The 2023 reading year was a good one, so many different reading experiences. I didn’t quite check off all my goals as planned but new and exciting reading opportunities came up along the way.
Once again, I traveled around the world with The Book Girls‘ Book Voyage: Read Around the World reading challenge. I visited 19 countries (not including the USA), three of which were new to me in reading (Albania, Argentina, and Italy), and I traveled to more of South America than in previous years. Books in translation made up 50% of the Book Voyage books.
I didn’t complete my 2023 Nordic Lit Reading Challenge as planned – a unique Nordic country for each of the six categories – but I still felt good about how it played out.
What I thought would be a simpler approach with fewer categories (in the past it’s been 12) turned out to require too much research and planning for all the pieces to fall into place. Also, I was distracted by new reading challenges.
I did read two new-to-me Nordic authors, Denmark’s Kim Leine (Reading Lately, May) and Finland’s Emmi Itäranta (Reading Lately, March). I also read two Norwegian authors long on my radar, Brit Bildøen (Reading Lately, August) and Abid Raja (Reading Lately, September) as well as a highly anticipated Swedish Sámi novel (Reading Lately, April). Looking back now, all I needed to do for the pieces to fall into place as planned was to read a Swedish book by or about a marginalized group or another book by or about the Sámi people and their history and culture, fiction or nonfiction. Goals for 2024!
Somewhere in the middle of 2023, I picked up the #DiversityAcrossGenres reading challenge, which I greatly enjoyed participating in. I read many diverse authors and different genres that I wouldn’t necessarily have read if I weren’t on the lookout for them. Click here to see my 2023 reads. I ran out of time to complete some categories, but I have those titles on my TBR for 2024’s challenge.
What have you been reading lately?
The Good Son by You-Jeong Jeong (2016) 📖🎧
Translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim (2018), narrated by Johnathan McClain & Elizabeth Liang
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with this one. It had been on and off my radar for a while as a book in translation by an Asian woman, and I finally read it now since I needed a thriller/horror by an Asian author for #DiversityAcrossGenres. It’s about a 26-year-old man who wakes up to find his mother dead in their home. He does not remember much from the night before, but as he tries to figure it out, more and more is revealed, both about what happened and about his past. The author really takes the reader inside his mind as he pieces everything together from bits and pieces of memories. It’s a dark and disturbing story (decent amount of violence) but intriguing to see it all come together. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- #DiversityAcrossGenres: Asian / Thriller/Horror
- Book Voyage: Read Around the World: Asia – North (South Korea)
People Like Them by Samira Sedira (2020) 🎧
Translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud (2021), narrated by Susan Nezami
This story by a French-Algerian author is loosely inspired by a quintuple murder that happened in 2003 in France. In that case, racist motives were completely overlooked. In this novella, the author takes into consideration race, which she believes to be an essential key to understanding that tragedy. The story begins mid-2015, a significant year for France with terrorist attacks both in January and November.
A wealthy Black man and his family move to a newly built chalet in a remote French mountain village. A little over a year later, they are murdered by a local whom everyone described as “normal”. The story opens with a retelling of the brutal murder. There is no doubt of the defendant’s guilt, just questions about his motivation. The story is from the point of view of the murderer’s wife. Reflecting on the tragedy and her husband’s role in it, she alternates between the trial and how she and her husband met and life in the village before the murder. It’s a thought-provoking look on human nature and race and class relations. The translation and the narration were both excellent. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- #DiversityAcrossGenres: MENA/Arab / Thriller/Horror
- Book Voyage: Read Around the World: Europe – Western (France)
Our Last Days in Barcelona (The Perez Family #5) by Chanel Cleeton (2022) 🎧
Narrated by Almarie Guerra, Elena Rey, and Victoria Villarreal
I read and enjoyed Next Year in Havana, the first book in the Perez Family series. I started but had to set aside the second one, When We Left Cuba. Now I skipped ahead to the last in the series, which was not a problem, but the family tree I found in the back of the book was helpful.
This is the story of Isabel, the oldest of four sisters. She travels from Palm Beach, Florida, to Barcelona in 1964 to track down her younger sister, Beatriz. The story jumps between Isabel in Barcelona in 1964 (unhappily married in Palm Beach) and the sisters’ mother Alicia in Barcelona in 1936 (at her parents’ home after leaving her cheating husband in Cuba) with some chapters from the perspective of Alicia’s cousin in Havana in 1936 (husband went to fight in Spain). There were many similarities, too many, between the storylines which made it hard to distinguish them at times. What I appreciated the most was the historical aspect of the novel. It takes place during the Civil War in Spain and also explores the historical relationship between Cuba and Spain, both of which have been rare topics in my reading. However, at the same time, I wish there had been a stronger sense of place in Barcelona. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- #DiversityAcrossGenres: Latine/x / Romance
- Book Voyage: Read Around the World: Europe – Western (Spain)
What have you been reading lately? Do you have any reading challenges planned for 2024?
