Among this week's reading recommendations are encouraging examples of how this great big planet can feel so much less lonesome and scary through the power of human interaction. Seasoned travel expert Rick Steves grants readers passage through his globetrotting origins in the "terrifically fun" memoir On the Hippie Trail, culled from the journal he kept on his 1978 adventure from Istanbul to Kathmandu. In Dinner at Our Place, Shiza Shahid and 11 other cooks bring home inspiration that "spans the world just as it spans the seasons" while reminding us just "how important gathering over lovingly prepared food can be, as a source of connection and joy." In the "spectacular" Oasis, Chinese Canadian graphic novelist Guojing depicts the "unbreakable familial bonds" that emerge for a pair of siblings who find a discarded robot to parent them while their mother works far away.
In The Writer's Life, translator Heinz Insu Fenkl outlines his long relationship with Lee Chang-dong's fiction and unpacks some of the Korean political upheavals that inspired the stories collected in the breathtaking Snowy Day and Other Stories.