As far as Murakami books go, After Dark (Afuta daku in Japanese) and South of the Border, West of the Sun are two of his more “normal” novels . Normal in a sense that there are no talking cats, alternate universes, or little people. Although, just because they are without seemingly supernatural creatures or events,…
Revenge, by Yoko Ogawa, is a collection of 11 disturbing short stories about seemingly ordinary people with ordinary lives. Though each story seems mundane, there lies beneath the surface the deeper, darker side of the human mind filled with strange desires and unspeakable emotions. The 11 short stories, though each one distinct and independent, are…
Daytripper by Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, is an award-winning 10-issue comic book, collected into a trade paperback, by Vertigo. Daytripper takes readers on an extraordinary journey through the life of the main character, Bras de Oliva Domingos. Bras, a newspaper obituaries writer is a struggling writer, trying to step out of the shadows of…
Hours after reading Julian Barnes‘ The Sense of an Ending, I’m still at a loss as to what its true meaning is. I’m finding it extremely difficult to describe this book, and to make sense of the whole thing. This novel bothers me more than I care to admit. The 2011 Booker Prize-winning novel is…
Having recently read several serious books back to back, I felt the growing need to get rid of the gloom hanging over me left over from Rushdie, Hugo and Hosseini, so I decided that for my next book, I would read something light and easy. I went with Neil Gaiman and Terry Prachett’s cult classic, Good Omens, about…
The first book I completed for 2011 is Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Technically it isn’t a novel; it’s a collection of his short stories. The thin volume is made up of 6 short stories: In a Grove Rashomon Yam Gruel The Martyr Kesa and Morito The Dragon Though rather short, most of the…
I’m a little late writing about the last two books I read in 2010. Two books of quite different moods – the first, quite heavy, A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, and the second, to brighten my mood a bit, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie. A Thousand Splendid Suns by…
“If a guy like you can stand up and do what you did, then maybe everyone can. Maybe everyone can live beyond what they’re capable of.” This is my concluding post about Markus Zusak’s I am the Messenger. After a week, I finally finished 357-page “children’s book.” As I stated in an earlier post about…
It’s taking me a little longer than I expected to finish Markus Zusak’s I am The Messenger. I thought I would be able to breeze through it during the weekend, but the copy I have has around 350 pages, and it takes me a while to read something that long. The book is easy enough…
“First the colors. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things. Or at least, how I try. *Here is a small fact* You are going to die.” I find it much harder to write about a book I liked than to write about a book I disliked or hated. With ‘bad’ books, there’s always…
The Misanthropologist 