50books_poc | Entries tagged with india

If you can get ahold of this idiosyncratic little memoir, it's pretty fun and light.

R.K. Narayan was a South Indian author, mostly of fiction, during the twentieth century. One year, in the 1950s, he travelled around the US (thanks to a Ford Foundation grant), and got two books out of it. One is The Guide, a novel about a tour guide. The other is My Dateless Diary, his diary of his travels from New York through Chicago, Berkeley, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, and more.

He has a ton of wry observations about different bits of the US, comparisons to stuff back home in Mysore, conversations with celebrities (Greta Garbo and Aldous Huxley, for example), sitcom-esque misunderstandings, poignant conversations with strangers, etc. He runs into discrimination on a bus in the South, he has trouble finding vegetarian food, people keep asking him for spiritual advice and for his opinion of Nehru. And he drafts his book along the way and submits it to his publisher. He has fun, he runs into some worries and difficult situations but nothing ever goes deeply wrong, and his descriptions of various scrapes and angsts reminds me of Wodehouse.

brainwane

A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee is a mystery written by a Scot of Bengali descent, taking place in 1919 Calcutta: "Desperate for a fresh start, Captain Sam Wyndham arrives to take up an important post in Calcutta’s police force." I agree with this book's politics but it really shows that the author had never written a novel before, in particular in the dialogue. Characters speak their subtext or otherwise exposit in that "unrealistically monologue coherently about national politics for six paragraphs" kind of way. I am a little interested in reading the next books in the series, because maybe the writing will improve.

opusculasedfera

The Ink-Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani
I'm deeply unqualified to judge classical Japanese poetry, but this seems like a pretty decent translation. I happened to read this one because it's the one the library had, which did make me wonder rather about why these particular poems and why these two authors were put in one volume and that sort of thing, but the translation sounds good and I assume these are the major poems of these two authors, though again, there's almost no context provided except a brief biography of the two poets. I don't really know what other translations are out there and I wouldn't not recommend this one, except that I kept wanting context, though I suppose it's a sign of a good poet-style (as opposed to academic-style) translation that I didn't need it for the individual poems which are largely unfootnoted and don't need said footnotes to be understandable as poems.

Suki by Suniti Namjoshi
This is half a memoir of the author's late cat and half discussion of meditation and I have to say that I found the bits about the cat more interesting. It's slight and charming, but might be a bit twee if you find people talking to their cats and having the cats answer back in English to be twee. Her insights into meditation/the personal insights she derives from meditation do feel like genuine insights, and yet I feel like I know so little about Namjoshi/the narrator that I don't actually care very much about her meditations on the origins of her personality. Cute cat anecdotes though.

Intimate Apparel/Fabulation: Two Plays by Lynn Nottage
These are two plays that deal in different ways with African-American women and the ways in which men take advantage of their achievements. The first is about a early 20th century seamstress in New York who corresponds with a labourer in Panama and ends up marrying him, and the second is about a successful businesswoman whose life is falling down around her after her husband steals all her money and fucks off, and how she returns to her family of origin in her distress. I don't really know how to talk about them because I found them both (they are, in a sense, time-separated mirrors of each other and that's why they're published as a single volume) excellent and yet they're both awfully depressing. I don't know that I'd want to go to see either of them played, and yet they both struck me as powerful and portraying their subject in a very clean, important way.

China in Ten Words by Yu Hua, translated by Allan H. Barr
The blurb claims that this book explains China through the lens of ten culturally important words. It doesn't. But what it is is memoir-essays with single word titles, and those are excellent. Yu Hua lived through the Cultural Revolution and served as a barefoot dentist (his term) for a while before beginning to write novels. He does a fantastic job of showing the degree to which children can be both unknowing about and culpable in societal brutality: in his case, during the Revolution. He also writes about how China has changed since then. An interesting perspective.

opusculasedfera

Reading and Writing: A Personal Account by V.S. Naipaul
Two short essays by a writer about how he doesn't really feel comfortable as either a reader or a writer and would have probably ended up in other media if that had been an option when he was younger. I'm probably being unfair to these pieces, and they might have been more interesting if I knew more about Naipaul personally. But I don't, and I was bored.

