Reading the World

When I discover an author whose work I like, I tend to go on binges and read everything she or he has written. For a while in my early 20s, I would go on binges of reading everything I could find from a certain country or continent. Remember, this was when much less world literature, especially from Nonwestern countries, was available in English in the U.S.; however, having access to a good university library, I was able to find quite a bit. Looking back on my reading list from those days, I find some of the following authors listed. I had a Middle Eastern mini-binge, reading Mahmoud Teymour, Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, Tayeb Salih, and Taufik Al Hakim. My Japanese binge took me through literature by Yasunari Kawabata, Yasushi Inoue, Yukio Mishima, Junichiro Tanizaki, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Hisako Matsubara, and Natsume Soseki. My South and Central American stage had me reading Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Ruben Dario, Rosario Castellanos, Pedro Prado, Jorge Icaya, Jorge Amado, Rachel de Quieroz, and Gabriela Mistral. Quite a few years later, I taught a class on "Contemporary Fiction by Nonwestern Women," and was able to discover many more writings by women from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; that class' readings, and the research I did for it, will be a topic for another day. In any case, for a few years when I was a graduate student and had access to a large university library, I happily worked my way through various shelves from various parts of the world. My reading in those geographical areas was mainly untutored, unguided and unsystematic, but it was a wonderful experience and opened up many areas - geographical and otherwise - of understanding for me.