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 …
I just finished reading The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by Janisse Ray, which is this this year’s Community Read. I found it difficult to get into at first; Ray’s tone can come across as self-righteous and moralistic. However, her love of seeds and gardening, evident in every page of this book, …
Love in the time of Cholera is a treatise on the mores of modern love. In an era before the technological distractions of our day, Gabriel García Marquez has woven a tale of intrigue and eroticisms that questions the very fabric of the most intimate connections people have. By presenting a character as rich and …
Welcome to the world of Fillory, where you will find Quentin Clearwater, a college student who finds this mysterious and magical land full of fairies, beasts, and even spirits. The Magician King is the sequel in Lev Grossman’s amazing series. Five pages after randomly picking this book up at Barnes and Nobles, I just knew …
Office Ladies and Salaried Men is a study done by Yuko Ogasawara about gender, power, and work in large corporations in Japan. She finds much of the clerical work is carried out by young women known as “office ladies” (OLs) or “flowers of the workplace.” OLs serve tea to the men and type and file …
John Scalzi’s Redshirts had me laughing out loud in public more than once. Both parody and homage, the book employs well-known sci-fi tropes to hilarious effect, while still delivering an enjoyable story: quick and fun, if not terribly deep. Considering the main focus of the book—the high death rate of low-ranked crew members serving aboard …
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