Marvellous Grounds: Queer of Colour Histories of Toronto ed. Jin Haritaworn, Ghaida Moussa, and Syrus Marcus Ware
A variety of pieces by Queers of Colour about living in Toronto within and without the queer community. I found this super interesting, but Toronto is my hometown and I'm not sure it would have the same resonances if you're not from around here. But if you want stories of QOC resistance from the 60s on, it's very good.

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor
A thorough and well-researched description of precisely the ways that the British screwed over India during the colonial period. Anyone with an interest in history should read this: it puts all the crimes of the British in India into one long list. It's not new information, but it's extremely well laid out here and Tharoor is not willing to let the British off the hook for anything, which is refreshing. He's not quite so clear-sighted about the current government of India, I think, but everyone has their flaws (and he is a sitting politician). (Obviously, I'm not criticising the concept of Indian self-government here, I'm criticising the government they've got, particularly given current events in Kashmir. And colonialism was worse. Just wanted to be clear.)

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe by Tina M. Campt
I really wanted to like this book, but it was so frustrating. The author has access to these two awesome photographic archives: first of Afro-Germans in the 30s and 40s, second of Black Carribbean immigrants to England in the 60s. If you want to look at the pictures, the reproductions of them in the book are great. But the actual prose gets distracted constantly by metaphors about how photographs can teach us things or release emotions and then not actually going into the things taught or the emotions released. For example, there's a fascinating section where Campt describes an interview she had with a Black tailor of the 60s who looked at the second archive of photos and had a million things to say about things like what different suit styles said about the photographic subjects. But she doesn't actually put the information into the text, just the fact that she learned these things! Instead we get a lengthy musical metaphor about how historians need to resist the urge to think they know individuals from their photos, but we can still learn things about people in the aggregate. What she learned about these populations in the aggregate? We don't find out. Just that the learning exists. The whole book is like that: the author does serious research -> the author writes a metaphor; a different set of interviews -> another metaphor. And yet I read the whole thing because the glimpses of straightforward research into the lives of these two populations were very interesting. I just wished she'd actually written a book about them.

opusculasedfera

Dates by Nawal Nasrallah
This is a short book about the date palm, covering both the biological side of what exactly it is and the cultural side of why it's so very, very important in the Middle East. Slight, but not without interest: one of the things that really made me understand how foundational to many cultures the date palm is was the poetry that's quoted throughout. It's not just that many cultures wrote poetry that refers to the date palm, it's that it becomes clear that there's so much date palm vocabulary that is normal and poetic in Arabic and in English has to be translated with scientific terminology that looks wildly out of place in this type of e.g. love poetry. A good resource on date palms, but you have to really want to read about dates.

Joon: Persian Cooking Made Simple by Najmieh Batmanglij
A perfectly good Persian cookbook featuring a good variety of types of dishes, all selected with the intent of being cookable by the average non-Persian cook in North America without sacrificing taste. I will probably make some of these dishes, though as a readable cookbook, I preferred her Food of Life (reviewed here) which not only lists recipes, but then elaborates on several different possible variants for each one and gives a much bigger picture of the scope of the cuisine.

Passage by Gwen Benaway
I should have read this before I read Benaway's second book of poetry (reviewed here) because she has definitely grown since this book, but the poems are still excellent and heart-rending.

Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
Khakpour has Lyme disease, which is both hugely debilitating and sufficiently vague that she has a hard time getting doctors to believe her. She's not sure when she contracted the disease, only that she seems to have always been sick, and the memoir is about both her life as someone coping with a debilitating and mysterious condition and the process of finding adequate medical care for something that some doctors don't even believe in. Khakpour is very honest about the ways in which she is and is not coping well with her disease; even a diagnosis is not necessarily the consolation you might expect it would be, and her resentment at having to have her life restricted is very refreshing.

Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation by Imani Perry
I'm not even sure how to review this except to say that if you're interested in race or history or gender, you should read this book. Perry describes how the liberal project (in the European sense of liberal, not just meaning vaguely leftist) keeps changing, but always maintains categories of non-persons that do not count in the new liberal order, but actually hold it up. She takes the reader through various historical examples to illuminate her argument, alway allowing for the complexity of the many different ways her subjects were oppressed, though I think she does an excellent job of tying them all back to the same strands of Western thought. Again, I am describing this complicated book very badly, but it doesn't feel complicated to read, only very deeply considered, and I recommend it highly.

even this page is white by Vivek Shraya
I have a terrible bias against the sort of poetry chapbook where poetry is confined to one tiny corner of the page, even when this means that a short poem must be split up over three pages for no particular reason and there are acres of blank white space. I suppose it might be a deliberate point in a collection about race and whiteness, but it wasn't to my taste. The poems themselves are somewhat uneven, though I may just be the wrong audience. When they were good, they were quite good; when they were otherwise, they were banal or plodding. On the other hand, I may be missing something: I'm not much of a poetry reader, and I don't have the POC or immigrant experiences that Shraya is exploring here. It did win some awards in Canada. I'd love to hear someone else's thoughts if anyone else here has read it, and I am looking forward to reading Shraya's recent book of essays.

opusculasedfera

I've been terrible about posting these round-ups of my reading so forgive me if I spam a little as I catch up with everything I've read for this challenge this year.

Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies by Najmieh Batmanglij and My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking Niloufer Ichaporia King
Two very different books about diaspora Parsi cooking. Batmanglij is talking primarily about the American diaspora, and King is living in America, but her food culture is the culture of Parsis who live in India. Reading them within a month or so of each other, I could see where they were coming from the same place filtered through two different foodways, and where they totally differ (King, for example, has a whole section on the food of the 1950s dinner party, Parsis-in-India edition; whereas Batmanglij occasionally offers ways to alter recipes to make them more accurate to medieval originals). Both of them you could easily cook from in North America and I fully intend to. I preferred the Batmanglij for thoroughness and the perspective that I rarely see in books aimed at a North American audience: namely, the bits aimed at Iranians who are interested in their own heritage. For example, she writes about how to create a festival meal assuming that you are attempting to return to celebrations remembered from childhood, not someone from a different culture who doesn't know what the festival in question is, though she does include several short summaries of Persian/Iranian cultural information, including poetry. King's book is more of a memoir, if you prefer that sort of cookbook, and it is a memoir of a very particular Indian sub-culture, which might be of interest. I would recommend both.

We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women's Coming-of-Age Ceremonies by Cutcha Risling Baldy
This is a serious and academic work of anthropology that genuinely made me cry. Risling Baldy is a Hupa academic who was personally involved in bringing back the women's coming-of-age ceremonies after the settler government attempted to eradicate them, and she writes about their meaning both metaphysically and what they mean to the people involved (both the women performing the ceremony for the girl coming of age and the girl herself.) I would press this book aggressively on anyone who wants to write anything about ritual and ceremony because it does such an amazing job of explaining not just what people believe, but also why they care. I'd recommend it to anyone: the writing is not academese at all, and the perspective is so important.

High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris
An excellent book about how African-American foodways are strongly related to African ones, tracing the journey across the Atlantic as well as how they mutated within America. Suffered only from the fact that I had already read Michael Twitty's book on the same subject (The Cooking Gene) which is just a tiny bit more thorough and slightly better. But an enjoyable book all the same and of interest if you're interested in the topic.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh asks the question of why artists are failing to deal with climate change in their art. For example, very few novels include the happenstance of the extreme weather events that are increasingly common and yet mimetic realistic novels should, even if they're about something else. His concern is that humans won't be able to imagine climate change unless we can see it imagined for us already in art, and if we can't imagine it, we won't do anything about it. Lots of interesting ideas in one short volume, highly recommended.

Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities by Gary Paul Nabhan
Nabhan suggests several methods of community organizing centred around food production, particularly things that can be done at the small scale. Interesting, but I find it difficult to remember months later.

Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging by Minh-ha T. Pham
Pham is looking at how Asian "Influencers" are both linked and not linked to the ongoing history of Asian involvement in the garment industry, as well as how racism affects these influencers' reception by the fashion industry. I didn't know anything about these style bloggers beforehand (though I believe that they're quite famous to other people), but I love me some labour history and this book does an excellent job of laying out the labour involved in style blogging and internet content creation more generally, and discussing how it is and is not received as labour. This is a more abstruse academic book, but if you're interested in labour history and new forms of work, I'd recommend it.

opusculasedfera

I've been keeping up with the challenge, but very bad about posting it anywhere. Let's see if I can change that this year as people come back to dreamwidth, maybe? (Please?)

Brief reviews:

A Burst of Light and other essays by Audre Lorde
A reread of the always magnificent Audre Lorde. I needed her essay on the uses of anger in this extremely trying time.

