#CBR10Bingo: Home, Something, Home (this book is set at Stovner in Oslo, three stops away from where I live on the metro. It also concerns exactly the sort of pupils that I teach.) Two youths, both living in the same tower block in a suburb on the east side of Oslo, in Stovner (where the large majority of inhabitants are immigrants or the children of immigrants). They start out going to the same high school. Starting in the year 2000, the framing device consists of these […]
The Secret Mission to Feed North Koreans
Based on a true story, Rice from Heaven: The Secret Mission to Feed North Koreans gives a softer view of a very true hardship the people of North Korea face. When a village in South Korea decides to secretly send balloons filled with rice to feed the hungry people of North Korea, they are faced with many obstacles: the other villagers do not want to give aide to the enemy. The North Korean soldiers could see the balloons and shoot them down. They do not […]
She squeezes his fingers and he can feel her love travelling all the way down from her heart to his
CBR10Bingo: Snubbed I first saw Kit de Waal’s name earlier this year on a couple lists of highly-anticipated new books for 2018. Since I rarely buy hardcover books and knew I’d have to wait a bit for The Trick to Time, I added her previous novel, My Name is Leon, to my wishlist and purchased it a few months later having finally found it in an English bookstore in Stockholm, of all places. After reading it, I can understand why people were excited for her […]
How the Other Half Lives
I revisited this book for class, and while the language and visceral imagery remained the same this time as it did on my first read, I was struck this time by just how much the theme of education ran through this story. For a general recapping of the story, here’s the amazon blurb: “Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the […]