My Genre Kryptonite is Intrepid Girl Reporters. I love this genre to little heart-shaped pieces. Below, my favorite recent Girl Friday reads. DREAMING IN HINDI: COMING AWAKE IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE by Katherine Russell Rich Things aren’t going super-awesomely for Katherine Russell Rich at the start of DREAMING IN HINDI. She’s been fired from her job as a magazine editor and is dealing with her second (Jesus Christ, SECOND) bout with cancer. She takes a freelance writing assignment in India and the book details her time spent in Udaipur, in particular focusing on her study of the Hindi language. Rich posits that because Hindi is such a radically different language than English, if she can learn to speak Hindi, she can transform herself through the language and become and entirely new person. As aforementioned, with career and health woes, life in English isn’t going too hot. Inspiring without veering into Lifetime Television for Women territory, DREAMING IN HINDI is both sweeping, panoramic, epic adventure and your favorite college professor teaching a linguistics course all in one brightly-colored- sari-wrapped package. SIDEWAYS ON A SCOOTER: LIFE AND LOVE IN INDIA by Miranda Kennedy This book has a deceptively girly-book, chick-litty, penis-scaring cover. Penises come back! It’s okay! This isn’t about shoe shopping and feelings talking! It’s about an American NPR reporter (all the liberal male genitalia just came back), how she spent her twenties as a foreign correspondent in India, and her relationships with the women of the country, from her close friends to her servants. The front row seat to Indian gender politics is edge of your seat fascinating, the anecdotes at turns gut-busting and sobfest-inducing, and the relationships are just pure, great memoir-ing. Penises, it’s okay! All genitalia can enjoy this book! THE TALIBAN SHUFFLE by Kim Barker FOREIGN BABES IN BEIJING by Rachel Dewoskin It’s a memoir about an American girl who was on a Chinese soap opera in the 1990′s with 600 million viewers called FOREIGN BABES IN BEIJING. If you don’t want to read it after that one-sentence-pitch, why are you even reading this blog, you have not fun in your soul, begone, I say, begone!