The Occasional Vegetarian: 100 Delicious Dishes that Put Vegetables in the Center of the Plate by Elaine Louie
Some excellent sounding recipes, some mediocre sounding recipes. Billed to me by the library catalogue as containing more essay than recipe, it was definitely the other way around, but if you want something new to do with a vegetable, this has a broad approach and recipes from a wide variety of food traditions. Tends to ignore the fact that even vegetarians need PROTEIN and heartiness/substance is not the same thing, which always annoys me a bit.

Following Fish: One Man's Journey into the Food and Culture of the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian
One of those books where someone travels somewhere and eats something delicious and describes it well. A solid example of the genre. Contains some excellent descriptions of fish cookery and Indian scenery, and some parts of India I know very little about. I enjoyed it, and Subramanian is much more aware that he's describing a delicious fried fish, not a deep secret of politics/society/life than the title makes it sound, which keeps the book light and compelling. If anyone has any more recs in this genre, I would be delighted to receive them.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani
An exploration of various historical antecedents to our current state of anything-goes political lies. Depressing as hell, but very good at the thing that it's doing.

Myth=Mithya: Decoding Hindu Mythology by Devdutt Pattanaik
An explanation of several Hindu myths as well as the personages/symbols within them. It took me months to finish this quite short volume so I kept getting the many, many names confused, but I don't think that was the author's fault. Does a good job with some myths at straightforwardly explaining how the same myth gets used to tell different lessons in different communities, but with other ones I was left feeling like there was a definite slant to the story and I was wondering whose story it was. On the other hand, it's not supposed to be a comprehensive guide, just a starting point, and I know that I'm not especially knowledgeable on the subject.

Tags: sri lanka, japan, african-american, india, china, food/cooking, mythology, politics, history, essay, non-fiction

brainwane

I've been recommending this book to friends recently and realized I never posted my review of it here. It's a mimetic/realistic fiction novel set in modern-day Bangalore, with two main plot threads: a guy who wants to expand his business honestly but faces the impossibility of doing so without bribing creeps, and a servant in his house who walks multiple figurative tightropes to maintain some sliver of personal autonomy and keep her son from falling in with creeps.

I'd previously read Sankaran's short story collection The Red Carpet, which I also recommend. (I picked it up in the Manhattan public library when I was looking for Dorothy Sayers and saw Sankaran's book near Sayers alphabetically. Most English-language Indian fiction isn't about Bangalore, so this is an ultra-specific YES YES SO RIGHT YES. Sankaran hooked me a few pages in by using the Kannada/English slang "one-thaara" ("a kind/type of"), which I'd never seen written down before. The title story is so sweet! I see

rydra_wong also liked it and

glitter_femme liked it too.)

I loved The Hope Factory -- what a specifically Bangalore story, getting the texture of class, gender, and location so right. (I wonder whether the flashback chapter about one protagonist's day laborer past would work as a standalone story; it sure has a Crowning Moment of Awesome that I will remember for a long time.) I honestly do not know whether I should recommend this book to non-Indians or even desis who are not Karnatakan or Kannadiga, whether it will sparkle quite as bright to people who have never been to that particular dosa restaurant, who don't think "wait I think I have relatives in that square mile of Mysore." But if you're looking for an English-language novel set in modern-day Bangalore, spanning rich and poor, family and business and politics, check this out.

delfinnium

(recommended to link here by Deepad. First post, first review thing!)

Thanks to

deepad, I'm currently reading the series Gameworld Trilogy by Samit Basu. (can be found here. It can be bought here!)

And it does start off a little slow, in the beginning, especially if you're like me, and have very little familarity with the Ramayan other than a very vauge understanding of 'something happens, Demons evil attack! Princess is involved, there is a vanar, Lord of monkeys and a damn good archer, involved somewhere, there is a lot of fire, and a chariot happens to be there somewhere', you might be a little thrown by all the terms there.

And it's GOOD!

I like that!

I mean there are some books (like the God of War series) that use terms so obscure and strange that it is hard to actually understand what is going on in the world unless you read it several times (and I'm not so sure I'm drawn into it), but this world is not like that!

