★★★★☆ A fiction based on Japan's most mysterious unresolved case from 1949. Nostalgic and mysterious like Japan and hardboiled-cool like America. You too will catch "Shimoyama disease".
🔽 log 🔽 Tokyo Redux David Peace, 2021 480 pages Read 2024.5
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 What is “Shimoyama case”? It’s a fiction based on Japan’s most mysterious unresolved case from 1949.
It’s full of masculine romanticism, throughout Japan’s Showa era, basen in Tokyo that everyone fantacises.
Nostalgic and mysterious like Japan and hardboiled-cool like America.
As they say, you catch “Shimoyama disease”. The writer is not Japanese, but precisely because of that it is good and is such a page turner, I now need to find the other 2 of the trilogy.
★★★★★ I've always been interested in Anthropology and this is why. We are all different, but not because of biological difference or difference in capabilities. So we're not that different.
🔽 log 🔽 Think Like an Anthropologist Matthew Engelke 2017 368 pages Read 2024.5
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 I’ve always been interested in Anthropology and this is why. It is a study to look at the world from the native’s (or local’s) point of view or points of view. We are all different, people in European city and in a small island in the Polynesia are different but not because of biological difference or difference in capabilities. They’re certainly not “backwards” or “barbarian”. If anything, I’d say colonialists were barbarian and backwards.
Starting with curiosity, move on to going there (most of the time) and live with the natives, think like them and rationalise like them, but always with critical eyes.
It’s different from psychology because it focuses more on the communal value and those thoughts might sound traditional, but we do not live without them. We’re not that modern.
★★★★☆ It really makes you feel small in this place full of orderly wonder. A book by a physicist, she shows you how you can apply physics in everyday life. Nothing is by chance.
🔽 log 🔽 Storm in a Tea Cup The physics of everyday life Helen Czerski 2016 282 pages Read 2024.5
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 A book by a physicist, she shows you how you can apply physics in everyday life.
It really makes you feel small in this place full of orderly wonder. As you stir a spoon in your tea, the liquid moves according to the law of physics, and nothing is by chance.
Though it is interesting to read, not that I understood all, and will ever be curious enough to try to understand more.. Happy to live in ignorance that I’m just a small creature in this vast wonderful world.
★★★★★ The feeling of confinement, hopelessness, and the raw human connection that exists there. If you remove everything other than what you'd need to live today and maybe tomorrow, what kind of humanity are we left with? A strong message of anti-war and hatred towards hypocrites.
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Lavish are the Dead, Prize Stock and other stories
Shisha no ogori, Shiiku
Kenzaburo Oe, 1958
死者の奢り 飼育
大江健三郎
Read 2024.05
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 I kind of avoided reading it because I knew it'd affect me strongly especially if I was unwell. And it did.
Tragedies of a war obviously mean the death and physical injuries or destruction but it takes away people's spirits, scrape off anything that define us as human.
Lavish are the Dead is a story of a student who does a day job cleaning corpses at university, and how he connects with the bodies floating in a pool for preservation. Stock Prize, which is probably more well known, tells a wartime story of a village and their "catch", a black American airman whom they found and kept. Fed like an animal by locals and their kids, he is kept in the village (Shiiku means "breeding") It's a short story full of racism, xenophobe, cruel innocence of kids, violence, and it makes you sick reading it, but, what's more disturbing is that, right or wrong, you as a reader do understand their point, too.
Reading these stories, it feels like your world is becoming so small that it almost chokes you. Remove all the wonderful things about being human, like humanity, social interaction, fraternity or benevolence, and you face another human with the raw cold iron feeling - you're barely a human at this point. Oe's message is clear, anti-war and anti-hypocrites, but he exposes our own hypocrisy while sending out that message.
If you are not well mentally or physically, it's a book to avoid.
★★★★★ Incomplete work published decades after his death in 1960. It's half his biography half a novel and is fully touching.
🔽 log 🔽 The First Man Albert Camus 1994 (1960) Le Premier homme 282 pages Read 2024.5
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 It’s the 70s American wild wild west hippy “comic” – not my cup of tea. Incomplete work published decades after it was found at his death in 1960. It’s half his biography half a novel and is truly touching.
