Globe Corner Blogs

Real World - by Natsuo Kirino

Many readers who express an interest in Japanese literature are already familiar with Natsuo Kirino’s fascinating work. Her recent novel, Real World, reads like a social study carefully disguised as crime fiction. The crime itself, a murder, slowly makes its way out of the picture, revealing other dangers, and rushing the story forward like a Tokyo bullet train.

The main characters are high school students with few bonds to each other and whose aspirations are as mundane as to simply live a peaceful life. Unfortunately, that is not meant to happen, and their worlds are doomed to be invaded by all the threats of the real world imaginable: school girl-obsessed creeps, fortune tellers, marketers, shallow pop-culture, alienated parents, personal disasters they have no idea how to cope with, smothering relatives and peers forcing them to study, study, study until you “spit up blood”, study “like you are going to die.” Continue Reading »

Lonely Planet China

When you come into the store, it is impossible not to notice all the books about China. They come in every shade of red possible, in all sizes and weights – including the hefty new edition of the Lonely Planet China. Saying that they are everywhere would be a slight exaggeration, but they have taken over four shelves of one of our bookcases. They have very intriguing titles. (Don’t you want to know how to cook a dragon, or what on earth The Corpse Walker is about?) After looking at all those books for a while your resistance is eventually undermined – your curiosity is piqued – and this is when you give in and pick one up.

I still can’t tell exactly why I picked up China High. Maybe it was just the right shade of red. Or maybe because the author is easy to relate to and gives a very good look at China – a place that is not so easy to understand. This book turned out to be about his own astonishing personal changes following his experiences in China.

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The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie -- by Malu Halasa & Rana Salam

It is sunny and almost warm outside, and I have decided that it is time to come out of winter hibernation mode.  I am also adjusting to a new pair of glasses and here all the far-sighted readers out there will feel for me, because the world became so wobbly and curvy that I feel like Alice in Wonderland. I cannot even read anything while my brain is learning to automatically turn curves into straight lines. But even this temporary impairment cannot dim my curiosity, so here I come with a list of hidden eye candy.

These are books that are not meant to be read, they are meant to be adored and looked through many times. I am writing about alternative, strange and very curious fashion photography book gems packed between our guides and maps. Tweaking a well-known expression, I would say that nothing tells you more about a country than it’s street food and street fashion.

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Bus in Mysore decorated for Dasara - photo by Nicole

1. The elephants and cows have better jewelry than you do.

2. You are in line at the foreign money exchange and are approached by a septuagenarian, sari-clad Indian woman who, after introducing herself, whips out her cell phone and calls her son. “Here is my son. His name is Manjuth. He is a salsa dancer. You talk to him.” (This happened to a friend of mine while we were waiting for our rupees. The lady seemed determined to make this very pale, fair English girl her daughter-in-law and was only assuaged after being given a fake phone number so that Manjuth could call this lily-skinned girl for follow-up dates and, presumably, for blue-eyed grandchildren for his mother.)

3. Pizza masala. Not quite the same as back home.

4. You get on a sleeper bus for the next nine hours to get to a World Heritage site, full of

amazing ancient ruins, and realize that the bus has no front door. (The bus is also full of Sri Lankan basketball players who sing Hindi and Tamil pop songs until four am.)

5. The air in the morning smells like chai tea and jasmine flowers… with just the slightest hint of cow dung and urine.

Painted Bull in Bangalore - photo by Nicole

The Geography of Bliss --by Eric Weiner

I should confess that this was the first book ever that made me feel something unusual towards the author. This time after finishing the last page I felt incredibly…grateful. The most unexpected feeling after putting down your read. The truth is I almost never take a book from a shelf just because I like the cover. This time the light-hearted picture of a paper plane made me open a copy; I immediately changed my mind about what I thought of the content a second before.

Measuring happiness, grasping the true meaning of it is definitely a tricky business. For example, we can’t even be sure that the word happiness means the same feeling, the same state of mind, in various cultures. We may think that there’s got to be a universal recipe for feeling good, but as it turns out every country has a slightly different approach toward defining bliss. I am very grateful for “the grump” who consulted the world’s happiness experts and then took the trouble to search for the happiest place, spinning out a whole new story of finding yourself. The discoveries along the way turned out to be quite unexpected, but invariably moving, funny, bizarre: they constantly made you reconsider your personal attitude toward happiness. This is a truly meaningful book.

As They Say in Zanzibar -- by David Crystal

Even after a mere weekend away from the store, I nearly always return to find several new and exciting titles awaiting my perusal. Today, I was immediately drawn to David Crystal’s newly released collection of proverbs titled As They Say in Zanzibar: Proverbial Wisdom from Around the World. This six-hundred plus page compilation is subdivided into 468 “thematic classifications,” ranging from expected categories such as family, health, and happiness to more atypical groupings such as semi-liquids, semi-solids, animal noises, and inland water. Crystal also conveniently indexes all proverbs by theme, to Roget Thesaurus’ semantic categories, to lexeme or key word, and even to country of origin.

There are some particularly relevant to the savvy traveler, such as “those who wait long at the ferry will get across sometime” (Scotland) and “money is a good passport” (France). Some that left us scratching our heads: “One should not board a ship without an onion” (The Netherlands) and “A dog may look at a bishop” (France). Others seem comically obvious, like “No melon-seller cries: bitter melons!” (China) and still others are comically bizarre, “The quiet duck puts his foot on the unobservant worm” (China). Continue Reading »

Rocking the World--photo illustration by Llalan Fowler

Here at The Globe Corner Bookstore, we like to think we know a little bit about world music. We know the beat of a Salsa versus that of a Tango, we know the whine of an Irish accordion from that of a Cajun one, we know a Buena Vista Social Club from a BigBadBoogaloo — we also know which one’s best to dance to around the bookcases on a slow night. And let’s just say we are quite familiar with the Putumayo ouvre. Sometimes I even wake up in the morning with a track off “Arabic Groove” running through my head.

If I’m not careful I forget that, in all likelihood, most people my age don’t listen solely to the traditional music native to their homes. I, for example, listen to more than just the OSU Marching Band’s rendition of “Hang on Sloopy.” This month’s issue of the music/film/culture magazine, Paste, features bands from all over the world. Whether they buck tradition or embrace it, they all rock — here’s a few of my favorites:

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