Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami has to be one of the stranger books I’ve ever read. I’m only about half way in, and there have already been leeches and sardines (separately) falling from the sky, an Oedipus-style prophecy, a character who can’t read but can talk to cats, and—saving the best for last—a …
I just started reading Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero, after watching it drop further and further down on my ‘must read’ list from years of avoiding it. Now I am annoyed I didn’t read it sooner, especially when I was a morose high school student. This novel wields a surprising spell on readers, …
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As I was rummaging through my textbooks, notebooks, journals, and random “read-for-pleasure” books that were sprawled out across my apartment’s floor, attempting to pack for summer storage, an old and worn-out binding caught my attention. The cover showed men trekking through a jungle, carrying weapons and backpacks and helmets and rifles. The book, The Things …
Having recently traveled to Cape Town, I was interested in reading something by a South African writer. While Coetzee and Gordimer are on my list, I started with The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay. This is a coming of age story about a boy growing up in South Africa around the time of World …
I’ve started reading a book that recounts the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair from the factual lives of two men whose stories would be otherwise unlikely linked. In The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson takes a grand event in history and creates a thrilling narrative, transporting the reader into America’s past and industrial beginnings. …
My resolution this year was to read more new books, and, like most new year’s resolutions, it seems to have fallen by the wayside as spring gets into stride, and I cuddle up, for what feels like the thousandth time, in one of Agatha Christie’s cozy mysteries. The Tuesday Club Murders is not, by any …
I am currently reading Korean Politics by Professor John Kie-Chiang Oh for my East Asian Politics class. Even though it’s more or less an ordinary history book, it leads you through the development of a culture and a nation that we are not so familiar with. While reading this book, I witnessed the transformation of …
Ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper, I’ve been awed by the fact that I could check out library books for free. Reading (poetry, fiction, and nonfiction alike) has always been a great source of joy for me. In Touching Peace, Thich Nhat Hanh shares the wisdom of his Vietnamese Zen Buddhist tradition …
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I recently read The Soccer War by the Polish journalist and travel writer Ryszard Kapuscinski. The book is a remarkable account of Kapuscinski’s travels through Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America during the second half of the twentieth century. He recounts his experiences attending a mass rally in Ghana for the African nationalist leader …
History matters in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, winner of the 2012 National Book Award for fiction. The reasons are simple: to be Native in the United States is to live always with the complexities of the past. Set on an imaginary North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, the story grows from the boyhood memories of the …