It talks about the life in poverty in Algiers but it’s full of love for those he was close, his mother, grandmother, uncle, friend and teacher. Without father and without tradition, split between France and Algeria, living in the poverty, there was nobody to rely on, nobody to teach him about life, other than how to survive in the poverty, until, he met his teacher at the elementary school.
How sometimes in life, people connected not by blood but pure love can raise you. This section of the teacher is the most moving. Then as he grows older, it abruptly ends where he is in love. True, this could have been a masterpiece.
★★★★★ What is happiness? I am certain he was happy when surrounded by all the wonders of the world and knowledge, but if life is a cycle, nothing is permanent. Forgiveness and salvations.
🔽 log 🔽 Flowers for Algernon Daniel Keyes, 1966 256 pages Read in 2026.02
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
This book is too personal and can't help to think in my surrounding situation, but let's try not to be objective.
This book asks the big question, what is happiness?
As Charlie gets smarter, a girl at the bakery mentions the garden of Eden, that God doesn't want us to go beyond what's given to us, quite frankly, she's saying it's wrong to be smart.
Was he happy that he got a lot smarter than everyone around him, was it a good thing?
I think he was happy, to be surrounded by the wonders of the world, he absorbed all the knowledge that almost all of us cannot reach.
Then he struggles as he lose the super power, but like any of us who get old and old enough to go sinile, I don't think it's a bad thing to return to our simple selves, it's a cycle.
You gain something, you also eventually lose that something.
Knowledge is power, sometime too powerful and harmful if we only focus on the power, but like the cycle of life, knowledge in a person is temporary, and he understood it, he decided to live every stage fully.
It also made me thing of one's role in a community, and coming from the US where they focus on the individualism, it's even more interesting that he finds peach in the given role.
Then, at the end, was the mother a bad person?
Was she bad to wish he was "normal"?
It's easy to say she was evil if you have been taught correctly at school, but if you have never experienced the desperation to realise that your child would never have "normal" conversations and "normal" work like other kids, you cannot dismiss her as bad.
She forgot to love her son, she was too focused on her unhappy self, the despair made her blind.
In the end, we are all selfish, but this book is a reminder that we always mean well and we don't want to hurt people around us, it's just it's difficult to juggle it all.
Glad that this book is full of salvations and forgiveness.
★★★★☆ A classic that everyone has heard of, and it is more than I imagined, full of sorrows yes but the self pity is full on. A universal feeling of despair we all feel at some point in life.
🔽 log 🔽 The Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774 Die Leiden des jungen Werthers 144 pages Read 2024.5
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 A classic that everyone has heard of, and it is more than I imagined, full of sorrows yes but the self pity is full on. Maybe it feels different if you read it when you’re young, or definitely if you read it in the 18th century.
This is the original version of all the sad love stories that came about since. You’re in love, you misunderstand the affection, you suffer, you’re in love with your suffering and it is far stronger than yourself and you can’t take it any more. A universal feeling of despair we all feel at some point in life.
★★☆☆☆ It was interesting for the first half, exactly what I hoped, about Kalimpong and its history. Then, it gradually changes the tone and he starts to preach.
🔽 log 🔽 Chasing a blazing fire in the Himalayas A brief sketch of the (un)noticed Kalimpong Pentecostal revival Anmol Mukhia, 2020 146 pages Read 2024.5
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 It was interesting for the first half, exactly what I hoped. (Though I didn’t really know when I bought it) It actually talks about the history and the background of the Christianity in Kalimpong and the area. Then, it gradually changes the tone and he starts to preach. The conclusion chapter has nothing to do with Kalimpong but just how to be a good Christian. Not what it says on the tin, I skipped through towards the end.
★★★☆☆ A bit of history, tradition and geography of tea. Interesting aspect from French to see what they value in tea. Then the rest is their catalogue with brief explanations. Full on Orientalism.
