Personal diaries offer a unique perspective of significant people or places in the past, providing a record of events that we wouldn’t get any other way.
We can learn from them and be inspired by them. There is also the personal connection of being able to glimpse one person’s thoughts and feelings, imagining their life, sharing in their triumphs and their adventures. They touch us in ways other types of literature can’t.
Here is a sampling of interesting diaries that might grab your interest:
Bill Bryson’s African Diary takes us to Kenya. CARE International is a charity dedicated to working with local communities to eradicate poverty around the world. They asked Bryson to travel to some of their projects in Kenya and write a few words on their behalf. His diary spans the week of his trip in early Fall 2002 and covers his impressions, insights and observations of what he experienced. From the extreme poverty of a Kibera slum to the polar opposite at the Karen Blixen house, his observations will elicit laughter, thought and sentiment.
The Lost Diaries of Susanna Moodie by Cecily Ross is a rich and harrowing story of survival set in the remote Canadian wilderness of the 1830s. This is a fictional account based on a true story. She moves with her husband to an isolated log cabin in the backwoods. John Moodie is an ebullient man with a weakness for money-making schemes, and he is convinced that riches await them in the New World. It is the 1830s and, despite their dreams, Susanna is woefully unprepared for life in the wilderness. Susanna’s tale is at times heartbreaking and shows the courage, wit and strength of this pioneer.
The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them by The Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell is inspiring. One day she intercepted a note with an ugly racial caricature and angrily declared that this was precisely the sort of thing that led to the Holocaust — only to be met by uncomprehending looks. So she introduced them to Anne Frank: The
Diary of a Young Girl and Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo, and together they went on a life-changing, eye-opening journey fighting intolerance and misunderstanding.
Philippine Diary by Herbert D. Fisher begins after the Spanish-American War in 1898, when Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States. The U.S. government developed a program to expand the islands’ school system. The author took part in this program and his account of life in the Philippines after the war is an authoritative and romantic text on the country and its fascinating people. In the author’s own words, the reader is given a bird’s-eye view of Philippine geography, culture and customs.
Find these and more at your local library.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published on Wednesdays. Katie Oke works at Coquitlam Public Library.
