(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best cultural heritage fiction books

Julian Gracq's gorgeous, gorgeous novel. Yes, I'm re-reading now just to study it because it's just... so... beautiful!

There are two books that I shall mention that I think would be of interest to genre readers, even though they are not nominally genre books.

SMILE AS THEY BOW is a beautiful, sad tale of an aging transvestite spirit dancer in Burma, and it's lovely and amazing and a whole different way of thinking about POV from a non-Western writer. http://www.amazon.com/Smile-as-they-Bow-Nu/dp/1401303374/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407256044&sr=8-1&keywords=smile+as+the+bow I strongly recommend it to everyone in the world.

Recommended to me by Larry Nolen, there is an amazing book translated from the Italian that I think genre readers would love. The Tartar Steppe is a beautiful allegory and warning chime to everyone in pursuit of glory: http://www.amazon.com/The-Tartar-Steppe-Dino-Buzzati/dp/1567923046/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407256202&sr=8-1&keywords=the+tartar+steppe

Also, recently, I read Gina Ochsner's latest short story collection, and it is whimsical and beautiful and heartbreaking. In the opening story, a middle-aged Eastern European couple is haunted by the ghosts of the children they didn't have. Later on, people place their broken hearts on trebuchets and cast them into a field. http://www.amazon.com/People-I-Wanted-Be-Stories/dp/0618563725/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407256400&sr=8-1&keywords=gina+ochsner+people

Lately, one of my favorite recent reads came out from Small Beer Press, and explores the fascinating figure of Jonathan Edwards. Spider in a Tree by Susan Stinson is an amazing, and beautiful book, exploring the life and times of a fascinating figure from American History. http://smallbeerpress.com/books/2013/10/01/spider-in-a-tree/

I'll recommend one book that isn't out, yet, but I want everyone of you to go and get it. Jenn Brissett's debut novel, Elysium, is coming from Aquaduct, and it's a complex and amazing story about what remains of us. It's powerful and complex and full of amazing imagery. I know I intend to write a full review when the time comes for such things. http://www.aqueductpress.com/forthcoming-pubs.php

Background info:

George Handley is a professor of humanities at Brigham Young University. He writes and researches on the intersection between religion, literature, and the environment, with a special interest in postcolonial literature. His articles have appeared in Callaloo, Modern Fiction Studies, Environmental Humanities, Angelaki, ISLE, Mississippi Quarterly, and other journals. His scholarship has also focused on the environmental values of Mormonism and he frequently speaks publicly in his home state of Utah about environmental values and issues. In addition to his scholarly writing, he writes creatively, including his environmental memoir, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River, which won the 2011 prize for best memoir from the Association of Mormon Letters. He also runs the Home Waters blog. Some of his other books include:

• New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott
  
  
• American Fork
  
  
• Stewardship and Creation: LDS Perspectives on the Environment
  
  
• Learning to Like Life: A Tribute to Lowell Bennion
  
  His latest book is called If Truth Were a Child. I highly recommend you check out his excellent essay by that same name on his blog. You should also check out his Mormon Scholars Testify entry.

I'm currently reading Meet Me in the Bathroom after reading about all the juice in there off various music blogs and it's pretty fucking hilarious. It helps I'm familiar with basically all the bands in there but not really a superfan of any of them. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs come off as super cool as people, James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) is a bit of a psychopath, and don't do drugs, kids.

Also read A Brief History of Seven Killings recently and loved it. It's long and you need to get used to the patois but it was pretty good historical fiction especially if you're familiar with reggae at all.

Nice post! It's great you've found several vegetarian places you like :)

There were two vegan places I wanted to try while I was visiting Korea over the winter holidays: Baru #2 and Loving Hut Honest Vegan in 이태원. I found out that they had both closed down for good.. Then I went to the biggest bookstore in Seoul to get a Korean edition of the novel The Vegetarian, written by a Korean author, and the employees said it's been out of print for years.. eck.

I did get a vegetarian cookbook, and it has some really amazing recipes! If you like to cook and know Korean, I highly recommend it: 하루 한 끼, 채식 한 그릇.