🔽 log 🔽 The French art of tea Mariage Frères, 2006 L’Art Français du Thé 104 pages Read 2024.6
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 Just a bit of history, tradition and geography of tea, which sometimes is incorrect (like, we use chunky steel pot for tea) but interesting aspect from French to see what they value in tea, that is, its colonial history and its fanciness. (Box of tea can be carried by native youths because the road is narrow and steep, etc.) Full on Orientalism. I do buy the tea but their selling point is the fanciness and Orientalism so maybe that's just how it is.
Then the rest is their catalogue with brief explanations.
★★★★★+♥️ This got me interested in history. How the Middle East had a wonderful history and traditions, and how Europe has always been greedy. Frankopan is so serious that it's funny.
🔽 log 🔽 The Silk Roads: A New History of the World Peter Frankopan, 2015 657 pages Read 2024.6
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 An epic. This got me interested in history, a lot more than before, it has that charm, it doesn't just give you knowledge, it is entertaining.
It is a book about the whole history of the silk roads (plural, because it's not just one road) but surprisingly it's not boring, it is very entertaining and exciting as a book, like a big intertwined story. It illustrates the magnificent and rich history of the Middle East, and how greedy Europe has been using the religion as an excuse, and how Europe faded and in came the US, the new Empire, with its selfish democracy as their weapon.
And after reading this, you know why the Middle East being rich is not a new thing, it's not merely the quick money as the West wants to portrait it. They have a looong history, long and rich.
Maybe it's just the end of the European and American empires, and could be just the return of the Silk Roads.
★★★☆☆ He follows the mysterious beautiful Korean girl. The dark and raw story about youth and there's a bit of punk a bit of cult. The writing style is refreshing.
🔽 log 🔽 The incendiaries R. O. Kwon, 2018 214 pages Read 2024.6
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 The dark and raw story about youth and there’s a bit of punk that leads to cult and terrorism, but everything seems to light and superficial, thus, contemporary.
It’s new in style, a bit like reading a poem and it’s refreshing. But it lacked depth, you can’t go deep into the characters, neither the girl or the boy, so it doesn’t make you feel lost in the story. But maybe that’s the point, and I didn’t get it.
★★★★★ How to humiliate a rich guy and to marry him in the end. What a girl. It's such a classic that it's difficult to find a love story that's not influenced by this.
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Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen, 1813
367 pages
Read 2025.01
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 The classic of the classics. The story is well known, but it is true the humour in the dialogues makes this the “best loved book” So very English, both in the lifestyle and humour. The characters are lively, the story simple but curious and anyone can easily engage with it. It’s so iconic that it’s now difficult to find any love story that has no reference to this book. I should also watch the movies properly one day.
★★★★☆ Classic of classics. Mr. Crusoe is so English. He's tidy, proud and concerned, and determined to make this barbarian land his home (English style home, of course)
🔽 log 🔽 Robinson Crusoe The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe, 1719 384 pages Read 2024.6
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 This was a period I was reading as many “classics” as possible, and here it is.
It’s amazing how English the protagonist is. He’s so well organised and no compromise to make the island his (English style) home, and he doesn’t hide to show how proud he is.
This is supposed to be one of the first story written as if it was a biography in spoken English, and indeed many thought it was a biography, a diary. Because of the historical background you cannot get away from the discriminations but within the boundary he made a sincere friend of Friday. Today’s reader would be uncomfortable, and when recommended to kids I hope there’s a note mentioning it.
Whether you like it or not, you’d have to conclude that it is a great story, written 300 years ago, and still read today.
★★★★☆ It's not a usual self help book, it's not easy to read, a quite demanding guide which forces its readers to familiarise with the philosophical thinking. Overall, enjoy life, guys.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 It's not a usual self help book, it's not easy to read, a quite demanding guide which forces its readers to familiarise with the philosophical thinking. So the midlife crisis is real, and inevitable, but you can live with it by changing HOW you think about your life. "What I could have had" is usually not better than what you've got. But it does give practical guide, like how diverting your focus away from results and goals, from actions that have ending, but turn to actions for actions' sake and enjoy them.
