Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is now currently being hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

Blurb from Goodreads

A few years after its liberation from French colonialist rule, Haiti experienced a period of unsurpassed brutality, horror, and superstition under the reign of the black King Henri-Christophe. Through the eyes of the ancient slave Ti-Noël, The Kingdom of This World records the destruction of the black regime–built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French–in an orgy of voodoo, racial hatred, erotomania, and fantastic grandeurs of false elegance.

Why I Want To Read It

It’s Monday again! I know, Monday is the least favorite day of the week by most of us. Even I am feeling a little sluggish. Nevertheless, Mondays present new doors, opportunities, and starting points. With this, I hope everyone started the workweek on a high note. I hope that everyone will have a great week ahead. Gee, I cannot believe that it is already October; actually, we are nearly halfway through the tenth month of the year. How has the year been so far? I hope that it has been kind to everyone. I hope the remainder of the year will be filled with good news and blessings. More importantly, I hope everyone will be healthy in mind, body, and spirit.

Kickstarting another blogging week is a fresh Goodreads Monday update. This has become a weekly tradition and wow, I am already on my 197th; I didn’t realize I featured that many books already. I have also been playing with the idea of doing a Goodreads Monday checkpoint wherein I will check which books I have already read and evaluate whether they were worth the feature. It is something that I considered before I hit my 100th Goodreads Monday update but I was too lazy to do it. Hopefully this time, I will be able to do the compilation. Anyway, I am losing the narrative so it is time to get back to what this post is about.

For this Goodreads Monday Update I am featuring Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. It was through an online bookseller that I first encountered the Cuban writer. I just learned that Carpentier is one of the writers who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its boom period (1960s to 1970s). Apart from being a novelist, Carpentier was an essayist and musicologist. He was also of French and Russian parentage but he grew up in Havana, Cuba. Despite his blood heritage, Carpentier identified as Cuban throughout his life. Widely traveled, Carpentier published his debut novel ¡Écue-Yamba-O (Praised Be the Lord!) in 1933.

Meanwhile, The Kingdom of This World was Carpentier’s sophomore novel. It was originally published in Spanish as El reino de este mundo in 1949, nearly two decades after his debut novel. To be honest, I thought Carpentier was Haitian because of the subject the book explored. The story highlighted the Haitian Revolution of the 18th century. I admit my knowledge of Haiti and its history is quite limited. I hope that by reading works such as The Kingdom of This World, I will be able to redress this. I recently obtained Marie Vieux-Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano which is also set in Haiti and in the same period as The Kingdom of This World.

This is, I guess, one of the wonders of literature. It allows readers to expand their horizons and their knowledge about other countries, people, and cultures. How about you fellow reader? How was your Monday? What books have you added to your reading list? Do drop it in the comment box. For now, happy Monday and, as always, happy reading!