94 books like Consider This, Senora

This book is a brilliant ethnography and one of the first books I read as a young anthropology student, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman.

It is about a Hmong family, living in California, that has an epileptic child and their interactions at a children’s hospital. The book came back into my life when my second daughter started having seizures and we were admitted into the same children’s hospital where the book was researched.

One of the doctors knew I was an anthropologist and reminded me of the book. Despite the cultural difference between myself and the Hmong family, I could see myself in their fear, their hope, and their desire to make sense of having a very ill child.

Girl, Woman, Other was the book I recommended to all my friends and family this year in our Christmas newsletter (yes, we are one of those families).

It follows twelve characters across two generations in the United Kingdom. Massive cultural shifts occur, socio-economic status changes, and children grow up.

At first glance, this might not appear to be a book about cross-cultural interactions but the relationship between the mother and daughter at the centre of the story highlight the monumental shifts that can occur in a lifetime.

On one of our first dates, my future husband gave me a book by Kazuo Ishiguro – it was love! Both with the future husband and the amazing author.

Ishiguro has a gift for cutting to the kernel of what it means to love, in a way that is beautiful and heartbreaking but in away that avoids being overly sentimental. When I first read A View of Pale Hills, a story centered on a woman reflecting on her time in Nagasaki before she moved to England, I was mesmerized.

I wanted to give the book to everyone I knew, it is a bit of mystery and I desperately wanted to talk about it! It is a touching, unsettling, and a powerful narrative about moving across cultures – the new possibilities that can provide and the complexities of the past.

The third book is possibly one of the shortest standalone books I have read, but also one of the most powerful.

Toni Morrison’s post-humous work Recitatif is the story of two poor girls, one white and one black, living in a shelter and their lives as adults. They share their past experiences, and unfortunately both witness a disturbing incident while wards of the state.

This book makes my list for best books about cross-cultural interactions because the reader doesn’t know which girl is black and which is white. It unsettles the reader and forces self-reflection, why am I trying to determine the race of these girls and what does that reflect about my own culture?

I’m always a fan of graphic novels that capture the mood of the book, rather than trying to make everything perfectly accurate to the original. Mariah Marsden’s adaptation of Anne of Green Gables perfectly captures the magic and beauty of one of my favorite childhood books.

I mentioned how much I enjoyed this adaptation to a friend who’s also a fan of L.M. Montgomery. However, my friend hated this adaptation (especially how Anne’s nose is drawn!) which I actually found very liberating as I considered adapting The Great Gatsby. I’d been concerned about how people who loved Gatsby would view my adaptation, but this made me realize that some people would love my book and some people wouldn’t—and that was okay!

I’m a townie, but early colonial Australia is all about the land and how some early colonial pioneers made their fortunes from it. (Many didn’t, needless to say.) This book is all about them: the squatters, the stock riders, the drovers, the station hands, etc. The long and perilous journeys into remote New South Wales looking for land—officially and unofficially; how early pioneers coped with droughts, floods, disappearing stock, financial uncertainty, and not least, relationships with local Aboriginal people. There are hilarious accounts of the strange habits of cows, and of the “new chums”—wide-eyed young men who migrated to the colony with money but no farming experience hoping to make their fortunes, and how the (colonial) locals took the mickey out of them. Readable, witty, and again, written with great authority and in-depth knowledge.

The Railway Children is a rich family saga set in 1905 told from the perspective of the children, Bobbie, Phyllis, and Peter. They live a happy, comfortable life until their father is suddenly taken away by two police officers. The family is forced to move away and adapt to living in the countryside on a much-reduced income. The separation from their father is keenly felt by the children, whilst their mother hides her own distress to protect them. 

We eventually realise that an injustice has occurred, but how can the children hope to reunite with their father? The Railway might provide an answer. Edith Nesbit has created a warm and engaging novel where acts of kindness, sometimes misguided, are integral to the storytelling.

This book is about a historic house in rural Suffolk in the East of England, which the author inherited from the artist John Nash. Blythe has himself made a career of writing about various aspects of the local landscape and how it, and the ways in which people have made their lives in the English countryside, have changed. The yeoman’s house itself, ‘Bottengoms’, was built in the 16th century, adapted, fell into ruin, and was then restored, and continues to be maintained to this day. It incorporates a garden and is set into the archetypally English countryside of Suffolk. Blythe’s gentle prose conveys a sense of sadness at the old ways of the traditional agricultural economy that have been lost, but in maintaining his beautiful house and sharing its story he is helping to keep some aspect of those ways, and that landscape, alive.

As a kid, I remember staring out the window during car rides and being mesmerized by shapes, repetition, and motion. This masterfully designed book captures that dream-like quality during a daytime road trip from country into city. The detailed black-and-white illustrations use silhouette and pattern to convey the shifting scenery. And just when you think the book has come to an end, you flip the entire thing over and travel back home — at night!

I loved this author’s brilliant writing and also the sense of menace that oozes from every page. As each page turns, you delve deeper into mundane activities with family filled with the possibility of murder. Culminating in a clever ending, carrying out an everyday household task.

A very clever book that I’ve read time and time again. Even long into the night.