Cross cultural reading

I was just browsing the MIT OpenCourseWare site and found a list of books for suggested reading in a course on intercultural communication. I was surprised to discover that I had read several of them:

Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. New York: Alfred A Knopf Co., 1985. Excellent.

 

Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies. New York: Doubleday, 1992. Through the recipes of a Mexican family, readers learn about their culture, their thoughts, and their beliefs. Saw the movie; looking forward to reading it en español.

 

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. New York: Penguin, 2003. A portrait of the French peasantry. I read it in French in college. I don’t think I understood much of it.

 

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Poisonwood Bible. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. The story of an American missionary Family in the Belgian Congo in the late 1950s. Also excellent.

 

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. Love in the Time of Cholera or One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Penguin, 1994. Enjoyed the former, couldn't make it through the latter.

 

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997. Started it – should pick it up again.

 

Shakespeare, William. Julius Ceasar. New York: Applause, 1998. Ancient Greece from the perspective of sixteenth-century England. Can't remember much about this one, but I know much of my English history via Shakespeare.

 

Sobel, Dava. Galileo's Daughter. New York: Walker & Co., 1999. Read it to learn about the lives of women in the sixteenth century. This was surprisingly good.

 

Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God's Wife. New York: Putnam, 1991. Second-generation Chinese women try to understand their mothers' lives. I remember enjoying this and also The Joy Luck Club (the movie of the latter had to be the biggest tear-jerker ever).

There are several other interesting looking books on the list if you're looking to expand your reading of other cultures. One could make lots of quibbles with the list (they have Pushkin but not Tolstoy?). The instructors claim "no rhyme or reason" to the choices other than that they like them. Are there any other books that you would add that really steeped you in another culture, another time?

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