I found a book on Costa Rica (by Nel Yomtov) from my favorite series (Enchantment of the World) and learned a few more interesting things!

Indigenous population: There's a site where as many as ten thousand people lived between 1000 BCE and 1500 CE with paved streets, bridges, and a large system of aqueducts.

Walker: He proposed the the US ( Read more... )

I just read Rich Ochoa's One Way Ticket To Anywhere, a memoir, because I have met some of the people in it and because it sounded kind of interesting. It's about how a guy with alcoholic parents got through high school without turning to drugs himself. Or as it says on the back of the book, he gets kicked out of the houses of both his parents ( Read more... )

What I already knew about Costa Rica: It's a Central American country with a lot of US expatriates. (Therefore I am wondering if it would be a good alternative to where I live now if things go badly around here.) One of the Zoology professors I used to type for took students there every summer to do biology research. And ACC's Spanish III study- ( Read more... )

This year I mostly focused on old favorites (Thailand and Scandinavia) and the two countries I was visiting (Norway and Spain), so I was not as widely read as last year. But I did get a taste of quite a few countries ( Read more... )

I just finished Pasi Sahlberg's Finnish Lessons: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland? (the series on school reform) (2010 ( Read more... )

Jo Nesbø's Blood on Snow: A Novel had a plot twist so surprising that I immediately re-read the book to see if I could see it coming (no), to see if I could figure out what really happened in some situations (yes for some, no for others), and to decide if I still liked the book (I think so) and the protagonist (probably ( Read more... )

I found Elizabeth Su-Dale's Culture Shock! A Guide to Customs and Etiquette: Norway (1995) recommended by a few sources, so I picked it up ( Read more... )

I once decided I'd rather read something other than travelogues for my media-from-other-countries project, but this title caught my eye, so I read Eric Dregni's In Cod We Trust: Living the Norwegian Dream (2008). An American with Norwegian roots moves to Norway with his wife for a year to see what it's like (and write a book). The wife ended up ( Read more... )

Due to an impending trip to Norway, I decided to read some books from Norway. But the first thing I found to help me find some was a list of recommended Nordic mysteries from my library, most of which are not set in Norway and most of which are not directly available at my branch of the library.

I did find Karin Fossom's The Caller, but the ( Read more... )

Robin recommended some novels based in Thailand by Timothy Hallinan. He'd just bought his own copies, so I started reading. But I accidentally started reading "Crashed" first, which is set in Los Angeles and turns out to be a whole different series (the Junior Bender mysteries ( Read more... )