Daily Archives: October 19, 2014

Culture Club

It’s a small world after all. Global media and internationally interdependent economies have brought people of different countries and cultures closer than ever. This can be rewarding but, too frequently, we bump up against “the others” in harmful ways, often the result of ignorance and misunderstanding.

News reports may tell us “what” happened but unbiased journalism has been overtaken by market forces that present “news” through adversarial viewpoints, constricted by space or time limitations. The result is that, even with internet access to the world, we easily and unknowingly remain isolated from “the others”. We tend to fear what we don’t know; fear instigates conflict.

I suggest we treat good literature as ambassadors of understanding. There is a wealth of literature that opens a world of other cultures to us while entertaining us. Whether novel or non-fiction, these books inform and enlighten us as few “news reports” can because they bring us into the lives of “the others”.

Literature is not “news”; it doesn’t pretend to be. It does, however, allow us to inhabit new places, get inside other people’s skins, share their experiences and see life from other viewpoints. Soon, we begin to stop seeing the “otherness” and recognize the “sameness” of humanity.

Your port of entry into other worlds can be your library, book store or eReader. Here are some of the places you might want to visit:
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (Afghanistan)
The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan (China)
Reading Lolita in Tehran – Azar Nafisi (Iran)
The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri (India)
The Orphan Master’s Son – Adam Johnson (North Korea)
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Colombia)
In the Time of the Butterflies – Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic)
Stones from the River – Ursula Hegi (Germany)
Same, Same But Different – Benjamin Prufer (Cambodia)

For young readers:
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie (Native American)
Same, Same But Different – Kostecki-Shaw, Jenny Sue (India/America)

Quotable

What is tolerance? It is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature. — Voltaire

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together. – Desmond Tutu

Humanity’s legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: ‘He/she was born, lived, died.’ Probably that is the template of our stories – a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds. – Doris Lessing

Recommended

Booked is delighted to rebroadcast its classic interviews and book reviews on UStream… because good books don’t have an expiration date. The shows continue to be accessible in the Booked Archives and book excerpts are also available on the website. This week’s re-broadcast (starting October 20th) is part two of my thought-provoking interview with transgender author Renee James, winner of several awards for her psycho-social thriller, Coming Out Can Be Murder.