Why am I passionate about this?

Although two of my nonfiction booksā€”The Dream of Water and Polite Liesā€”are about traveling from the American Midwest to my native country of Japan, I'm not a traveler by temperament. I long to stay put in one place. Chimney swifts cover the distance between North America and the Amazon basin every fall and spring. I love to stand in the driveway of my brownstone to watch them. That was the last thing Katherine Russell Rich and I did together in what turned out to be the last autumn of her life before the cancer sheā€™d been fighting came back. Her book, Dreaming in Hindi, along with the four other books Iā€™m recommending, expresses an indomitable spirit of adventure. 


I wrote

The Dream of Water: A Memoir

By Kyoko Mori,

Book cover of The Dream of Water: A Memoir

What is my book about?

In 1990, at the age of 33, I traveled to Japan to revisit the landscape of my childhood. I hadā€¦

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Stone Fields: Love and Death in the Balkans

Kyoko Mori Why did I love this book?

In the summer of 1996, Ms. Brkic joined a Physicians for Human Rights forensic team in Eastern Bosnia to excavate the mass graves of the Srebrenica massacre. Ms. Brkic, who grew up in Northern Virginia, had family connections in the Balkans. Her grandmother, Andelka, was from Herzegovina, in a small village among limestone hills. The family survived the Second World War and the Communist takeover of their country. Her father escaped from Yugoslavia in 1959 and settled in America. 

Stone Fields juxtaposes the family story with the story of the summer Ms. Brkic spent on the forensic team in Tuzla and with her friends and relatives in Zagreb. The author portrays the many ways that people can lose their homesā€”through war, genocide, political oppression, emigration, family discordā€”with heartbreaking clarity, always aware of the dignity, as well as the tragedy, of the survivorsā€™ lives.

By Courtney Angela Brkic,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Stone Fields as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Twenty-three years old, forensic archaeologist Courtney Brkic joined a UN-contracted team excavating mass grave sites in eastern Bosnia. She was drawn there by her family history - her father is Croatian - and she was fluent in the language. As she describes the gruesome work of recovering remains and transcribing the memories of survivors, she reimagines her family's own catastrophic history in Yugoslavia. Alternating chapters explore her grandmother's life: her childhood in Herzegovina, early widowhood and imprisonment during the Second World War for hiding her Jewish lover. The movement throughout the book between the past and the present has aā€¦


Book cover of Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language

Kyoko Mori Why did I love this book?

Katherine Russel Rich, who had spent 20 years as a magazine editor (and just as long as a cancer survivor: recounted brilliantly in her first book, The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancerā€”and Back), started studying Hindi because she needed a new language to describe her life during the messy process of remaking herself as an artistic rather than commercial writer. Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language is a memoir of the year she spent in the ancient city of Udaipur, where she lived with a local family and attended a Hindi language school. 

This personal story is combined with fascinating information about second-language acquisition, as well as the profiles of various Americans and Europeans who made a home in India as a teacher, aid-worker, scholar, spiritual seeker, or in the case of one memorable character, a fortune/husband seeker. At times hilarious, other times heartbreaking, this is a story of a true adventure.

By Katherine Russell Rich,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Dreaming in Hindi as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

An eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.

 

After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiencesā€”ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to theā€¦


Ad

Book cover of Everything We Had: A Novel of the Pacific Air War November-December 1941

Everything We Had by Tom Burkhalter,

War is coming to the Pacific. The Japanese will come south within days, seeking to seize the oil- and mineral-rich islands of the Dutch East Indies. Directly astride their path to conquest lie the Philippines, at that time an American protectorate. 

Two brothers, Jack and Charlie Davis, are part ofā€¦

Book cover of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story

Kyoko Mori Why did I love this book?

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All portrays the contact between seeming opposites: the author who grew up in Boston and traveled to New Zealand when she was a graduate student in Australia and the Maori man she met there and married; the ā€œcolonizersā€ who were her direct ancestors and the ā€œnativesā€ her husband descended from; the history of the encounters between the two groups (including the story of Captain Cook).  At the heart of this complex, mesmerizing, and unflinching story is the coupleā€™s devotion to their three sonsā€”boys growing up in a Boston suburb and navigating their identities as ā€œa little bit of the conqueror and the conquered, the colonizer and the colonizedā€ as Ms. Thompson explains to them in a letter she tucks into the folder containing her life insurance policy.

By Christina Thompson,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Come On Shore and We Will Kill And Eat You All is a sensitive and vibrant portrayal of the cultural collision between Westerners and Maoris, from Abel Tasman's discovery of New Zealand in 1642 to the author's unlikely romance with a Maori man. An intimate account of two centuries of friction and fascination, this intriguing and unpredictable book weaves a path through time and around the world in a rich exploration of the past and the future that it leads to.


Book cover of The Tin Can Crucible: A firsthand account of modern-day sorcery violence

Kyoko Mori Why did I love this book?