And of course what is self help without Buddhism and meditation.
★★★☆☆ Extracts of a bigger collection of the folktales, "Fiabe italiane" written originally in 1956. A lot of misfortunes and a fair amount of cruelties, just like any folktales. Need to read the main book one day.
🔽 log 🔽 Ten Italian Folktales Italo Calvino, 1956 Fiabe italiane 96 pages Read 2024.6
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Extracts of a bigger collection of the folktales, “Fiabe italiane” written originally in 1956.
They are short and some have moral teaching, like the last one Jump into my sack. But the rest are tales and some just justify rapes, like sleeping with an unconscious queen and he becomes a king…
A lot of misfortunes and a fair amount of cruelty, just like any folktales.
★★★☆☆ A “quintessentially Renaissance man”. This is a guidebook on how to be a good ruler in 1500s Italy. Focus, be cruel, rule. Scary this is still loved by many.
🔽 log 🔽 The Prince Niccolò Machiavelli, 1532 Il principe 128 pages Read 2024.11
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
Alma classics, a version that was translated and published in 2009
So this is a guidebook on how to be a good ruler in 1500s Italy. It has many connotations but clearly it is wrong to try to apply this to all leaders or all societies.
It does recommend to focus on the ruling and go cruel, but it was probably what was needed back then. And the words are straightforward, and references a lot to the history especially the Roman empire. And gives practical advices on how to behave. As they say, a quintessentially Renaissance man.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 I think I got it from someone, that's why I had it in Japanese. Not a long story, of 2 middle aged men who had loved a same woman, and their friendship, if you can call them "friends". So dark and so English.
It'd have been different if I read it in English, so it's my fault I put less stars.
★★★★☆ He wrote it after the hellish travel with his lover, a self destructive man, a full of self pity and frustrations. True you should read this while drunk and preferably in the night.
🔽 log 🔽 A season in hell Arthur Rimbaud, 1873 Une saison en enfer 96 pages Read 2024.6
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 A poem of youth in pain. It's true you should read this while drunk and preferably in the night. Not in the Mediterranean summer daytime.
He wrote it after the hellish travel with his lover, a self destructive man, and this is as the title suggests, a full of self pity and frustrations.
Would have felt differently if read in different occasions for sure.
Penguin classic 60, this version translated in 1962.
★★★★☆ Eco’s 7th and last novel. Book about the journalism of our time – conspiracy theories and fake news. A warning to the Italian society today.
🔽 log 🔽 Numero Zero Umberto Eco, 2015 208 pages Read 2024.6
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 Book about the journalism of our time – conspiracy theories and fake news. Eco’s 7th and last novel. It’s not ask mind provoking as his other classics but nice and short-ish.
We live in the world where nothing can be trusted to be real, and real can be fabricated. A warning to the Italian society today.
It’d have been more fun if I knew more about the modern Italian history around Mussolini time.
★★★★★ After WW2, 40,000 Japanese people crossed the ocean to Brazil to start better lives promised by Japanese government. Instead, they lived and died at the bottom of the society and jungle. Let the revenge begin.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 1000+ pages in Japanese, but it's nonstop explosion of excitement that you can't put the book down.
After the second world war, Japanese government encouraged people in villages to move to Brazil, assuring them they would have land and work guaranteed. Instead the 40,000 people were left in the amazon forest to survive alone. Those who did survive and escape, lived at the bottom of various south American towns and cities.
That's the first book, then, we move on to the second book where they start their revenge.
Today's Japan, you meet 3 wild men, their faces look like Japanese but their eyes are dangerously bright; they have one mission, one target, the Japanese government.
You spent one chunk of a book following their horrible lives so you are 100% on the side of these men, and you've also learned that this really was how many of those Japanese lived in Brazil.
The book also reminds you how small we are in the huge endless nature of the amazon, one person is nothing. The nature would easily swallow you. Yet, we still live, we still regret the actions we did in the past, we still love.
It's an epic and 1000 pages full of drama, action and love. A must read (if it becomes available in English!)
