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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Hello! Welcome to my first Sanskrit post. I’m so excited to learn about this fascinating South Asian language! To begin with, here is what I already know: Sanskrit dates back over 3,000 years as part of the Indo-European language family and, thanks to its religious and ceremonial use in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, it is…
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Hello! Welcome to my January reading wrap-up. I finished reading 9 books in January, including The Epic of Gilgamesh, which I talked about in-depth here. I say “finished reading” because there were a few that I started but hadn’t finished yet by the stroke of February, so I’ll mention those briefly at the end of this…
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I’ve read The Epic of Gilgamesh several times, and it never fails to amaze me how accessible something so old can be. If you’ve ever read a comic book or watched a superhero movie, you might recognize a lot of elements from Gilgamesh, the legendary tale of a real king of Uruk in the 2nd millennium BC/BCE.…
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I listened to the audiobook of this short story yesterday (as part of an Audible exclusive collection of short stories called Trespass: Take a Walk on the Wild Side), and I thought I would attempt to write a review. Not an easy task for me, since Stephen Graham Jones’ writing usually leaves me speechless. He…
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As the first month of my World LiteraTour project nears its end, I have to be honest – I very quickly reached the end of my journey with learning Sumerian. There’s only so far you can go without committing to it entirely. However, I don’t consider that a fail at all, because I really enjoyed…
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I have a hard time settling on favourite authors in the same way that I have a hard time settling on favourite musical artists. My taste is both eclectic and vaguely specific, meaning I like a little bit of a lot of things but I’m always looking for That Certain Something that I can’t quite…
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The Kesh Temple Hymn is the oldest piece of literature ever found, dating back to around 2600 BC/BCE. Stop and think about that for a moment – many people today consider a literary work “old” if it pre-dates themselves, but this poem pre-dates almost everything that has ever been written by human hands. Many of…
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Hello! Thanks for checking out this list of my most anticipated book releases of 2025. A lot of what I read is over a century old, but there are several contemporary authors and genres that I love and eagerly reach for. So, while I’ll be reading a lot of classics from all over the world…
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Hello! Welcome to my first post about the ancient language of the Sumerians. I’ve been watching some lessons and doing some research this month, and I thought I would share what I’ve learned so far. (If you would like to watch the lessons I’ve gleaned most of this information from, you can find them here.…
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Hello! Thanks for stopping by! This is the place where I will gush about my favourite reads of 2024. I read 113 books in 2024, and surprisingly few of them were 5-star reads for me. I give a 5-star rating to books that I feel nothing but love for after I read that last page;…