Rating: 8.3/10. Novel spanning 7 generations, beginning in Ghana around 1760 and following two half-sisters and their family lines. The first sister Effia marries an Englishman in charge of the slave trade; this side of the family remains in Ghana. The other sister Esi is captured and sent on a ship to the Americas; this…
Category: Novels / Fiction
To Live (活着) by Yu Hua
Rating: 8.5/10. A very tragic novel — the protagonist is an old man telling the story of his life when he was young. In the beginning, he was born into a rich family, he gambled all day. He lost all his family’s property gambling and they had to move into a small hut. At this…
Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq
Rating: 8.5/10. First novel by Tanya Tagaq, an Inuit throat singer. She tells the story of an Inuit girl in the 1970s, growing up in Nunavut in the high arctic. At first, she is a girl, and various problems like bullying, drugs, sexual assault on young girls are common. She matures and learns to fight…
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
Rating: 7.0/10. Modern day Japanese romance novel, between a 38 year old woman Tsukiko and a former high school teacher thirty years older than her. She’s an office worker and doesn’t really have friends, and he is also lonely since his wife died. They start out as acquaintances and run into each other a lot…
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon
Rating: 6.3/10. Novel originally written in Icelandic by author Sjon and translated into English, takes place in medieval Iceland (in the 1600s). Back then, Iceland was poor and in a remote corner of the world, people starved during the winter. The main character, Jonas, is a talented naturalist that explores the world through science. However,…
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
Rating: 8.4/10. This book is about the life of an Ojibway Indian, living in northern Ontario and growing up in the 60s. When he was young, they sent him to a residential school where he was badly treated and not allowed to speak his own language. He found hockey and got really good at it,…
Man by Kim Thuy
Rating: 4.9/10. A short novel by a Vietnamese-Canadian refugee, it tells the story of a girl who immigrated from Vietnam to Montreal to escape the war, just like herself. Translated from French, the book is comprised of short chapters of a paragraph to a page each. There is a lot of poetic descriptions of scenery…
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Rating: 7.4/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] Second book I read by Agatha Christie, it was okay but I liked the first one better (And Then There Were None). In this mystery, detective Hercule Poirot is on a train in Eastern Europe when one of the passengers is murdered, and also the train gets stuck in a snowbank…
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Rating: 8.5/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] This is the first mystery novel and Agatha Christie novel that I’ve read, and it also happens to be the bestselling title in the entire mystery genre of all time. Ten strangers are invited to a fancy party on an island, and then, one by one, they start dying, and they…
Sky Burial by Xinran Xue
Rating: 8.7/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] In this novel, a Chinese women, Shu Wen from Suzhou, travels to Tibet to search for her missing husband. This was in 1958, when the Chinese Communist Party annexed Tibet. On the way there, she picks up a Tibetan woman, Zhuoma. They get into some trouble in the mountains and meet…
The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
Rating: 4.0/10. Book about the Haitian revolution, originally written in Spanish and translated to English. Although the topic is interesting, the writing is confusing, uses too much unfamiliar vocabulary, and it was hard to follow what was going on. At least it was short, with less than 200 pages. I’m not sure why this has…
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Rating: 8.3/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] Pachinko is the name of the Japanese pinball game, where you watch metal balls tumble through a machine. It’s also the name of this novel, that traces a Korean family in Japan through four generations (Yangjin/Hoonie/Hansu -> Sunja/Isak -> Noa/Mozasu -> Solomon/Phoebe). Sunja is the first generation to immigrate to Japan…