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Erik's Book Club: November Selections

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I experienced another wonderful month of reading, six books in all.  Five of them were quite magnificent. The Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi was probably my favorite.  It's a novel that was a finalist for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. It's a philosophical novel of family, religious faith, identity, and science and one women's struggle to understand them all as they apply to her tragic life. It would take a 1000-word review to do the book justice;  I would simply say that I highly recommend it and it's a book worth seeking out. Very different, but as good as Gyasi's novel is: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. It sounds peculiar: it's a hybrid history/novel retelling the story of crucial discoveries in quantum physics. It's a book that disorients the reader in that, for the first half, it is extremely difficult to determine where fact ends and fiction begins. Ultimately it is a caution...
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Erik's Book Club: August Selections

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Didn't get much reading accomplished in August. Partly because it was my busy season of New Student Orientation and the start of the academic year, but also because I got bogged down with the main book I read. The book that bogged me down was The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Earlier this year, I read his newest work, Klara and the Sun, which I zipped through and enjoyed immensely.  However, The Buried Giant, while it is a well-written and profound work, really was a book that didn't speak to me and I had trouble getting through more than about 15 pages a day.  The novel is a fable telling the tale of an elderly couple trying to find their long-lost son as they hike alone through the stark English landscape.  The story is set in the darkness of Post-Arthurian England and mixes realism with the exploits of dragons and knights. If you like Ishiguro, you might enjoy this book, but I found it tedious and I would strongly recommend reading Klara and the Sun instead. I also r...
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Saturday Splurge: Dim Sum at Li Feng

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Sometimes it takes weeks to get a reservation for the lunch dim sum at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in downtown Jakarta. Luckily, there was a table for one available at opening time. I love dim sum as it is a wonderful way of eating: bite-sized dishes served one at a time. As I have great difficulty narrowing down what to order on the regular dinner menu, this format that caters to experiencing variety is especially appealing to me.  Pictured here: *Goldfish-shaped prawn dumplings swimming in mutsusaki mushroom broth *Edamame and sweet potato dumpling with black truffle *Szechuan shrimp wonton in soy sauce infused with chili *Crystal beef dumpling with ginger and celery *Tofu Kung Pao bun with cashews (my favorite) Not pictured: Spicy scallop dumplings and mango pudding with carmalized banana for dessert.  A wonderful meal at one of my 5 all-time favorite restaurants.
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