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“Kim Leine’s great epic, ‘Profeterne i Evighedsfjorden’, is the story of the Danish priest Morten Falck who travels to Greenland at the end of the 1700s. Through this unfolds the tale of Danish colonisation as a completely crazy and meaningless project. The Danish officials try to keep hold of power and customs but are plagued by homesickness and resignation. Grief and anger smoulders amongst the Greenlanders, and some of them seize Christianity and the European ideas of freedom as an inspiration for rebellion against colonial power. But as well as being a critical, historical novel that reminds us of Denmark’s problematic past as a colonial power, the book is also a depiction of dirt as mankind’s basic element.”
“Her [Sofi Oksanen’s] third novel, Purge, is about the Soviet occupation of Estonia and its consequences. Unfortunately, it is also very much of current interest with its stories about human trafficking around the Baltic. The book’s two time levels are 1992 – one year after Estonia won its independence – and the 1940s – when tens of thousands of Estonians were deported to Siberia and agriculture was collectivised. On a summer morning in 1992, old Aliide Truu finds an exhausted and confused young woman in her vegetable garden. This Zara has been tricked away from her home in Vladivostok to work as a sex worker in Berlin. On the way to Tallinn where she was supposed to start selling her body to Finnish sex tourists, she manages to escape.”
“The Blue Fox is a novel about an Icelandic pastor and a fox hunt. Sjón makes use of the Icelandic folktale to tell his story. One of the principal characters is the pastor Baldur Skuggason. He has an evil, dark side to his character. Another key figure is the strange offspring of a cat and a fox following the story – Sjón’s style has elements of a very unique Icelandic sense of humour. The Blue Fox is a short novel with a few sections. Some pages only consist of a single written line, surrounded by large white surfaces calling to mind the Icelandic expanse. This concreteness can be said to balance on the line between prose and poetry. ‘Skugga-Baldur’ is also a contemporary novel which brings up some of today’s ethical questions. Are the weak, deformed babies with developmental disorders welcome in a world where they could have been discarded already prior to birth?”
“The Ice Palace is a novel with two 11-year-old girls as the protagonists: extrovert Siss and quiet, introvert Unn. The day after a meeting of the girls at which Unn revealed that she is carrying a dark secret, Unn travels to the ice palace. This is a huge ice formation which builds up at a waterfall in winter-time. As it turns out to be made up of several ice rooms, she walks into the palace. Unn is enthralled by the beauty of the rooms, but in the seventh room she loses her way and cannot find her way out. She freezes to death with Siss’s name on her lips. The novel concludes with the story of Siss’s life and her reaction to Unn’s death. Siss now becomes the quiet and lonely one. She goes into an inner ice palace until she is finally redeemed and can move on into adulthood with a profound insight.”
“Blackwater is a detective novel set in the town of Svartvattnet in Norrland. It depicts a woman from Stockholm, who moves in with her boyfriend in the town to work as a teacher in a commune. However, events revolve around a double homicide that remains unsolved and the consequences of this trauma for the people in the town. Kerstin Ekman’s story invites many reading styles; it can be read as a Bildungsroman, as a critical analysis of gender roles, as a mythical story with symbolic elements, but, of course, also simply as a thrilling detective novel.”
At 9 years old, Elsa, a Sámi girl from a reindeer herding family, witnesses her reindeer calf being killed and is threatened to silence by the perpetrator. The event has a deep and lingering effect on her. As time passes, the Sámi community continues to experience crimes against their reindeer. The police do nothing; the crimes are just marked as theft with no investigations. The story jumps ahead 10 years when Elsa returns to her Sámi community after high school in town. Nothing has changed in regards to discrimination and prejudice towards the Sámi, and Elsa becomes active in the fight for justice. So many issues facing the Sámi are touched upon in this book. In addition to the discrimination and prejudice they face, there’s the effect of climate change on reindeer herding, mental health of Sámi people, and expected gender roles within the Sámi communities. It was an engaging and powerful read that left impressions that will stay with me for a long time.