Almost finished The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. It's about to be the fastest 600 page novel I've read lol. It's alot of moving parts but when the stories started to intersect I couldn't put the book down.

plot from the link:

"The novel follows three very different founding families across generations, from 19th-century Europe to the banks of the near-future Zambezi river. The first matriarch we meet is Silliba, illegitimate daughter of an Italian noble and his housecleaner, born covered in hair that regrows as fast as it is cut. Next is Agnes, a rising tennis star - until she loses her sight. She secretly flees her wealthy, British parents to return to the home of her Rhodesian lover...who notices small eyes growing on her that recede on closer inspection. We then meet Matha, a young African woman coming of age as Zambia becomes a nation in the 1960s. These intertwining stories are as steeped in a solemn strain of magical realism as they are in actual history: the plot’s fantastical elements reveal the cruelties and absurdities of real-world colonialism."

Read a great Sci-fi story collection, Exhalation by Ted Chiang. I appreciated the fact that each story read like it was written by a different author. My favorite was the The Merchant and the Alchemist:

"The story follows Fuwaad ibn Abbas, a fabric merchant in the ancient city of Baghdad. It begins when he is searching for a gift to give a business associate and happens to discover a new shop in the marketplace. The shop owner, who makes and sells a variety of very interesting items, invites Fuwaad into the back workshop to see a mysterious black stone arch which serves as a gateway into the future, which the shop owner has made by the use of alchemy. Fuwaad is intrigued, and the shop owner tells him three stories of others who have traveled through the gate to meet and have conversation with their future selves. When Fuwaad learns that the shop keeper has another gate in Cairo that will allow people to travel even into the past, he makes the journey there to try to rectify a mistake he made twenty years earlier."

Im just gonna suggest my favorite french and french canadian books :

• A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche
  
  >Set in Kigali, Rwanda, the novel deals with a love affair between an elder Canadian expatriate and a young Rwandan, AIDS and the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.
  
  (Amazon link : https://www.amazon.com/Sunday-at-Pool-Kigali/dp/1400034345/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475200692&sr=1-1&keywords=a+sunday+at+the+pool+in+kigali)
  
  Theres a movie named "A Sunday in Kigali" that was made about it but I prefer the book.
  
  
• Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad
  
  >Incendies follows the journey of twins Jeanne and Simon, as they attempt to unravel the mystery of their mother's life.[1] When Jeanne and Simon Marwan lose their mother, Nawal, they are instead left with a difficult mission that sends them on a journey to the Middle East in pursuit of their tangled roots and a long-lost brother.
  
  It's a very hard and crude book but it's also excellent. There's a good movie about it too. Won multiples prize, I think the movie is as good as the play.
  
  
  (Amazon link : https://www.amazon.com/Scorched-Revised-Wajdi-Mouawad/dp/0887549268)
  
  
• Dieu et nous seuls pouvons - Michel Folco (but its not translated :( so I guess you need to know french)
  
  >Pour échapper à la galère, Justinien Pibrac devient bourreau officiel du seigneur de Bellerocaille. Le jour de sa première exécution, après quelques maladresses rocambolesques, il parvient finalement à briser les os du condamné. Ainsi début la saga trépidante des Pibrac, qui deviendront de génération en génération les plus grands bourreaux de tous les temps.
  
  It's really really well written and it's filled with black humour. I dont want to spoil anything at all but it's a sure pick-up if you search a book in french.
  
  
• Empire of the Ants - Bernard Werber
  
  Science fiction book about a machine that allows communication between ants and human. I think it stands out from other science fiction book by having a more litteral approach to the philosophical themes it talks about.

Late to the party here... Made for Love by Alissa Nutting - totally weird and hilarious. Definitely has a more absurdist and surreal bent in comparison to a lot of the other great recommendations folks have shared. So. Much. Fun.

If short fiction is on the table, I also recommend:
Tender by Sofia Samatar, What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky by Lesley Nineka Amirah, and All the Names They Had for God by Anjali Sachdeva (maybe the best collection of short stories I have ever read).

I started House Girl by Tara Conklin, narrated by Bahni Turpin. It was highly recommended by a friend who told me it reminded her of me and she thought I would love it. I am 1/3 of the way in and I am really dreading it when I get in the car - I wish it were over already! think I may abandon it, although I feel obligated to finish it because of my friend. I usually abandon audiobooks because of the narrator (by the time I choose what I am going to read I am pretty certain I will enjoy it. So, I almost always read the print/ebook after giving up the audio.) However, this time, I actually like Turpin's performance, just not the story/main character - seems contrived and forced. How do you all decide whether or not to finish a book that a friend really wants you to read, but you don't like, at all?

