My Caribbean Year

Last year, as some of you may remember, was my Year of Down Under, in which I attempted (and failed, but no matter...) to read one Australian book per month. I didn't get through all the works I wanted to (no Peter Carey, no Tim Winton!), but it still proved to be a really fascinating way to read, bringing out all sorts of interesting ways of thinking about nation and national traditions or fascinations.

So what will this year's theme be? Well, I had felt the pull of a non-English-language theme, one that would require much more reading in translation. China and Japan loomed large in these musings. But I am contemplating teaching courses in Anglophone literature more and more frequently these days, so I decided to go for a different sort of a regional focus: the Caribbean.

Below are some authors I would love to read for the first time or read more of in the next twelve months (I have also noted specific works by these authors that I own or that particularly interest me):

  • Julia Alvarez (Dominican Republic)
    • In the Time of the Butterflies
  • Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba)
    • Before Night Falls
  • Edwidge Danticat (Haiti)
    • Krik? Krak!
  • Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua)
    • My Brother
  • Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique)
    • Texaco
  • Paule Marshall (Barbados)
    • The Chosen Place, The Timeless People
  • V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad)
    • A Bend in the River
  • Jean Rhys (Dominica)
    • Quartet
  • Caryl Phillips (St. Kitts)
    • Crossing the River
    • A Distant Shore
  • Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia/Trinidad)
    • Omeros
  • Aime Cesaire (Martinique)
    • The Tempest
  • Andrea Levy (Jamaica)
    • Small Island
  • David Dabydeen (Guyana)
    • A Harlot's Progress
I have included (in parentheses) the part of the Caribbean these authors are most closely associated with; the literature of this region is particularly geographically complex and diasporic, so I have included authors who are of very recent (within one generation) Caribbean descent, as well as those who were born in the Caribbean, but later left, for whatever reason.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I would be particularly interested in suggestions of good general histories about the Caribbean.

A quick update

So... I have just returned from the national conference and my mad interview gauntlet (8 job interviews in two days, running about in a short skirt and perilously high heels in the slushy Cocytus that was Chicago* between Christmas and New Year's Eve, barely emerging from the professional frenzy for long enough to eat), and am now trying to get the last of my grading from the fall semester done. But I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year and say that I can't wait till I am back to a more bloggy, book-devouring, film-rampaging state. In the meantime, I am going to (try to) keep an annotated list of books, films and plays I see/hear/read on the blog, so that I am not completely absent (see below for my first entry).

I hope everyone is having and has had a wonderful holiday!


*Actually Chicago looked lovely. On the last day I was there, snow fell in the most picturesque manner, with flakes as big as a fingernail. In fact, it fell so quickly, abundantly, and windily that, for the first time in my life I discovered how shocked an eyeball is when a fingernail-sized piece of fluffy ice falls directly into it. (It was my first winter in New Haven that I made a similar discovery - snow, beautiful as it may be, can hurt like %&$* if it falls hard enough.)

Read in 2008

An ongoing list of my 2008 reading:

  1. The Miserable Mill (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Fourth) by Lemony Snicket
    • The endless, near-blind stupidity of the adults in the lives of the Baudelaire orphans (chased from home to home, guardian to guardian by the unscrupulous, Baudelaire-fortune-hungering Count Olaf) is becoming somewhat exhausting. The tone and design of the books is delightful; if only their narratives were less formulaic. [Tuesday, January 1, 2008 ***]
  2. What will be next? Very Good, Jeeves? The Odyssey?