★★★★★ A beautiful story told in a cruel and violent environment; war and colonisation. They must cling to little happiness or sadness that are their own. By a Nobel prize winner.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 A beautiful story told in a cruel and violent environment; war and colonisation.
It's a reminder that people's loves get messed up by the external horrible business of war, like African lives affected by wars that are happening in Europe, "nothing to do with us" But importantly, their lives can continue they can have little happiness or sadness that are their own, they must cling to them. And a little magical and personal relationships with the coloniser and colonised makes the story hopeful, despite the violence that's surrounding them.
BY THE WINNER OF THE 2021 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
★★★★★ Love letter to London that’s disappearing. We all have different opinions, skin colour, age, roots, culture, education, faith, or lack of any or all of it, but we try to survive this thing called life as a community.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 The most talked about book ever since I arrived in London, for over 2 decades now. And only now reading it. Somehow I thought it be more, coarse or rough, but it was surprisingly heart warming and this really is the London I loved, the mess and how Londoners coped.
But I lived mostly in Islington, more clearly a Turkish area, but it is what you'd seen even in 2003 when I arrived, then slowly disappeared, or put under the carpet.
We all have different opinions, skin colour, age, roots, culture, education, faith, or lack of any or all of it, and it's ok you are not the same, or not in agreement, but we try to survive this thing called life as a community. The struggle to survive as a community, as a component of something big and messy, it's the fun, it's worth it.
★★★★☆ It’s stone cold and stylish and stylised, but has the human struggle of the protagonist. And of course clever.
🔽 log 🔽 The spy who came in from the cold John Le Carré, 1963 464 pages Read 2024.7
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 So this is the famous spy book. And I admit I have almost zero interest in this genre it didn’t draw me into it as much as it should or could but it was a good story that you van easily imagine it being made into films.
It’s stone cold and stylish and stylised, but has the human struggle of the protagonist. And of course clever.
★★★★☆ 31 men and 1 woman on a remote island. She makes sure to take advantage of being the only woman, but it’s not that simple, she gets old and fat, and gets greedy, too.
🔽 log 🔽 Tokyo Island Natsuo Kirino, 2008 東京島 桐野夏生 Read 2024.7
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
31 men and 1 woman on a remote island. She makes sure to take advantage of being the only woman, but it's not that simple, she gets old and fat, and gets greedy, too.
As time goes on, 5 years, 6 years, they slowly start to fall apart and form their own communities. I only recently read Robinson Crusoe, and I'm not sure if he'd prefer years alone, or with these people.
Men are not to be depended on, but she's so used to be treated like a queen by now, what should she do now that she's getting old and fat? It's not a beautiful story, it's the real woman with real problems, even if she's on an island with dozens of men alone.
★★★★★ A difficult read, difficult to understand what’s actually happening, but once you get a hang of it, and with a bit of research it’s gripping. Must read this again, now that I know the story.
🔽 log 🔽 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner, 1929 464 pages Read 2024.7
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 A difficult read. The first chapter is written from the perspective of a disabled man, who is the fourth child of the family and it's not chronological, things come up as they come up in his mind, jumping around the time and repeating the same things, repeating his love for his sister. Then it goes to the first son's perspective, then the second son's, then ends with no first-person narrator and concludes how the family has collapses.
Throughout the book things go back and forth and there is little explanation of what's actually happening or who's speaking, as if you are reading from the character's mind so you're supposed to follow with no description of events.
Though it's difficult, and I needed a synopsis from Wikipedia, it is gripping once you get a hang of it. Unique, for sure, and it's a sad story of a proud but dysfunctional family. Must read this again, now that I know the story.
★★★★★ Remembering the past, remembering the regrets and hoping for a bright content future. Classic Ishiguro here, perfectly capturing the Japanese sentiment. Elegant.
🔽 log 🔽 An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro, 1986 206 pages Read 2024.7
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 Remembering the past, remembering the regrets and hoping for a bright content future. Classic Ishiguro here, with an old man as the protagonist, perfectly capturing the Japanese sentiment.