Edit: I love these weekly threads - they are giving me a lot of good ideas for books to listen to :)

So I didn't realize Metta wrote a book:

> Metta: The Panda's Friend- Metta and his wise and energetic daughter Diamond take a magical journey to China. They see sites on their own, but the fun really starts when they meet Bernie the Panda. Their friendship grows as they taste spicy foods, travel some winding paths, watch animals jump and play, and learn some lessons along the way. Join Metta, Diamond and Bernie on their adventure!

https://www.amazon.com/Metta-Pandas-Friend-World-Peace/dp/1502312158

If anyone is interested in reading a novel with the Opium Wars as the backdrop I highly suggest checking out the Ibis Trilogy by Amitav Ghosh, which starts with [Sea of Poppies] (http://www.amazon.com/Sea-Poppies-Amitav-Ghosh/dp/0312428596/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377016732&sr=8-1&keywords=sea+of+poppies). In fairness the trilogy starts on the eve of the Opium Wars and hence SoP only scratches the surface; [River of Smoke] (http://www.amazon.com/River-Smoke-Novel-Amitav-Ghosh/dp/0374174237/ref=pd_sim_b_3)--part two of the trilogy--does a deeper dive on the political events that lead the Opium Wars but obviously you'll need to read SoP to make sense of what's going on in RoS.


(As an aside--I found SoP to be an excellent book with engaging characters, great prose and incredibly well written and plotted while RoS was merely ok for me. RoS could have used better editing and seemed almost unfocused at times. That said, the writing is still pretty strong and perhaps it seems unfocused because it is setting up the final, and as yet unreleased installment of the trilogy.)

It's been a long time since I read My Name is Mata Hari; not sure if it fits your request best. However, I remember how vibrant the story-telling felt. Mata Hari is a real person, but this book is best treated as fiction instead of biography. Hope you enjoy it :)

Anything by Kenzaburo Oe (very gritty, less "floaty" than Murakami, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994), or Natsume Soseki (Kusamakura reminds me a bit of Murakami; kind of dreamy). I also love, love Banana Yoshimoto -- Kitchen is great. Very contemporary.

I'm not familiar with books about body image but I don't think that books need to be about body image to make young black kids comfortable with their blackness - just reading about normal, well-written black characters is enough for some kids. (Even seeing a black face on the back of the book or illustrated on the cover is a good thing for young people.) There are a bunch of books out there that address the topic of fitting in and what it's like to be black in America and feel "normal," but those books are usually catered to pre-teens and I don't know enough about them to give any recommendations.

There are a bunch of good books out there by black writers (all of the ones I can think of right now are by women) that have black main characters and convey a positive message (not just about being black) that I think might help. Check out these books and their authors:

• Plain City by Virginia Hamilton
  
• Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson
  
• Mindscape by Andrea Hairston
  
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
  
• Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor
  
• Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper
  
• Words with Wings by Nikki Grimes

Krys Lee's Drifting House is highly regarded -- although is more about Koreans in America and North Koreans. Also, it is a bit depressing (good, but rather serious).

Giacomo Lee apparently has a new book coming out about modern Korea, called Funereal. Naomi Foyle's Seoul Survivors is a science-fiction novel set in Korea that I've seen some good reviews for (but haven't read myself).

I totally second EatYourNut's recommendation of that Korean Modern Literature series.

For something older, Katsuei Yuasa's Kannani is really excellent. It's about the March 1 Movement, in 1919, but from the eyes of a Japanese child living in Korea. The history that goes with the short story (in the book I linked to) is also fascinating.

It's all dependent on what you want to do. Plenty of authors have written dialogue in dialect. Plenty others have written it normally and used narration/dialogue tags. Consider the effect of both. Dialects can be extraordinarily useful in showing a character is an outsider—everyone is talking one way, but this character is talking another. It's never just about verisimilitude or mimesis. If that's the only effect you're going for, I'd say just let us know the character has an accent. You can tell us that plainly, or you can have characters they come in contact with regularly asking where they're from, etc.

