Do you ever take a look at your reading log after a few months and think… yup. I picked some good ones!
That’s been me lately. With summer on deck, I thought it opportune to try and share some of my favorite recent reads for you to take on your travels and adventures. Throwing a few film recs for good measure.
I’ve got six countries explicitly featured on this list, and several more taking a global look at things like cartography and personal travel.
Fiction
The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa | Set in Japan | Knives Out meets Palm Springs, basically. A family gathers around New Year’s to discuss a grandfather’s plans for who will inherit his successful business. Who would ever expect a murder to go down? Thankfully, our protagonist is caught in a Groundhog Day time loop situation where he re-lives each day nine times, giving him several rounds to figure out who did the deed.
An Unlasting Home by Mai al-Nakib | Set in Kuwait | This follows the members of a couple households in Kuwait set across different generations. A few scenes also unfold in India and San Francisco as members of the family move across the globe. The inciting incident might be a female professor being charged with the crime of blasphemy, but the story itself encompasses so much more. This made me really interested in doing a deeper dive into Kuwait.
Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro | This opens with a tragic accident in the mid eighties, and gives you little glimpses into how everyone else’s lives unfolded and were affected in the years that followed. The chapters bop around a bit going through different characters’ perspectives and different years over the decades that follows. A whole lot of what-if’s.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi | Felt like everybody was reading this one all within the same three-week window. There’s no denying, this book is a feel-good, everyone-has-a-story saga. It’s full of sweetness, with the “make it a meaningful last chapter” energy of A Man Called Ove and the “dive into people’s lives’ arc of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. This has picked up some haters… perhaps for being too sweet, but if you know what you’re getting into, you can set your expectations accordingly.
The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr | Set in Ireland | If you want a very Irish feeling book, this one should hit the spot. It’s the story of an unusual baby found abandoned on a beach along the Irish coast and how he grows alongside the family that takes him in. It’s moving, quirky, and has a kindness beneath its heavier subject matter.
Katabasis by RF Kuang | When I read Babel and saw what RF Kuang could do with the premise of an alchemic school guided by linguistic studies, I knew I wanted to read more from her. In a lot of ways, Katabasis runs it back with what works. This time, the school is more divination than linguistics, and its students have to journey into the underworld to retrieve its professor in a Dante’s Inferno-esque fashion.
Nonfiction
This Way Up by Mark Cooper-Jones & Jay Foreman | This book was so perfectly written for my nerdy interests in geography. It covered niche topics, like how the BBC’s broadcasting rights shaped the social geography of the United Kingdom for decades, or how the geography of the Marshall Islands was shaped by the development of bombs. Written with a cheeky sense of humor at that.
Climate Wayfinding by Katharine Wilkinson | This one comes from too closely within my world for me to not want to dive in deep. Climate Wayfinding takes on the emotional, social, and spiritual dimensions of climate action, including how to navigate anxiety and find a more integrated course of action. This arrives at an important time, when burn-out is especially prevalent and the wind isn’t exactly at the sails of climate activists.
Landon by Landon Donovan | I try to routinely dive into a memoir of somebody a bit unexpected, and this time around the honor went to the American soccer pioneer, Landon Donovan. I actually started appreciating Donovan a lot for his leadership during a three year window when he was head coach of the San Diego Loyal, a short-lived USL team. His memoir covers his complicated relationship with his dad and the early days of MLS.
Everything Good About God is True by Bruce Reyes-Chow | I’ve been introduced to Bruce Reyes-Chow, a Filipino-American minister who writes a lot about justice and culture. His book offers a well-rounded look at practical theology. There’s a combination of progressive and applicable in his chapters that you don’t often find side-by-side.
How Iceland Changed The World by Egill Bjarnason | Set in Iceland, of course | The book’s title is a promise… how Iceland changed the world, and the rest of the book actually delivers. Despite Iceland being known for its remoteness and sparse population, its outsized influence includes the impact of its volcanoes on air travel and climate change, its unusual relationship with Nazi Germany and the United States around World War 2, and the roles it played in both the French Revolution and the Palestinian partition.
Belonging to the World by Barry Hoffner | Barry Hoffner has quite the story from the past few years, and it begins with tragedy. Following the unexpected loss of his wife, he leans into their mutual love of travel and begins a quest to complete his visitation of every country in the world. It becomes a beautiful memoir of connection, grief, and as advertised, belonging.
Screen Time
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight | Set in Zimbabwe, South Africa-based Production | This is a film adaptation of a memoir by Embeth Davidtz, who has a direct hand in producing the film. Davidtz was raised in what was initially Rhodesia, and we catch a glimpse of her white family’s farming life just as Robert Mugabe takes power and reinvents the country as Zimbabwe. To top it all off, her mom must deal with both family life and the politics of the era alongside bipolar disorder. It’s a coming of age story set against an incredibly complex backdrop.
Kneecap | Set and produced in Northern Ireland | This film starts right off the bat by calling out how most films set in 1980s Ireland begin… with car bombings and the troubles and all that. Then it lets you know how you’re in for something different. Kneecap focuses on a group of young rap artists and how their assertion of the Irish tongue in lyrical form becomes a vehicle for discourse around national identity in Belfast at the time.
Rental Family | Set in Japan, USA-based Production | This one features Brendan Fraser playing a struggling American actor who finds himself booking unusual gigs… pretending to be fiances, estranged family members, and other people in the real lives of ordinary Japanese families. While the film’s actual script is a work of fiction, the job it portrays is based on the real world “rent-a-family” businesses that started to emerge in Japan in the 1980s. Subtly comedic with heart.
Goat | This film had so much going for it, I wish it got a bit more attention. It has a stacked roster of voice actors, which seems to consist of 33% Stranger Things cast members, 33% NBA Players, and 33% stand up comedians. And Wayne Knight to make up the other 1%, I guess. This feels more like the Space Jam of the 2020s than the Space Jam of the 2020s. It has the obvious basketball element, flashy animation reminiscent of the Spider-Verse movies, and feels very much like a product of its time. With all the niche slang that isn’t bound to age well, it’ll be interesting to see how precisely dated this feels in a couple years.
Augurk Aan Zee | Set in Bonaire, Netherlands based Production | This is a straightforward comedy, with over-the-top characters in improbable situations. This one features a Dutch factory worker’s attempt to reconnect with his estranged father… who almost immediately passes away leaving him with a resort in Bonaire in serious disrepair. It’s the sort of movie that we grew up on but don’t really see anymore. Glad that comedy lives on in Dutch cinema, at least.
La Suprema | Set and produced in Colombia | This is a film about a girl who takes a strong interest in boxing, while her village’s hometown hero prepares for a major fight. The rural village is so remote, it’s left off of many maps. This makes the simple task of acquiring a TV for everyone to watch the fight a tall order. The film is a bit of a slow burn at first, but sticks the landing with a ton of heart.