Beyond Entertainment: How Books Train Us to See and Forge Our Cultural Intelligence
world map loving the world globe world street signs
In an era where multicultural films (like those I explored in this article) are increasingly recognised for shaping our global perspective, a quieter but equally transformative force often remains overlooked in higher education: the book.
For university lecturers navigating increasingly diverse classrooms, reading is not simply an intellectual exercise or source of disciplinary knowledge. Stories rooted in culture, history, migration, memory, and lived experience can profoundly shape how students learn to interpret the world, understand difference, and engage with complexity.
While we often treat reading as entertainment, information, or escape, sustained engagement with literature does something far more significant. It cultivates cultural intelligence. It deepens historical awareness. It trains attention, slows perception, and expands our capacity to understand how knowledge, identity, and meaning are shaped across different cultural contexts.
In my work with educators and knowledge mentors, I often explore how learning is never culturally neutral. The ways students interpret ideas, authority, participation, communication, and even critical thinking are shaped by social histories, educational traditions, language, migration, and collective memory. Literature offers a powerful pathway into this understanding because it invites readers to inhabit worlds beyond their own assumptions.
Building on my earlier discussion of multicultural cinema, I want to delve into the equally rich and transformative world of multicultural books.
This list is not a canon, nor is it an argument for what everyone should read. Rather, it is a reflection on how cultural and historical intelligence is formed slowly over time through sustained encounters with stories grounded in place, memory, and lived experience.
Across different regions and traditions, these books invite readers - and importantly, educators and students - to step inside different historical rhythms: colonial and postcolonial worlds, Indigenous knowledge systems, societies shaped by migration, religion, labour, ideology, and social expectation. They reveal how history is not confined to the past, but continues to shape institutions, relationships, classrooms, identities, and ways of knowing in the present.
For lecturers, this matters deeply.
Higher education is increasingly multicultural, interdisciplinary, and globally connected. Yet many educators still grapple with how to create genuinely inclusive learning environments that move beyond surface-level diversity toward deeper cultural understanding. Literature can help bridge this gap. It develops empathy without simplification, complexity without abstraction, and perspective-taking without reducing culture to stereotypes.
Books work quietly, but with immense depth. They teach us to notice what we might otherwise overlook: whose voices are centred, whose knowledge is legitimised, how silence operates, and how power moves through institutions and everyday interactions.
The broader and more complex our narrative reference points become, the greater our capacity to navigate complexity in our teaching, research, and relationships with students.
Reading in this way is not about mastering a body of knowledge or arriving at a single truth. It is about learning to see differently: to recognise how narratives carry values, how communication is culturally shaped, and how human lives are always embedded within larger historical and social forces.
The 33 books gathered here have accompanied me over many years. Some are widely read, others more specialised. What connects them is not genre or ideology, but their ability to deepen cultural understanding, challenge assumptions, and orient readers within complexity.
For educators, they also offer something else: a reminder that teaching itself is a profoundly human and cultural act.
I offer these books not as conclusions, but as companions for lecturers, students, and anyone seeking to think more critically, teach more reflectively, and engage more meaningfully with the diverse worlds we now inhabit.
Scandinavia & the Nordic World
Out of Africa, Karen Blixen
The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Selma Lagerlöf
Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, Astrid Lindgren
The Hidden Camino, Louise Sommer
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset
Women in Old Norse Society, Jenny Jochens
Dina's Book, Herbjørg Wassmo
Australia
Eggshell Skull, Bri Lee
Deep Time Dreaming, Billy Griffiths
Wise Women of the Dreamtime, K. L. Parker
Ten Pound Poms, Kate Grenville
Korea (North & South)
The Girl with Seven Names, Hyeonseo Lee (with David John)
To the Moon, Jang Ryujin
Japan
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata
Saudi Arabia / Middle East
Daring to Drive, Manal al-Sharif
Peru
The Feast of the Goat, Mario Vargas Llosa
The Bad Girl, Mario Vargas Llosa
South America
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
Open Veins of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano
North America
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Desert Queen, Janet Wallach
India
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
An Era of Darkness, Shashi Tharoor
East Asia & Diaspora
Wild Swans, Jung Chang
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
Mao's Last Dancer, Li Cunxin
Morocco
The Moor’s Account, Laila Lalami
Turkey
The Bastard of Istanbul, Elif Shafak
South Africa
Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela
North Africa
So Long a Letter, Mariama Bâ
I would love to hear your reflections on this topic.
Was this article inspiring?
Share it on social media
Pin it!
Send it to a friend who needs to read this
Comments