Rabbitin

Summary from Goodreads :  The artistic career of Vincent Van Gogh streaks across the history of modern art like a flashing comet. When Van Gogh arrived in Paris in 1886, at the apogee of the Impressionist revolution, he associated with Pissarro, Cezanne, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard, and explored with them such new forms of painting as divisionism and cloisonnism. But Vincent, fascinated though he was by Gauguin, knew that he carried within himself a message, a genius, that was his alone. He left Paris and in a few years - he was to commit suicide four years later - in Arles, in the psychiatric asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, near Saint-Remy-de-Provence, and finally at Auvers-sur-Oise, he accomplished his life's immense work.  The Starry Night has enjoyed immense popularity. It's on Barbie dresses, and sneakers, and mugs, and tile mosaics and cakes. And I can see why. I was enthralled by it the first time I was introduced to an image of it. It's a beautifu...

Summary from Goodreads : Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies the city of New Crobuzon, where the unsavory deal is stranger to no one--not even to Isaac, a gifted and eccentric scientist who has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before encountered. Though the Garuda's request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger. Soon an eerie metamorphosis will occur that will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon--and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it evokes. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD Perdido Street Station opens with a prologue that is very verbose, describing the filth and squalor of New Crobuzon. It's not just the prologue, China Mieville lays it on thick for the most part. Perhaps too thi...

Summary from Goodreads : "When Martin Grace enters the hip Philadelphia coffee shop Cornelia Brown manages, her life changes forever. But little does she know that her newfound love is only the harbinger of greater changes to come. Meanwhile, across town, Clare Hobbs--eleven years old and abandoned by her erratic mother--goes looking for her lost father. She crosses paths with Cornelia while meeting with him at the café, and the two women form an improbable friendship that carries them through the unpredictable currents of love and life." What I found enjoyable about Love Walked In is the crispness and clarity of the voices employed in storytelling (although the initial Cornelia chapters felt too long winded). And the alternating narratives of Claire and Cornelia indicated that this isn't your usual romance novel, you know, the one where they trace the path from meet cute to falling in love to happily ever after. The focal point isn't even romantic love, not entir...

February 2015 Required Reading Report: 1. Love Walked In by Marissa de los Santos - (3/5 Stars)  Enjoyed the alternating narration and how it ended up not focusing on romantic love, not entirely. 2. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville - (5/5 Stars) I feel bludgeoned after reading this. No, I feel like I took some dreamshit after reading this, and then bludgeoned. March 2015 Required Reading: 1. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy - This is TFG's book of the month and it's shaping to be a bit of a sombre read, but an enthralling  one. (Task 7: A book that takes place in Asia) 2. Van Gogh by Pascal Bonafoux - This will be my first time to read an art book. And I know nothing about art, but I like looking at Van Gogh's. Bonafoux, a renowed art historian, recounts Vincent's career and his personal life. And most importantly showcases some of his works and their inspirations. Well see how this goes. (Task 4: published by an indie press) Book Riot ...

Summary from Goodreads: Charles Bukowski examines cats and his childhood in You Get So Alone at Times, a book of poetry that reveals his tender side. He delves into his youth to analyze its repercussions. You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense roughly contains 138 poems, in free verse. The topics are an assortment of various things, but largely autobiographical. Charles Bukowski  mapped out his life in this collection, it contains his childhood including a tenuous relationship with his father, his ten year hiatus from writing (to which he refers to as the ten-year-drunk), his rise to fame as a writer and his winding down from his old degenerate life to a much mellowed state. Then there are pieces that talk about mundane things such as cats, classical music, driving, horse racing, booze, whores.  Then there are those that speak of death, poverty, life, writing, isolation. It's basically a mishmash of actual events and Bukowski's opinions on...

Summary from Goodreads : David Mitchell's electrifying debut novel takes readers on a mesmerizing trek across a world of human experience through a series of ingeniously linked narratives. Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters-a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York-hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact. Like the book's one non-human narrator, Mitchell latches onto his host characters and invades their lives with parasitic precision, making Ghostwritten a sprawling and brilliant literary relief map of the modern world. Ghostwritten moves along the lines of his more popular work, Cloud Atlas, where we have...

January 2015 Required Reading Report : 1. Ghostwritten by David Mitchell - (5/5 Stars)  Considering that this is Mitchell's first novel, it's not as grand and complex as the popular Cloud Atlas, but it is just as engrossing and entertaining and mind blowing. 2. You Get So Alone Sometimes It Just Makes Sense by Charles Bukowski - (3.5/5 Stars) Bukowski's poems are on the dirty realism side, and I enjoyed it. I thought they were quite affecting. But the poems got a bit repetitive and my interest waned a bit as I was getting to the end of the collection. February 2015 Required Reading:   1. Love Walked In by Marissa de los Santos - This   TFG Book of the Month, under the romance genre. I was off on a shaky start on this, but it's starting to pick up.  2. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville - China Mieville has been known to create well-imagined surreal worlds and creatures, and I am ready to be enthralled, unsettled, creeped out, perplexed... Have a Ha...