JoV's Book Pyramid
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Anne Lamott: Traveling Mercies
My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pad, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, in … Continue reading
My Book Towers are demolished (in a good way)
The truth is this, when I moved to my current place in January 2009 I pretty much spent a year before, selling out my Textbooks and books that I don’t want to keep. By then I was quite chuffed that I have kept book hoarding to a minimum, and my books were half of that … Continue reading
Nicole Krauss: The History of Love
“I often wonder who will be the last person to see me alive. If I had to bet, I’d bet on the delivery boy from the Chinese take-out. I order in four nights out of seven. Whenever he comes I make a big production of finding my wallet. He stands in the door holding the … Continue reading
Milan Kundera: Identity
Milan Kundera is up there on my favourite author list with his The Unbearable Lightness of Being. When I saw “Identity” on the library shelf, it takes a superhuman’s willpower not to resist the temptation to pick this one up. It is only 152 pages and because I wish to explore the depth of the novel, … Continue reading
Anne Enright: The Gathering
The novel traces the narrator’s inner journey, setting out to derive meaning from past and present events, and takes place in Ireland and England. Its title refers to the funeral of Liam Hegarty, an alcoholic who committed suicide in the sea at Brighton. His mother and eight of the nine surviving Hegarty children gather in … Continue reading
Banana Yoshimoto: Asleep
Picking up Yoshimoto’s novel to read is like a quick bite. Like a Mars bar or a Snicker bar. It gets chewed on very quickly, you will probably like it and then you crave for the next one, but they will never fill you up or make you think about the last wonderful meal you … Continue reading
The Weight and the Weightlessness
As summer is drawing to a close, I felt a sudden weight on my shoulder thinking about the months ahead of wintery cold and perhaps snow, and the weight that I have to carry by wearing more layers of clothing and reflecting about another year drawing to an end. Hence, I’m combining two novellas reviews … Continue reading
The Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif
Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love is a family saga, a story that draws its readers into two different eras in the complex, troubled history of modern Egypt. The story begins in 1997 in New York. There Isabel Parkman discovers an old trunk full of documents, some in English, some in Arabic, in her dying … Continue reading
Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe
Changeling is published in the USA 3 months earlier than UK. As you can see, the cover of the UK edition is beautiful, with sort of transfer sheet for baking with dotted yellow flowers as outer flap and the vertical title, a typical layout of the kanji characters seen in far eastern novels (In the background … Continue reading
After Dark by Haruki Murakami
Opening paragraph: Eyes mark the shape of the city. Through the eyes of a high-flying night bird, we take in the scene from midair. In our broad sweep, the city looks like a single gigantic creature –or more like a single collective entity created by many intertwining organisms. Countless arteries stretch to the ends of … Continue reading
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Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. - Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
JoV's Book Pyramid 
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