Erik's Book Club: June Selections

This month I completed six books, my personal record.  How did I accomplish that you might ask. Was it improved and enhanced time management?  Certainly not.  Or maybe I completed an exceptional speed reading course?  Hardly. Then what is the secret of my reading success?  I can give it to you in three simple words. Read. Shorter. Books. And that's what I did during the month of June--and here are my brief reviews.

*Ms Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami:  a coming-of-age novella about a fourth-grade Japanese boy who has a crush on a young woman selling sandwiches in the local supermarket. Good, but nothing special.

*Be Here by the Dalai Lama:  Meditations on how we stay in the moment in the midst of the demands and stresses of everyday life. Wonderfully insightful and highly recommended.

*Men without Women by Haruki Murakami:  Stories about men who find themselves in fractured relationships with women.  More than anything, this is a collection about loneliness in the modern world. Quirky, funny, philosophical...highly recommended.

*The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino:  Calvino is one of my three favorite authors and this novella was the last work of fiction of his that I hadn't read.  It's a peculiar allegorical myth which I enjoyed, but I would recommend other Calvino works if you aren't familiar with him.  Start with "if on a winter's night a traveller" to begin your journey with an amazing writer.

*The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:  This is probably my favorite book of the month.  This is a collection of short stories chronicling the lives of people who reside in both U.S. and Nigerian cultures.  The fate of women who have precariously divided lives is explored in particular detail.  Definitely worth reading.

*The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman Burglar, by Maurice Leblanc.  I read this as an E-book. These tales were written from 1905 onward and they definitely have a dated feel.  I love the Lupin series on Netflix, so for me, these were a fun diversion.  But unless you are a serious Lupin Netflix fan or a Francophile particularly enamored with Paris circa 1900, your time would probably be better spent elsewhere.

This month I have some heavy novels on my shelf awaiting me, so I will be lucky to finish three books in July.  But, even if you only read one book this month, that is fantastic because reading is a journey that enriches the soul. 








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Erik's Book Club: November Selections

Image
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
Read more

Erik's Book Club: September Selections

Image
I was bogged down in August, but I've roared back in September, reading five books during the month.  Even better is the fact that all five books were fantastic and worth reading. First one I read is a book a dear friend recommended quite some time ago and I found an old copy that I brought with me to Indonesia.  Finally, I read it: Blink, by the prolific Malcolm Gladwell. Though it's one of his older works, it still resonates today. In a nutshell, Gladwell utilizes lessons from psychology and neuroscience to teach us how to make better decisions using our ability to focus extremely quickly on a few essential details. Highly recommended, though it was sad to read the chapter on the Amadou Diallo case.  15 years ago Gladwell provided a blueprint on how police could be better trained so they could avoid cases of accidental police killings of minorities, such as in the Diallo case, by training police to recognize bias and modify their policing. Of course, in the thoroughly unprogr
Read more

Erik's Book Club: August Selections

Image
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 read a
Read more