He revisits and reviews his life as he gets old, old enough to have others around him die, and slowly sees his mistakes of being too nationalistic, though that was the norm, and for his daughter's sake he acknowledges the mistakes.
Slow and elegant and all you expect from Ishiguro.
★★★★★ Who doesn’t know Dracula? But so the threat is in the town and awakens intelligence and sexuality in women, and men go out to destroy. Definitely playing with female sexuality and empowerment.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 The classic of the classics, who doesn't know Dracula?
The entire novel is written as if it were collection of diaries, notes and letters. In a way surprisingly to me that it was full of pure adventures, good guys chasing the bad guy to save woman. But it is the woman who became the victim because of the men's heroism and she saves their asses. Also if you read between the lines, it's sexual, or bisexual even. Dracula likes the blood of young beautiful women, but he also imprisoned Jonathan and attempted to attack him also.
So, the threat is in the town and it brings about the awakening of women to their intelligence and sexuality, so the 4 men go out to hunt. That's one way to look at it but certainly it's playing a lot with the idea if female sexuality and empowerment.
★★★★★ What’s so fab about it is that you know it’s impossible, but it’s so good that it doesn’t matter. Exciting and entertaining, definitely the most loved mystery of 2025 in Japan.
🔽 log 🔽 一次元の挿し木 松下龍之介 2025 (Labyrinth of Hortensia and Minotaur) Ryunosuke Matsushita 256 pages Read 2024.8 (Not available in English)
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 The author is in his mid-20s and it was only his debut novel. It's so entertaining that all bibliophiles have read it in Japan.
The DNA of an ancient bones found in India matches the DNA of his missing sister. And there are evil organisations and scientific secrets that are bigger than life; so you know it's impossible, there is no reality to it, but, but! you let that go because the story is so good. Who cares if it's the story is unlikely, but not even SF, if it's entertaining, people will read and get addicted to it.
The protagonist is a beautiful lone young man who never smiles, his younger sister is a quiet pretty girl, there are also a bored housewife and poor students and Greek mythology, Frankenstein's monster, then the sound of mysterious liquid splashing - all the good ingredients are there.
We're all waiting for his future books now. (And I'm sure it will soon be available in English)
★★★★☆ Record of crimes, policing and prisons in Islington, my home in London. This is when British Empire was at its peak, yet, citizens of London lived in poverty. Hypocrisy.
🔽 log 🔽 Criminal Islington The Story of Crime and Punishment in a Victorian Suburb Islington Archeology & History Society, 1989 90 pages Read 2024.7
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 Collection of essays related to criminals, policing and prisons. Being so closed to the City, Islington, especially Clerkenwell had a pretty bad history. It’s interesting that there was no “police” outside of the City, and at the same time people realised that the petty crimes are born out of poverty so the policing and the housing improved the situation.
Crazy to think that the alleys in London were so poor yet they had the Empire.
In any case, interesting to know the area I know so well has such an interesting (but not very proud) history.
★★★★☆ For children aged 2-3 years and just been diagnosed. The interesting thing was to learn the rationale behind the step to take though.
🔽 log 🔽 An Early Start for Your Child with Autism: Using Everyday Activities to Help Kids Connect, Communicate, and Learn Sally J Rogers, etc, 2012 342 pages Read 2024.7
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 Clearly it was too late to read this, this is for children aged 2-3 years and just been diagnosed. We've already done or already doing all the steps...
The interesting thing was to learn the rationale behind the step to take, good to read it properly rather than just guessing, however correct it was.
The later chapters were more appropriate like speech, but the whole book is really for the newly diagnosed, so if that's your family's case, then a great book.
★★★★☆ Written for assistant teachers at school, so not home or therapist, but useful even for parents.
🔽 log 🔽 Autismo. Cosa fare (e non) Guida rapida per insegnanti. Scuola primaria Marco Pontis, 2021 150 pages Read 2024.8 (English not available)
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 For Italian teachers. Written for assistant teachers at school, so not home or therapist, but useful even for parents.
Nothing new specifically to note (it doesn't go deep, and assumes it's for a classroom) but good to read in Italian and normally what they suggest is consistent in various books.
