World LiteraTour
Reading the World’s Greatest Stories
New blog posts every Tuesday and Friday on languages and literature from around the world, from the most ancient classics to the newest releases
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Old Chinese, or Archaic Chinese, is the oldest known variation of the Chinese language. It’s the language that was used on oracle bones (pictured above), pieces of ox scapula or turtle shell that were exposed to heat and interpreted based on the cracks that formed. The ancestors were asked a series of yes or no…
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Chrystia Freeland is a controversial figure here in Canada. Since her election to federal parliament in 2015, she has served as our minister of international trade, then our minister of foreign affairs, then until very recently our deputy prime minister and minister of finance, the first time a woman has held the latter position. A…
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Hello and welcome to my February reading wrap-up! Not including my study of the Rig Veda and the Upanishads, I completed a total of 12 books in February. Surprisingly, I managed to get my hands on 3 new releases and wrote full reviews for them, which I will link to below along with my abbreviated thoughts. I’ve…
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The Upanishads are a collection of sacred Sanskrit texts that were written over the course of a few centuries. Which texts were written in which centuries is a hotly debated question, but according to Valerie J. Roebuck, the translator and editor of the Penguin edition pictured above, the “consensus view” is that “the principal Upanishads were…
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Goodreads blurb: From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in the heart of an Empire which doesn’t consider you fully human. My review: Sudan. Afghanistan. New York. Iraq. Syria. Nigeria. Ukraine. Gaza. Israel. In the first quarter of this century, countless civilians have died, caught…
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Goodreads description: When Elise and her boyfriend, Tom, set off for Minnesota, all she knows about harvesting sugar beets (Beta vulgaris) is that her paycheck will cover a few months’ rent on their Brooklyn apartment. She’ll try anything to escape the incessant debt collection calls—and chronic anxieties about her body and her relationship. But as…
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Hello! Welcome to my update on what I have learned about Sanskrit throughout the month of February. This is truly a beautiful, intricately-structured language that I would love to dive into more deeply someday, but for now I’ll sum up what I know. (Image from Wikipedia: Excerpt from a 19th-century Illustrated Bhagavad Gita) Sanskrit is…
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The Rig Veda is the oldest surviving text originally written in Vedic Sanskrit, the earliest known version of Sanskrit that was preserved orally until the invention of writing. These hymns probably originated around 1500-1000 BC/BCE, and they have been organized into 10 books, or mandalas, that amount to thousands of pages of hard-to-interpret text. I obviously…
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Goodreads description: To find a missing young woman, the new tribal marshal must also find herself. At rock bottom following her daughter’s murder, ex-Chicago detective Carrie Starr has nowhere to go but back to her roots. Starr’s father never talked much about the reservation that raised him, but they need a new tribal marshal as much as…