I mean there are creatures whom you don't know what they are - vaman, pashan, vanar (though since I know passingly from School the ramayana, i know what vanar are), khuldran, and so on and so forth, and Samit doesn't explain, not at first.

But then as the story opens up, you start to realise what they are. Vaman are the equivalent of dwarves, vanar are monkeys/apes, pashan seem to be troll types, asur are... I'm not sure what they are, really, other than that no one likes them and they do all the dirty shitty jobs that no one wants.

( Yet longer incoherent flailing review here! )

Just.

You like POC cultures and fantasy? Sick of male dominated Generic White Medieval Fantasy?

THIS WILL BLOW YOUR SOCKS.

Genre: SFF, fantasy, parody
Subject: parody, trope inversion, non-white fantasy
Author nationality/ethnicity: Indian

sumofparts.livejournal.com

1. Swimming in the Monsoon Sea by Shyam Selvadurai
2. Mr. Muo's Traveling Couch by Dai Sijie (translated by Ina Rilke; white)
3. Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup
4. Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life by Bryan Lee O'Malley
5. The Circle of Reason by Amitav Ghosh

( Read more... )

tags: a: selvadurai shyam, a: dai sijie, w-t: rilke ina, a: swarup vikas, a: o'malley bryan lee, a: ghosh amitav, chinese, french, indian, canadian, sri lankan, novel, fiction, graphic novel, young adult, china, india, toronto, sri lanka, glbt, mysteryr

rosehiptea.livejournal.com

( Marrying Anita, by Anita Jain )

( Book Girl and the Suicidal Mime, by Mizuki Nomura )

( Blood the Last Vampire: Night of the Beasts by Mamoru Oshii )

Current Mood: awake

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

In a voice mellifluous as a gentle shower of honey, without faltering, without throwing in filler words, very gracefully, the goose made a highly learned presentation. […] She also demonstrated her proficiency in poetry, dramaturgy, poetics, music, and erotic science.

The goose Sucimukhi was taught by Saraswati, Goddess of Learning and Speech, and given the title “Mother of Similes and Hyperbole.” In this gorgeous, witty, sensual fifteenth-century novel from south India, she helps resolve a war in Heaven by match-making between Pradyumna, Krishna’s son, and Prabhavati, the daughter of a demon king.

If you skim the genealogies at the very beginning, you don’t need to already have a background in Indian traditional tales and religion to appreciate this short novel, which can be enjoyed on many levels: as a love story told in luscious, Song of Solomon-like metaphors; as a love story punctuated by metafictional commentary and sly parodies of the overblown conventions of love stories; as myth; as a small taste of a literary culture that I suspect many of you haven’t encountered before. (I mean fifteenth century Telegu literature, not Indian literature in general.)

Unlike a lot of literature which was clearly hot at the time but not to modern readers’ erotic tastes… this is still hot. At least, I thought so. There are many more explicit passages, but I was particularly taken with this one, in which Prabhavati’s girlfriend helps her arrange her hair for her first meeting with her beloved, and breaks into spontaneous poetry:

If you let your hair down, you look beautiful.
When you let it hang halfway, you look beautiful, too.
If it gets tangled, you’re beautiful in a different way.
If you comb it down, even more so.
You can braid it, roll it into a bun, or better still
tie it into a knot on the side.
You’re beautiful with that hair every which way.

It’s long, black, and so thick
you can’t hold it in one hand.
No matter how you wear it,
you’ll trap your husband with your hair.

Translated and with extensive historical notes by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman.

The Demon's Daughter: A Love Story from South India (S U N Y Series in Hindu Studies)

veleda-k.livejournal.com

The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson.

( The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It )

The Bandit Queen of India: An Indian Woman's Amazing Journey From Peasant to International Legend by Phoolan Devi with Marie-Therese Cuny and Paul Rambali.

( The Bandit Queen of India )

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

6, 7, & 8. Three poetry collections by Moniza Alvi: Carrying My Wife, A Bowl of Warm Air, and The Country At My Shoulder (all three collections are available together in an omnibus also called "Carrying My Wife"). I have to admit, out of about 150 poems, there were three that did anything for me. I mostly found the expression of content incomprehensible, possibly due to the author reaching for innovative imagery, and the aesthetics of form uninteresting, but she's a comparatively popular mainstream Establishment poet so my judgement is extremely questionable (and I haven't heard her read her own work live). There are two of the poems, which did speak to me, at my dw journal.

