Carl Hiaasen has become my latest reliable antidote to combat the seemingly neverending succession of death and destruction horror titles I've been relentlessly reading either by assignment or by choice. Admittedly, many of them have been utterly amazing, but sometimes...
Just as North Korea’s presence in news headlines has proliferated of late – thanks to the installation of the third-generation round-faced despot; nuclear tests; failed missiles; blatant threats – book shelves, too, have seen an increase in North Korea-themed titles, predominantly written by non-Korean authors. In...
Don't let the seasonal title fool you ...
Sometimes I need three major reminders to get me to open a book I've been anxiously waiting to read. Who knows why, but I admit to being lost and misdirected often! So first the inimitable Mz. Jessica Hagedorn had to tell me (almost a year...
