Episode 913: A book that features two languages

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Welcome to Reading With Libraries!

Thank you for joining us again on our book group and Reader’s advisory podcast! 

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange, and we work with all types of libraries. Schools, public, academic, history centers, and more! We are here to support you and to bring you new knowledge to inform your library work. 

This season we continue to explore a wide variety of book genres and topics so you can expand your reading horizons, and share more information with your library community. We are looking at the prompt from the 2022 PopSugar reading challenge this season. You can read along with their challenge, linked in our show notes, or just enjoy some different books. 

This week we are looking at cool books in at least two languages! It’s not just a neat thing, not just a way to learn about other cultures, not just good to enhance your job prospects; but also knowing more than one language will help to keep your brain functioning at top capacity as you age. Lots of coolness here! 

Check out our show notes page for links to our beverages, our resources, and the books we share today.

Beverages:

This is, of course, a book group. And every book group needs to have beverages, so you really get the feel for your reading! 

Our beverages this week are from the article International Drink Recipes: Around the World in 8 Cocktails. Try a few of them, to find something you like!

Netherlands: Rose Gimlet

“Raise your hand high if you’d rather be gifted a trip abroad over flowers, well I’m with you but chances are not looking good this weekend. However, rather than toss aside that pretty bouquet, use the petals to garnish this Netherlands cocktail called a Rose Gimlet.”

Ingredients:

Instructions:

  • Combine ingredients into a cocktail shaker then shake whatcha momma gave you (swear these are the official instructions)
  • Strain into a martini glass
  • Garnish with rose petals

Kenya: Kenyan Dawa

“In Swahili, the word “Dawa” means medicine, so no matter if you catch the flu, get fired, or your bf/gf cheats on you, legend has it that this African craft cocktail can heal it all.”

Ingredients:

  • 2 oz. Vodka
  • 2 lime slices
  • 1 tablespoon brown sugar
  • 2 tablespoons honey
  • 1 wooden stirring stick
  • Crushed Ice

Instructions:

  • Fill a glass with vodka and ice
  • Add limes and sugar
  • Pour 2 tablespoons into the glass
  • Dip a wooden stirring stick into the honey and mix well into the drink

Genre Discussion:

This is such a great prompt! There are so many benefits to working on your bilingual skills, even if you are not fluent in more than one language. Our books may have pages of different words,or may have some words to enjoy sprinkled throughout the pages.

Over the history of our podcast, we have looked at several picture books or other books for young readers that featured more than one language. Of course, that is a great time to be working on language, while the brain is nice and plastic and ready to learn new words no matter what language you are using. But any time is fine to start! We support working on your language skills whether you are four or 94. 

One great benefit to working on another language is the window it gives you to understanding other cultures. The opportunity to see how other people put together words, how they share ideas, and what kinds of things they say in their language is an invaluable tool for you. When you then practice that language by reading books, you get the fun of a new story along with practicing your skills.

Learning other languages also helps to keep your brain active and young! Both reading and speaking a second (or third or fourth!) language are proven strategies for keeping your brain healthy, and helping you to stave off dementia later.

This week, let’s put together some materials in more than one language so we can have word-based fun!

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 

The House that Jack Built: A picture book in two languages, by Antonio Frasconi

Generations of children have delighted in the nursery rhyme about Jack and his house. Starting with the familiar refrain “This is the house that Jack built. This is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built,” the age-old chant expands to include the maiden all forlorn, the cow with the crumpled horn, and other distinctive characters.

This Caldecott Honor-winning picture book offers an additional attraction to the traditional tale: all of the verses appear in French as well as English. From the opening, “Voici la maison que Jacques a bâtie. Voici le malt que se trouvait dans la maison que Jacques a bâtie,” to the grand conclusion, the repetition of catchy rhymes provides effortless reinforcement of French words and phrases. Brilliantly colored woodcut illustrations by renowned artist Antonio Frasconi add an ageless beauty to this keepsake edition.

