One year ago today Nicole from the Expat Cast, former guest and guest Host Tatjana and I discussed the book Schadenfreude, a Love Story: Me, the Germans and 20 Years of Attempted Transformations, Unfortunate Miscommunications, and Humiliating Situations That Only They Have Words for in an episode. After I moved to Berlin, Germany I posted a photo of my neighborhood and Tatjana reminded me that this street was mentioned in the book. I decided tor reread the book and also reached out to the Author to see if we could ask her some questions. We are so thrilled that she said yes. This episode is the conversation that I had with Rebecca about her book, with prerecorded questions from Nicole and Tatjana, of course. 

Rebecca recently moved back to her hometown of Eugene, Oregon after twenty-five years living (among other places) in New York, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, California and Missouri. She is currently teaching a memoir writing workshop for Stanford Continuing Studies online, and a pro-tempore professor of comparative literature at the University of Oregon Clark Honors College.

Welcome to the bookish world of Japan. Guest Host Tatjana from Craving Expat Life chats with Yuki fromBook Nerd Tokyo about Japanese books, specifically Banana Yoshimoto’s “Kitchen” in this conversation. They explore Yuki’s life between Japan and the USA as well as Tatjana’s discovery of Japanese literature, translations, and stereotypes. 

Yuki is originally from Los Angeles but has been living in her parent's hometowm of Tokyo for a few years now. She writes about books, bookstores and cultural identity on Instagram under the handle  Book Nerd Tokyo. She started Book Nerd Tokyo as a way to explore her in-betweenness and gain a deeper understanding of her own familial roots. 

This episode is our first episode with a Guest Host, thanks Tatjana! 

Do you read about a place before traveling there? Yup, so do we. By we I mean Mel and Dave, two American expats living in Prague, Czech Republic and Creators of the Sense of Place Podcast. Oh, and myself. In a few podcast episodes Mel and Dave have already perfected the art of diving deep into a place via books and the people who love them. 

This mini episode is in two parts: 
1. their favorite bookstores in Prague
and
2. two really heartwarming and romantic book love stories

​Years ago an expat friend of mine made a comparison with the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920’s and Western expats in Asia in the early 2000’s and I have never forgotten it. Shannon Martin returns to the Geopats Podcast for a dive into Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” book about his slice of the Lost Generation so that we can dig into this expat generation comparison with about 100 years time difference between them. We will be following up with a conversation about Hemingway’s more autobiographical version of “The Sun Also Rises”, “A Moveable Feast” in 2020, when both of us will possibly be living in Western Europe. 

In this podcast episode, I am honored to talk with Tina Kanagaratnam about the book The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. Tina is a Bookish Expat with both strong literary and historical knowledge of China. I have been to a number of bookish events in Shanghai where Tina has joined in to provide some historic context to the texts that we were discussing. Every time I have blown away by how knowledgeable, insightful and personable she is. Tina is one of those people that balances intelligence, perspective and humor perfectly. 

What do you get when you have two American Expats and one German Expat talk about a book by a former American Expat living in 1990’s Former East Germany? This culturally windy episode dripping with heaps of blasted stereotypes, linguistic gems and lots of laughter. We are delighted to have Nicole Palazzo, Host of the Expat Cast Podcast on the show today. Her interview with me in February this year on the Expat Cast is a big reason why Bookish Expats exists so danke Nicole! More on the book that we talked about below, but first, let's pay some pod bills.

The Global Soul by Pico Iyer is a seminal geopat book. Stephanie and Summer (Steph’s Co-Host on the new podcast Creatively Complicated) dig into this book in a very big way. This is not a regular episode because Steph is not interviewing Summer about her reading story but instead they are discussing both of their reactions to this book. Summer read this book for the first time recently thanks (or no thanks, lol) to Steph’s persistent recommendation and Steph tried to reread it for the first time since she fell in love with it in 2002.    ​

Antonella Moretti is the Author of Parsley and Coriander, a fictional book about an Italian expat community in Suzhou, China. Antonella has lived in Suzhou for many years herself and draws upon her personal expat experience for this narrative. In this episode we asked Antonella about her two bookish hats: expat reader AND expat Writer. We discuss her love of reading books about China, what led her to write this book on an expat experience in China and about the publication and translation process. The book was initially written in Italian but now has an English version and will soon have a Mandarin Chinese version as well.  Special thanks go out to Tatjana , a bookish Germany expat living in India and to Russian expat living in Shanghai, Marina Kushch, ShanghaiDailyChic on Instagram, for contributing questions to this interview. 

In the podcast episode we chat with Tatjana, in her words “a German married to an Indian-Chinese - or Chinese-Indian depending on the mood of the day”. Tatjana grew up wanting to live in different countries, so she went into Hospitality in order to do so. Of course, at the same time she read voraciously. In fact, while living in Dubai, one of the six cities she has called home thus far, she met her husband. Just before she moved to India to be with him she started reading the works of Indian Author Chetan Bhagat. And thus began her bookjucation of India and Indian culture. I was fortunate enough to sit down with Tatjana in my home in Shanghai and chat about some of Chetan’s books that had an impact on her life in India. We also dig into her bookology, her favorite books and places to read them and so much more. 

​In the podcast episode we chat with Evo Terra . Some of you might remember him from season 2 of the Bangkok Podcast with Co-Host Greg Jorgensen, However, Evo’s podcast history goes back much farther than this. In fact, one of his podcasts was the 40th podcast of all time (there are rumored to be about 700,000ish podcasts listed in Apple Podcasts right now) and he wrote the first Podcasting for Dummies books. We recorded this interview about the time of his one year reverse culture shock anniversary (exexpatsary?) returning to the U.S. after living in Bangkok, Thailand for a few years. He selected the book, Working With The Thais to talk about.​