★★★★☆ It is scary to think just how we continue to demand to be strong, stepping on all the other animal and the ecosystem that surrounds us – and, on other fellow human beings.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 One of the most talked about books in the last decade.
As I was warned, it is interesting, clever, provoking but above all scary. It is scary to think just how we evolved to be the most powerful being on the planet, and how we continue to demand to be strong, stepping on all the other animal and the ecosystem that surrounds us - and, on other fellow human beings.
If you stop and think, it's crazy how we're destroying our world by selfish.
As he says, the earth is a big shopping centre. We love to consume and want more - but what exactly do we want? What is the happiness that we want? And in future, when we evolve to something new, what new things will we want?
Another scary part is, he doesn't seem to criticise this aspect of our greed and seem to just speak about it, which might be alarming. So though interesting, I don't like it, and I kept it with 4 stars only.
★★★★★ Women looking at each other, women being looked at by each other. This is everyday stuff, a mundane, but why does it have to be a taboo to talk about women's normality? Sharp and warm.
🔽 log 🔽 Breasts and Eggs Mieko Kawakami, 2008 乳と卵 川上未映子 Read in 2020.05
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
There's no other stories like this.
3 women, 3 days.
What does it mean to be a woman?
It goes on about sexual "tools" and about reproduction "tools" and menstruations that just happen in between
Women looking at each other, women being looked at by each other.
This is everyday stuff, boring, a mundane, but why does it have to be a taboo to talk about women's normality?
In the original Japanese it's written in a way that's not easy to read mixed with Osaka dialects, there was nothing like this before Kawakami, a story that talks about the truth in everyday life. Her theme and storytelling is sharp, but her writing is warm.
Today her books can be found in English and many other languages, but naturally I wait to get them in Japanese!
It's a poem so inevitably it loses the beauty when it's translated. I also looked a bit at the Japanese translation but it was better than the English version.
"Song offerings" to god, so I'm unfortunately not familiar with the sentiment as I don't know much, but it is nice and beautiful to read. It opens your mind and heart to another layer of the world, away from the everyday rush life.
First Asian to receive a Nobel Prize. He had a warm relationship with Japan and Japanese artists, but he was very critical of the Japanese nationalism in the 1920s and eventually stopped visiting Japan.
★★★★★ His adolescence, friendship and first love, like any stories of this kind, but the sense of not belonging was too real and obvious, he really did not belong. A bittersweet love for his home, India.
🔽 log 🔽 The Room on the Roof Ruskin Bond, 1956 184 pages Read 2024.08
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 First long novel I read of Ruskin Bond, and his first novel when he was still a teenager.
It talks of his own youth, of being a white English boy raised in India and not belonging anywhere. His adolescence, friendship and first love, like any stories of this kind, but the sense of not belonging was too real and obvious, he really did not belong.
Bittersweet, under the Indian sun the boy is undeniably in love with India, his home.
★★★★★ Nuns with good intentions in the isolated hills out of Darjeeling, which used to be a harem. If that doesn’t promise the hysteria and darkness. As expected they slowly went mad.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 Nuns with good intentions in the isolated hills out of Darjeeling, which used to be a harem. If that doesn't promise the hysteria and darkness, I don't know what does. As expected they slowly went mad.
It's in a way stereotypical, how can they dare to go out to someone else's back garden to preach, when the locals have been living perfectly fine. How could the women, with different tempers expect to live peacefully, when they're not welcome.
It's the dark side of living in Darjeeling hills, as the young General said, people go mad when they stay too close to the mountain Kanchenjunga, God.
Sexual tensions, the struggle between white supremacy and Christian philanthropy, the end of British Empire. And it did make it into a rather successful film and series. In the final days of the Imperial rule, some British also thought it was good and made a film out of it, too. I must watch it.
★★★★★ Maids in Japan this period were not just housekeepers, they were a part of the family. And it’s Tanizaki, all his women are unique and loveable, and all a bit crazy.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 In the house with an old man, many maids come and go. Back then, maids were not just housekeepers, the young girls come out from countryside, and their employers treat them like nieces, taking care of their affairs.