9. The Redbeck* Anthology of British South Asian Poetry, edited by Debjani Chatterjee, is a nearly 200 page collection with a wide variety of content and style, which I enjoyed. There are two example poems at my dw journal and a third example poem but, of course, three poems can't reflect the breadth (or depth) of this anthology.

* I keep misreading it as "Redneck". ::facepalm::

10. The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan didn't appeal to me visually as much as the previous Tan books I've perused but the gist, that it's more important to be happy than to fit in, is another good theme, especially for kids.

Note to tag wranglers: "british-asian" and/or "british-south-asian" is correct usage and, yes, some of the authors (and/or their subjects) are also caribbean / african / &c.

Tags: women writers, poetry, anthologies, asian, british-asian, pakistan, britain, british, caribbean, african, bangladesh, india, indian, indian-british, pakistani, bangladeshi, pakistani-british, bangladeshi-british, british-south-asian, asian-australian, australian, chinese-australian, picture books

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

2. Sarita Mandanna, Tiger Hills

Devi is a beautiful, strong-willed young girl, growing up in Coorg, a rural, mountainous area of South India, in the late 1800s. She's in love with Machu, a warrior famous for having killed a tiger single-handedly. Devanna, Machu's younger cousin, is a quiet, intelligent boy, studying to be a doctor, who's in love with Devi. As you might expect, things don't turn out well.

This novel has some beautiful descriptions of scenery (apparently Coorg- spelled Kodagu today- is known as 'the Scotland of India'), but the plot is a bit over-the-top, with tragedy following tragedy. I enjoyed reading to pass the time on a long bus trip, but I'm not sure I can genuinely recommend it, unless you're looking for something to read that won't require a lot of thought.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

1. Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India

Anjali Bose is a small town girl in rural India who has big dreams. Her teacher, an ex-pat American, encourages her to make something of herself by heading to Bangalore, which they both see as the best new city in India. Anjali eventually heads there, and ends up in more trouble than she anticipated.

The writing in this novel is quite good, very poetic, in the first few chapters, but gradually heads downhill and becomes very pedestrian by the end. The problem, I think, is that there is just way too much plot in this book. The main characters deal with rape, international terrorism, false charges of murder, police brutality, arranged marriage, teenage runaways, divorce, gay men in India, botched back-alley sex change operations, prostitution, art theft, suicide, the role of outsourcing in the Indian economy, riots, the art of photography, homelessness, telecommunication centers, and more. By about the fourth major plot twist, there's no time for poetry anymore, and even for much of a reaction from the characters, because there's just too much happening. I think it could have been a much better book if it had just focused on a few of these issues instead of all of them.

That said, many of the characters here are quite appealing, particularly Anjali. And it certainly seems to be a very current look at Indian society (I learned, for instance, that the cool new dessert is cold coffee with ice cream, which I promptly went out to try, and I can inform you that it is delicious). Overall a fun read, but not a particularly deep one.

puritybrown.livejournal.com

44: Swami and Friends by R. K. Narayan

Although it was his first novel, I'm not sure I would have chosen to begin my exploration of R. K. Narayan's work with Swami and Friends -- I was rather hoping to read his retelling of the Ramayana one of these days -- but I just happened to stumble on it in a charity shop, for the princely sum of €2. So I snapped it up, and I greatly enjoyed it. It is one of those books that one hesitates to call "a children's book" because although the protagonist is a child, there are lots of glimpses of the adult world and adult sensibilities peeking through the narrative, and it could be enjoyed as much by adults who can see the wider significance (or lack thereof) of Swami's little dramas as by children appreciating a story about their peers.

It put me in mind of the William books, which were staples of my childhood. Swami and Friends was first published in 1935, and Just William was published in 1922, so it's possible that Richmal Crompton was an influence on Narayan, though I wouldn't want to put money on it; quite likely anyone writing about young boys at that period would produce a story with a similar sort of atmosphere. Like the William books, Swami and Friends is very funny, but there's a more serious side that the William books lack; Swami is growing up in an India struggling for independence, and at one point he gets caught up in a patriotic demonstration that turns into a riot. Yet, Swami being only ten years old, this riot is no more important in his eyes than the fact that he has to miss cricket practice because of Scout drills after school. It's that shift in perspective to a child's-eye-view that makes Swami and Friends so charming and effective.

