Library Loot ~ two more books

Around the World in 80 Books ~ by David Damrosch, 2021, world history in literature, 432 pages

Inspired by Jules Verne’s hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University’s department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic’s restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe.  Following a literary itinerary from London to Venice, Tehran and points beyond, and via authors from Woolf and Dante to Nobel Prize-winners Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, Mo Yan, and Olga Tokarczuk, he explores how these works have shaped our idea of the world and the ways in which the world bleeds into literature.
 

To chart the expansive landscape of world literature today, Damrosch explores how writers live in two very different worlds:  the world of their personal experience and the world of books that have enabled great writers to give shape and meaning to their lives.  In his literary cartography, Damrosch includes compelling contemporary works as well as perennial classics, hard-bitten crime fiction as well as haunting works of fantasy, and the formative tales that introduce us as children to the world we’re entering.  Taken together, these eighty titles offer us fresh perspective on enduring problems, from the social consequences of epidemics to the rising inequality that Thomas More designed Utopia to combat, as well as the patriarchal structures within and against which many of these books’ heroines have to struggle — from the work of Murasaki Shikibu a millennium ago to Margaret Atwood today.

The Report Card ~ by Andrew Clements, 2004, children's fiction, 173 pages, 10/10

I first read this book in 2010 when I rated it 9 of 10.  I ran across the title recently and decided to re-read the book.  A fifth-grade genius turns the spotlight on grades — good and bad — in this novel from the author of Frindle.  Nora Rose Rowley is a genius, but don't tell anyone.  She's managed to make it to the fifth grade without anyone figuring out that she's not just an ordinary kid, and she wants to keep it that way.  But then Nora gets fed up with the importance everyone attaches to test scores and grades, and she purposely brings home a terrible report card just to prove a point.  Suddenly the attention she's successfully avoided all her life is focused on her, and her secret is out.  And that's when things start to get really complicated.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.  Sharlene has the Mr. Linky this week (June 8-14).