And remember it's Tanizaki, it means all the women in the book are unique, loveable and a bit crazy. The house is always noisy with the maids chatting away and running around, exactly as the old man likes. Yes he likes the girls and looking at their feet, but he also lets go of their little madness, or their love affairs, even love affairs among the girls. It's an old custom or value that's disappeared.
It might not be one of his more famous books, but it's fun, it's sensual, it's subtly sensational, definitely a lovely read.
★★★★☆ A controversial novel where the government and leaders in France become more and more Islam, to cling to their careers. It’s not so impossible. Today Europe is tired of the emptiness that they want to bow to something big. Fascism or Islam?
🔽 log 🔽 Submission Michel Houellebecq, 2015 Soumission Read 2024.8
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽
A controversial novel where the government and leaders in France become more and more Islam, to cling to their careers. It's not so impossible.
Today Europe is tired. Now moving away from Christianity and Individualism, freedom, and social justice, what they want is a big religion, a bigger than life idea to bow to, where you can ignore women's right and live only thinking about themselves. Even if that means they submit to Islam. After all which is better, certainly not Fascism. Very provocative, but not so impossible.
I must add that it makes you sick while reading this that it simplifies a religion that is complex and has deep history, whether you are a Muslim or not. And it's totally understandable that it made Muslim people angry, it's provocative yes, but a bit sick.
★★★★★+♥ Why was the East India Company so successful? Well, because they were disrespectful, aggressive, opportunist, deceitful and selfish gang of thugs. The book is such a cultural heritage not only because it’s insightful but also passionate and humane.
🔽 log 🔽 The Anarchy The relentless rise of East India Company William Dalrymple, 2019 576 pages Read 2024.08
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 A great book, definitely the top, the best. It’s the topic I’ve always been interested in; how in the world could small England colonise India, a great power?
So is it like, Mughal Empire was a lion, and EIC a hyena? A handful of gang, a mob, disrespectful, aggressive, opportunist, deceitful and selfish, who only thought of making quick money, took the gamble for their own profit. They were hardly truthful to their employer, government or Crown either. But East India Company was too big to fall, Britain was too dependent on the wealth India brought, so they nationalised it, and took over what EIC had, ie the power over the subcontinent, the start of the British India.
History is definitely more interesting and exciting than fiction here, the facts are fascinating but then you have Mr Dalrymple writing about it with his compassion, passion and humane sensibility, it becomes such a force, it’s so powerful, and utterly important.
This careful yet brave book focuses on the fall of Mughal Empire and how EIC took all the opportunities with aggression and lies, because that is what it was, and it’s hardly to do with the ability of EIC as merchants. It contains endless anecdotes and references taken from the writing of the time that had been buried in the cluster of materials in India, so they are the facts that we were never aware of. And facts are scary, truth hurts, historical facts almost always hurt Britain. No wonder, sadly, some people don’t like Dalrymple’s books, history hurts them.
One particularly interesting character that I didn’t know about was Warren Hastings who loved and cared about India, unusual for EIC employee but had nasty enemies.
Again a great book, I’d even go as far as saying an important cultural treasure, and an instant classic.
★★★★☆ Nepal and Diaspora, sense of not belonging where they live. Far from home people’s tradition and customs are distant memories while the feelings for home gets stronger.
🔽 log 🔽
The Gurkha's daughter
Prajwal Parajuly, 2013
280 pages
Read in 2024.09
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 A collection of short stories of people who have different ties to Nepal.
It's about lives of people living in diaspora, sense of not belonging where they live. To begin with, Nepalese people in Darjeeling area have a different sense of home, and not necessarily uniformed. And how about Nepalese in Bhutan who got kicked out to Nepal? Or Muslim from Bihar in Kalimpong? A guy from Darjeeling in New York who's never been to Nepal?
The stories are subtly harsh and sad but not exaggeratingly dramatic, just like real lives of real people, they carry their own inevitable drama and the longing, between tradition and practice and sense of home. Nice short stories.
赤パンの本棚 