Christopher Davenport, who later became a Foreign Service Officer with the U. S. Department of State and served in various countries including Vietnam, Guatemala, Tajikistan, and Georgia, was a Peace Corps volunteer in 1994. In Papua New Guineaā€™s Eastern Highlands, he was placed with a local family in a village of subsistence farmers. Except when attending classes in town (a hike and a long car ride away) with other Peace Corps volunteers scattered through the area, he worked, attended village gatherings, ate, and slept with his host family who treated him like an adopted son. The Tin Can Crucibleā€”the title refers to the ingenuity of the local peopleā€”tells an honest, unsettling, and thoughtful story about what happened when the rhythm of this peaceful life was shattered by an accusation of witchcraft and examines the moral and ethical ambiguities and complexities of the role of philanthropy and the well-meant intentions of the authorā€™s own pilgrimage.

By Christopher Davenport,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Tin Can Crucible as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In 1994, a Peace Corps Volunteer named Christopher Davenport travels to Papua New Guinea's Eastern Highlands region to live with a group of subsistence farmers.


He settles into village life, begins learning the language and develops a strong sense of connection with his inherited family.


One day, following the death of a venerated elder, the people of the village kidnap, torture, and ultimately kill a local woman accused of practising sorcery.


Devastated, Christopher tries desperately to reconcile this unspeakable act with the welcoming and caring community he has come to love. He is left with one universal question: How canā€¦


Ad

Book cover of Need to Know: World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence

Need to Know by Nicholas Reynolds,

The authoritative but accessible history of the birth of modern American intelligence in World War II that treats not just one but all of the various disciplines: spies, codebreakers, saboteurs.

Told in a relatable style that focuses on actual people, it was a New Yorker "Best of 2022" selection andā€¦

Book cover of The Long Field

Kyoko Mori Why did I love this book?

When Pamela Petro traveled to Lampeter, Wales for the first time to enroll in a year-long masterā€™s degree program, she had no idea that the open vista of sheep pastures and low hills around the town would strike a chord in herā€”she found herself nodding as if she was in agreement with the landscapeā€”or that she would spend the rest of her life returning to Wales from the various American cities where she made a life as a writer and a teacher. The Long Field takes us on a journey through time and ideas as well as of places. 

The book masterfully weaves together the accounts of various trips to Wales and elsewhere, the childhood spent in suburban New Jersey where, in spite of the family she loved and was loved by, Ms. Petro was overcome by a desire not to stay in one place, and most important of all, the journey of her love for the woman who became her life-partner. Combining these stories with astute observations and reflections about literature and linguistics, Long Field explores the concept of hiraeth, the Welsh word that expresses the deep sense of longing that defies translation, perhaps because we know it all too well.

By Pamela Petro,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Long Field as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Long Field burrows deep into the Welsh countryside to tell how this small country became a big part of an American writer's life. Petro, author of Travels in an Old Tongue, twines her story around that of Wales by viewing both through the lens of hiraeth, a quintessential Welsh word famously hard to translate. It literally means "long field," but is also more than the English approximation of "homesickness." It's a name for the bone-deep longing felt for someone or something--a home, culture, language, a younger self--that you've lost or left behind. Hiraeth is embodied by Arthur, King ofā€¦


Explore my book šŸ˜€

The Dream of Water: A Memoir

By Kyoko Mori,

Book cover of The Dream of Water: A Memoir

What is my book about?

In 1990, at the age of 33, I traveled to Japan to revisit the landscape of my childhood. I had fled the country at 20 to attend an American college and never went back. My hometown of Kobe hadnā€™t felt like home after my motherā€™s suicide and my fatherā€™s remarriage. I had no intention of living there again. But when I received a travel grant from the small college in Wisconsin where I was a tenured professor, I decided to spend the summer in Japan to work on my second novel.

I wanted to reconnect and hear the family stories I hadnā€™t fully understood. The Dream of Water is the book I wrote instead after uncovering a handful of secrets from my own lifetime.

Book cover of The Stone Fields: Love and Death in the Balkans
Book cover of Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language
Book cover of Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

2,008

readers submitted
so far, will you?

Ad

šŸ“š You might also likeā€¦

Book cover of Up the Down Escalator: Medicine, Motherhood, and Multiple Sclerosis

Up the Down Escalator by Lisa Doggett,

2024 Gold Winner, Benjamin Franklin Awards, Health & Fitness Category

2024 International Book Awards, Winner, Autobiography/Memoir Category and Health: Women's Health Category

A memoir of triumph in the face of a terrifying diagnosis, Up the Down Escalator recounts Dr. Lisa Doggett's startling shift from doctor to patient, as she learnsā€¦

Book cover of Gunner Hobbs: WWII in the Pacific! Tulagi! Tarawa! Saipan!

Gunner Hobbs by Herb Marlow,

A WWII novel about a young Gunner's Mate - Max Hobbs - serving on a troop transport in the Pacific Theater.

Hobbs is a man with exceptional eye sight who earns a snipers designation in Gunner's Mate school. When he graduates he is assigned to an APA in San Diego,ā€¦

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in interracial marriages, the Yugoslav Wars, and Wales?

Wales 59 books