With the Fire on High, by Elizabeth Acevedo 

From the New York Times bestselling author of the National Book Award-winning title The Poet X comes a dazzling novel in prose about a girl with talent, pride, and a drive to feed the soul that keeps her fire burning bright.

Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s life has been about making the tough decisions—doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela.

The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness.

Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free.

Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner 

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, one of TIME’s Most Influential People of 2022, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band–and meeting the man who would become her husband–her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner’s voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

99 Nights in Logar, by Jamil Jan Kochai

A dog on the loose. A boy yearning to connect to his family’s roots. A country in the midst of great change. And a vibrant exploration of the power of stories–the ones we tell each other and the ones we find ourselves in.

Twelve-year-old Marwand’s memories from his previous visit to Afghanistan six years ago center on his contentious relationship with Budabash, the terrifying but beloved dog who guards his extended family’s compound in the rural village of Logar. But eager for an ally in this place that is meant to be “home,” Marwand misreads his reunion with the dog and approaches Budabash the way he would any pet on his American suburban block–and the results are disastrous: Marwand loses a finger, and Budabash escapes into the night.

Marwand is not chastened and doubles down on his desire to fit in here. He must get the dog back, and the resulting search is a gripping and vivid adventure story, a lyrical, funny, and surprisingly tender coming-of-age journey across contemporary Afghanistan that blends the bravado and vulnerability of a boy’s teenage years with an homage to familial oral tradition and calls to mind One Thousand and One Nights yet speaks with a voice all its own.

The Best We Could Do, by Thi Bui 

This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family’s daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.

At the heart of Bui’s story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.

In what Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “a book to break your heart and heal it,” The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui’s journey of understanding, and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.

In Other Words, by Jhumpa Lahiri

In Other Words is a revelation. It is at heart a love story—of a long and sometimes difficult courtship, and a passion that verges on obsession: that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, that love was for Italian, which first captivated and capsized her during a trip to Florence after college. Although Lahiri studied Italian for many years afterward, true mastery always eluded her.

Seeking full immersion, she decides to move to Rome with her family, for “a trial by fire, a sort of baptism” into a new language and world. There, she begins to read, and to write—initially in her journal—solely in Italian. In Other Words, an autobiographical work written in Italian, investigates the process of learning to express oneself in another language, and describes the journey of a writer seeking a new voice.

Presented in a dual-language format, this is a wholly original book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Vladimir Nabokov: a startling act of self-reflection and a provocative exploration of belonging and reinvention.

A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, by Xiaolu Guo

From one of our most important contemporary Chinese authors: a novel of language and love that tells one young Chinese woman’s story of her journey to the West—and her attempts to understand the language, and the man, she adores. Zhuang—or “Z,” to tongue-tied foreigners—has come to London to study English, but finds herself adrift, trapped in a cycle of cultural gaffes and grammatical mishaps. Then she meets an Englishman who changes everything, leading her into a world of self-discovery. She soon realizes that, in the West, “love” does not always mean the same as in China, and that you can learn all the words in the English language and still not understand your lover. And as the novel progresses with steadily improving grammar and vocabulary, Z’s evolving voice makes her quest for comprehension all the more poignant. With sparkling wit, Xiaolu Guo has created an utterly original novel about identity and the cultural divide.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings. 

At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan’s friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin’s summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.

With superlative emotional and intellectual sensitivity, mordant wit, and pitch-perfect style, Batuman dramatizes the uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood. Her prose is a rare and inimitable combination of tenderness and wisdom; its logic as natural and inscrutable as that of memory itself. The Idiot is a heroic yet self-effacing reckoning with the terror and joy of becoming a person in a world that is as intoxicating as it is disquieting. Batuman’s fiction is unguarded against both life’s affronts and its beauty–and has at its command the complete range of thinking and feeling which they entail.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! 

Join us next Thursday with another topic or genre and many more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries or expand your library skills, check out our podcast Linking Our Libraries!  

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!