United States: Everything I Never Told You

Everything I Never Told You (ISBN-13: 978-0143127550) by Celeste Ng is a book that has been on my radar for a while now. It was Ng’s debut novel, and won the Amazon Book of the Year award in 2014. I finally decided to purchase and read this when Amazon had the Kindle edition of this book, and a few other New York Times’ best sellers, for a mere $3.00. I chose to include this book in my Booking Around the World series because I wanted my selection for the United States to be special. Sadly, the majority of the books I have read have been written by American authors (which is precisely why I created the challenge for myself in the first place). I decided that when I selected a book for the United States, I wanted to choose an author that represented the diversity of America well, and I think I made a good choice.

South Africa: Born A Crime

Born A Crime by Trevor Noah (ISBN-13: 978-0399588174) is probably one of the best memoirs I’ve read, though I admit I haven’t read many. I would highly recommend experiencing this book in the audiobook form. Audible was offering this book for free for a limited time through Goodreads, so of course I took them up on the offer. Especially since this book was already on my to-read list. Trevor Noah narrates the audiobook himself, and his accent is pleasant to listen to and gives life to his stories. I didn’t know much about him before listening to this, besides that he succeeded Jon Stewart to be the host of The Daily Show. He was relatively unknown in the States before he took on that role, but since then I have seen bits and pieces of his show through video clips posted online. From what I had seen, he had some great insight on various political and social issues, particularly ones regarding race relations. Now, having read his memoir, it all makes sense.

Armenia: Falling Back in Love with Short Storytelling

At this point it would be redundant to apologize for my lack of Booking Around the World related posts since I’ve never really gotten into a consistent posting schedule thus far. But I’m happy to be back with another review, even if I decided to go a little out of order.

The next country on the list was supposed to be Angola, but another book caught my interest first, and it happened to be by an Armenian author.

Andorra: a campy adventure

After reading three books with rather heavy content for Booking Around the World, I decided it was time for a lighter read. A palate cleanser, if you will.

First off, I was silly in thinking that finding a work of Andorran literature translated into English would be an easy task. Sadly, Catalan is not a language I have chosen to conquer yet, and it happens to be the national language of Andorra, this tiny country in the middle of the Pyrenees, between Spain and France.

Algeria: political decay

You know how they say slow and steady wins the race? Well I have been slow, but I surely have not been steady.

Since my last review, I have completed several other novels for the Booking Around the World challenge (compilation here) but have not been able to post my reviews yet. Let us just chalk it up to part laziness, part me being halfway around the world for a bit.