Announcing New Blogs: Six Degrees South is now Inactive

Check out my new blogs as this one is now inactive.  The Periscope is my main blog covering general topics and it can be found at eriksperiscope.blogspot.com     Erik's Travel is self-explanatory.  It can be found at erikstravel.blogspot.com    See you there.

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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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