If you're going to use dialects, I'd strongly recommend you read a lot of works that use dialects. Ideally, you'd be able to find some examples of characters that speak in the dialects you're interested in using to see how others have done it. Off the top of my head, a recent (and excellent) book with heavy dialect is A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James, which won the Man Booker a few years ago. One of the POV characters speaks in a Jamaican accent in narration and dialogue alike.

Out , Grotesque and Real world, all by female Japanese novelist Natsuo Kirino. They all have female main characters. They are very dark, and they show an interesting side of the Japanese lifestyle/sense of annihilation.

Rivlary, by Nagai Kafu. A beautifully written and mean geisha tale from the point of view of the geisha.

Murakami has already been mentioned, but unless you pick up his short stories (where he is at his best, IMHO), almost all of his novels are written by the point of view of a male character. The exception is 1q84, his latest, and by far weakest, novel.

It might be The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

>We meet him late in life: a quiet man, a good father and husband, a fixture in his Brooklyn neighborhood, a landlord and barber with a terrifying scar across his face. As the book unfolds, moving seamlessly between Haiti in the 1960s and New York City today, we enter the lives of those around him, and learn that he has also kept a vital, dangerous secret. Edwidge Danticat’s brilliant exploration of the “dew breaker”--or torturer--s an unforgettable story of love, remorse, and hope; of personal and political rebellions; and of the compromises we make to move beyond the most intimate brushes with history. It firmly establishes her as one of America’s most essential writers.

For those who are more interested in Jamaican history and Mr. Marley, may I recommend A Brief history of seven killings?

I'm done explaining it, but I'm an exmo who has better things to do with his life than break your true order of circle jerk.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003NE6D56/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

The Daevabad Trilogy is good, and the second book just came out as well! Here's the first, The City of Brass

This book Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff is a sci-fi horror mostly about a black family from Chicago that writes these guides. The book was fantastic and I'd love to see it get more traction.

In no particular order:

1. The Grishaverse By Leigh Bardugo
   
   
2. Binti by Nnedi Okarafor
   
   
3. The Great Library by Rachel Caine
   
   
4. Hunter by Mercedes Lackey
   
   
5. The Temeraire Novels By Naomi Novik
   
   
6. Wake of Vultures by Lila Bowen
   
   
7. The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin
   
   
8. Kings and Sorcerers by Morgan Rice
   
   
9. The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb
   
   
10. The City of Brass by S A Chakraborty

Sorta. It's a book by Matt Ruff about the 50's, but the main character reads Lovecraft. Ruff is one of my favorite authors, (read Bad Monekys) and Get Out was phenomenal, so i'm really excited about this.

Technically, tithing/fast offerings/humanitarian aid/missionary funds/etc goes into bank accounts and mutual funds for a period of a few years. Then the interest earned off of this money is put into the general use budget of the Church: buy or build new for-profit companies, real estate, or to cover the losses if they spend more than their self-imposed tithing "budget" for the year. Then the original amount that was tithed is budgeted separately from this cash and is technically only used for business underneath the umbrella of "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints". The corporations either support themselves or are helped by infusions of further interest earned from tithing accounts.

If you want more info on this sort of thing, I'd recommend The Book of Mammon. It's kind of a crazy read in terms of style, but it covers all sorts of crap like this.

Her other book sounds really interesting too, actually.

Shavers says they're free to use Orange amplifiers, but could it be The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat.

He used to work in the church offices, and later wrote this book

I haven't read them, but Nalo Hopkinson has produced at least two science fiction novels centered on Afro-Caribbean characters: Brown Girl in the Ring and Midnight Robber.

There's a great history book Season Of The Witch about 60s-80s San Francisco that gets into government infiltration of the counterculture, including the Black Panthers. And then there's the novel A Brief History Of Seven Killings about the assassination attempt on Bob Marley.

So hard to separate fact from fiction with this stuff... I'm with /u/BeachStoop in being v skeptical about conspiracy theories. Like yeah, that Dopey guest was so far out there - seems like it's a coping mechanism about the insecurity of not being totally in control.

See also: Hanlon's Razor - sometimes people aren't evil, they're just stupid.