45: Emiko Superstar written by Mariko Tamaki with art by Steve Rolston
I loved Skim, which was written by Mariko Tamaki with her cousin Jillian Tamaki, so I had high hopes for Emiko Superstar. And it's good; not as good as Skim, but still clever and entertaining. Like Skim, the main character is a slightly geeky Japanese-Canadian teenage girl who longs for something more than her boring, mundane life. The "something more" comes in the form of the Freakshow, a local performance art night positively custom-designed to appeal to teenagers. Emiko is at first intrigued, then scared, then drawn in by the Freakshow; the wildness of it is seductive, even if it has its unsavoury side. Meanwhile, she's got herself a job babysitting for an outwardly-perfect suburban couple, but there's more going on with John and Susan than meets the eye.

Emiko Superstar is part of DC's ill-fated Minx line of short graphic novels aimed at teenage girls. I have mixed feelings about the Minx line; some of the titles were good, and they were all obviously well-intentioned, but they often came across as slightly thin and underdeveloped, as if they needed either twenty more pages or six extra months of rewrites and redraws to get up to snuff. None of the ones I've read were bad, exactly, they were just... flat. Uninspiring. Emiko Superstar is one of the better ones; it doesn't feel flat, and it doesn't feel uninspiring, but by comparison to Skim it's a bit wordier, a lot less subtle, and a great deal more predictable. Where Skim was the kind of work where every word and every line seems to bring with it a meaning behind the obvious meaning, Emiko Superstar pretty much all happens on the same level. It's a well-constructed, well-told story that doesn't have much in the way of depth or layers. Still, I did enjoy it.

(tags: a: tamaki mariko, w-i: rolston steve, a: narayan rk, india, graphic novel, young adult, children's books, japanese-canadian)

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14. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices

A sort-of fantasy novel about Tilo, a 'Mistress of Spices'- immortal, mystical women, trained in magic and secret knowledge, sent out into the world to help people. Tilo is sent to Oakland, California, where she slowly becomes personally involved in the lives of the people around her, and begins to reveal her own backstory.

This novel is very hard to describe, because it doesn't have much of a plot for most of its length. Instead, it's full of beautiful, poetic descriptions of spices and food, magic, Oakland and imaginary places like the Island where Mistresses are trained. Some parts are very realistic; others involve rampaging pirate queens or singing sea serpents. It took me a while to get into this book, because the beginning is very slow, but by the end I was in love. The language is incredibly evocative, and the resolution felt just right. I really grew to like the characters, particularly Tilo, who shows herself to be much more of a flawed human than any mystical fairy.

Highly recommended.

Current Mood: lazy
Current Music: "Naomi" Neutral Milk Hotel

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13. Pico Iyer, Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East

I love travel books, and this is a fantastic one. Iyer visits several Asian countries (including India, China, Tibet, Burma, the Philippines, Bali, Thailand, Hong Kong, and probably a few more I'm forgetting) with the goal of seeing how they've been affected by Western pop culture and tourism. Iyer is quite good at describing places, and seems to have really made the effort to get to know local people and include their viewpoints.

This book is a bit out-of-date now (it was written in the early 80s), but to me that just added to the appeal. This is a China and Tibet newly opened to Westerners, a Hong Kong which is still a colony, Burma before it was Myanmar. So many of the places he visits no longer exist- at least, not as they did at the time- that it makes for an intriguing historical snapshot.

Iyer uses the 'Modern, Masculine West meets Traditional, Feminine East! However Will They Understand One Another?' trope a bit too much for my tastes, but you could easily skim those parts and focus on the descriptions of places and people, which are quite well-written. Recommended, and I'd love recs for other travel books, if you have a favorite!

Current Mood: cheerful

zeborah

Swati returns with his wife's ashes to his childhood home, where (though British colonialism has made the title more or less meaningless) he and his ancestors were kings. There he learns of the existence of a cousin he never knew about, and more.

The book mingles his journey and memories and the mythology and history of the kingdom in a way that reminds me a little of Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits (though chronology isn't quite so... liquid here as in that book). Part 2 dragged a bit for me (partly the point of view change, partly that I wasn't interested in that setting) but it all came together in part 3.

(Warnings for possible triggers: skip) Contains descriptions of violence, including description of sexual violence.)