The Housekeeper and the Professor

I've had this book on my shelf for years. A not insignificant number of years. And I don't know why, but every time I was looking for a new book to read, I'd pass it over. Maybe because it's just so small and I didn't notice it? Maybe because, despite everything good I'd heard about it, I…

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

I have sort of been passively trying to meet some of the Reading Women prompts for 2021 – not as intensely as last year, but just for fun. And one of the prompts that I figured I just wouldn’t meet was to read a "Crime Novel or Thriller in Translation" …mostly because I just don’t…

Bright

I really don’t know where I first heard of this book, but somehow I knew, when I saw it on the used book shelf at my local indie bookstore, that it was the first novel by a Thai woman to appear internationally in English translation. These are the pluses and minuses of being on #bookstagram.…

The Little Paris Bookshop

I picked this novel up at a used bookstore a few years ago and never got around to reading it. It just sounded sweet and the cover is super cozy looking, but for some reason it never called out to me as my “next read.” During the last meeting for my long-distance book club, I…

The House of the Spirits

I have read a number of things by Isabel Allende over the years, starting with Zorro, when I was really probably to young to appreciate Allende’s prose, because my brothers and I were obsessed with the movie The Mask of Zorro, starring Anthony Hopkins, Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. I cannot tell you how many…

Celestial Bodies

In my goal of working to read more diversely, I’m attempting to also diversify my diversity… That sounds confusing, but basically, I’m just trying to cast my reading net ever wider. So when I heard about this 2019 winner of the International Man Booker, the first novel translated from Arabic to win this prize, in…

The Vegetarian

This is the first book of the year that I chose to read as part of The Reading Women Challenge 2020, for Prompt #2: Translated from an Asian Language. It’s been on my radar for awhile now, but I’m already picking up books I would have continued to put off, thanks to this challenge. Yay!…

Like Water for Chocolate

I read this more years ago than I’d like to admit, in a Spanish class at some point. Having taken Spanish from middle school all the way through majoring in it in college, I cannot remember exactly when. I any case, many years have passed and, since I first read it in Spanish (not my…

Things We Lost in the Fire

This was my choice for the August Just One More Pa(i)ge Reading Challenge prompt: Women in Translation month. It was a great chance to both read something totally different and, in this case, to work on my side goal of reading more books by Latinx/Spanish-speaking authors. And this was such a good choice. Completely different…

Convenience Store Woman

A few months ago, this tiny book was everywhere and, while it really didn’t sound like anything particularly striking, people seemed to be really enjoying it. And, I am, as ever, a sucker for hype. Long story short, I added it to my TBR and, when it became available at my local library, I was…