Category: Uncategorised
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This isn’t it; this is my bookshelf showcasing the first half of my Booker reading project: I wasn’t kidding about The Little Prince being my favourite book, by the way; as you can see, I like to collect it in different languages from places I visit. You probably won’t guess, so I’ll tell you for…
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“I had a sense of undigested emotional material, which is really just a disconnect between the totally normal passage of time you happen to be in and the totally normal passage of time that is about to follow, after which everything will be different.” The story opens – quite mundanely, I thought – with Tom,…
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“Like seaweed, we floated untethered, without the anchor of intimacies.” Misinterpretation is a novel about connection, about how people connect – tenatatively, fragilely, often talking past each other. …And, it is also a story about a translator. Which should make it right up my alley. 😊 The story – told by an unnamed female narrator…
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‘Politics – so dull,’ he says. ‘This world’s so full of noise and most of it is pointless.’ And ain’t that the truth. Seascraper is a book which steers away from politics entirely and focuses on the hard worn day-to-day of survival. Although never stated in words, I dated the story to exactly 1962 –…
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It feels somehow fitting not to have found an appropriate quote to begin with from Flesh, given how its whole style of narrative seems so geared towards communicating… nothing much? The story opens with an affair – if we can call it that – between a 15-year-old Hungarian named István and his much older married…
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“In the darkness, the fallen coconuts all around us glimmered like skulls.” A girl is smuggled across the water from Trinidad to Venezuela, in the bottom of a boat, in the middle of the night. Why? And who is she? Thus opens Love Forms, full of promise. Then, the story quickly becomes… surprisingly uneventful? The…
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“I was about to turn seventeen, and at that age, what did I really know about time?” The South is, at its heart, a touching coming-of-age story set among a Chinese immigrant family in 1990s Malaysia. The book opens (perhaps slightly jarringly?) with a liaison between its two young male protagonists, Jay and Chuan. I…
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“The personal is anything that affects me. Everything else is political. And identity politics is whatever affects you, but not me.” What is the zeitgeist of these strange times, and what “universality” of human experience does it point to? This is, I think, the central premise of Brown’s second novel, its cast of characters to…