I loved this book, such a heartwarming story! The story is told from the perspectives of three characters all with such unique personalities – Tova, a woman in her 70’s whose son died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 18 and whose husband recently died of cancer; Cameron, a young adult who never had a father and was raised by his aunt when his mother left him at an early age; and Marcellus, an octopus nearing the end of his life, who has a keen eye and is not a fan of humans. I cared and rooted for all the characters, including the octopus. I loved how the storylines intertwined over time. I chuckled throughout and even teared up at the end. And a little bonus for me, Tova’s family emigrated from Sweden when she was a young girl, so the occasional mentions of her Swedish heritage were fun for me. Also, I attended a panel at the recent LA Times Festival of Books where the author and three others spoke about their recent books, which was a real treat. Highly recommend it! The audiobook narration by Marin Ireland and Michael Urie was fabulous.
This book had been on my TBR list for a long time. I was intrigued by the historical setting – 1953 in Tehran, Iran, when the government was overthrown and the Shah reinstated. It’s about Roya, a teenager who falls in love and is engaged to be married, but the political upheaval disrupts those plans abruptly. She ends up moving to California and continues her life in the US. Sixty years later she is reunited with her lost love and learns what actually happened. I greatly appreciated and enjoyed the insight into Iranian history and culture (especially the food!). My favorite part of the book was when the story was set in Iran. However, I found the story of Roya in the US to be lack-luster. I had great hopes for her, but she just didn’t come off as a very strong character.
I started this book by listening to the audiobook but the narration wasn’t working for me. I didn’t want to give up on it; I was too intrigued by all the hype about it, so I switched to the ebook. There I found the writing to be without quotation marks which is normally not to my liking, but luckily, I quickly got used to it and it didn’t bother me. The story takes place in the near future. So much mirrors contemporary times — children taken from parents, book banning, Asian hate, lockdown due to a crisis. Ng’s writing is wonderful, poetic at times, but I found the whole book bleak with no joy. I did admire the non-violent protests using art and the role of libraries. I was hoping for a more hopeful or satisfying ending.
My middle grade reads were inspired by a reading challenge that my elementary school hosts every winter in which students are encouraged to read certain books and vote for their favorite. Parents, faculty, and staff are invited to join, and I’m participating with the 6th grade booklist. All are genres I don’t normally read. Besides being middle grade books, they are a novel-in-verse (partly), a fantasy, and a graphic novel. This past month, I read the graphic novel and novel-in-verse. I’m currently reading the fantasy one.
This middle grade graphic novel is a modern day Breakfast Club story. A group of students seen by most as all the same, just five Spanish speaking kids, find themselves stuck together with nothing in common other than having to complete community service hours. I had mixed feelings about this one. I enjoyed getting to know the individual students and their personal stories and I liked how they came together to help someone. However, I was not a fan of how it was framed with the beginning and end as they were. I also didn’t like how the adults at the school were portrayed. I did, however, really appreciate the dual language aspect and liked reading the Spanish passages when they were offered. And the illustrations were fabulous.
I’m so impressed with how the structure of the novel contributed to the plot. The story begins in regular prose as a daughter and father head out on a road trip to hike a canyon. They are getting over the death of the mother and find peace and safety in nature. Suddenly, a flash flood comes barreling through the canyon. At this point, the story switches to verse from the perspective of the daughter as her father is swept away with the gushing water after lifting her to safety. The story continues in verse as she perseveres fighting to survive and looking for her father. The verse isn’t all uniform but changes according to what’s going on in the story. A very impressive and engaging middle grade read.
I wasn’t sure about this book when it was suggested for book club and I wasn’t enamored by it to begin with when I started listening. However, when their journey across the country finally began, I was all in and went for longer walks and didn’t mind long, slow drives. I loved the characters, both human and animal, and their road trip was full of adventure meeting all sorts of people along the way, both good and bad. Based on 
Anne Holt is a prolific Norwegian crime author who’s been on my TBR list for a long time. I started with her debut novel, the first in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series (published in Norway in 1993), which was about drug trafficking and corruption. What’s unique about this series is that it features a lesbian protagonist. I liked the Oslo setting and the police investigator Hanne. However, I was not a fan of the writing style in which mystery and suspense were infused by referring to characters in the third person instead of by name. There were also too many characters to keep track of which made it confusing at times.
I read the first in this series, Alt er mitt, in Norwegian two years ago before it was available in English (it’s now available in translation, 
Blood Ties was another pageturner and didn’t disappoint. It continues the story of Clara, now a single mother to twins about 8 years old, who has just been appointed Minister of Justice but doesn’t have much time to accomplish anything before her boys disappear. I had to suspend disbelief for a couple of things (lack of surveillance/supervision on the boys and a character’s lapse in judgment), but it still worked for me. The story is written from different perspectives, including one of her boys, which provided interesting insight into the plot. I had both the audiobook going for drives and walks (great ensemble narration) and the ebook for bedtime reading. I’m looking forward to the final installment because there are definitely elements that need wrapping up. (
This debut novel by a French Korean author was left over from 
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