Rabbitin

Summary from Goodreads : Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live. I was largely unaware of the existence of Indian Reservations and the terrible amount of societal restrictions they have to live with. It's the 21st century but it feels like we are back in 1920s for all it matters. That's why I am terribly grateful when I get to read boo...

Summary from Goodreads : Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life. Now Tony is retired. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove.  The Sense of an Ending is unsettling. For a book that spans 167 pages, it sure packs a wallop that I did not quite expect. A huge portion of the story is Tony Webster's musings on the meaning of life. But I assure you it is more than a running journal of his thoughts. And yeah existentialist talk can easily brow beat me into exasperation. But Julian Barnes is a philosophical wordsmith that writes w...

Summary from Goodreads : David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, number9dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and his mother’s breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses—through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck—a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father’s identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight int...

July Required Reading Report: 1. The Quite American by Graham Greene  - (4/5 stars) A wonderful personal examination of conscience, morality, neutrality, innocence, idealism, cynicism, and more big stuff. It sort of gives perspective on humanity. Or the different kinds of it.  2. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes - (5/5 stars) How can such a short book be so..so unsettling? It has so many insights about existence and death that sort of upended my own. That and because Barnes writes with so much flair. This is my favorite Man Booker read to date! (I realize that I say this everytime a read a Booker! Bookers can be terribly surprising!) 3. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie - (5/5 stars) This book is so bouyed by hope, it feels like I don't know, like crowd surfing. There are times when humans can be terrible and mean spirited, but then there are also times when they have your back and love you and accept you.  August Required...

Summary from Goodreads : Navigating between the Indian traditions they've inherited and the baffling new world, the characters in Jhumpa Lahiri's elegant, touching stories seek love beyond the barriers of culture and generations. In "A Temporary Matter," published in The New Yorker, a young Indian-American couple faces the heartbreak of a stillborn birth while their Boston neighborhood copes with a nightly blackout. In the title story, an interpreter guides an American family through the India of their ancestors and hears an astonishing confession. Lahiri writes with deft cultural insight reminiscent of Anita Desai and a nuanced depth that recalls Mavis Gallant. She is an important and powerful new voice. Belonging and displacement in marriage and immigrant life. This is a prevalent theme in Interpreter of Maladies. Union and Isolation seem unlikely to converge. But to Lahiri there is isolation in union and union in isolation. My favorites among the nine are as ...

June Required Reading Report: 1. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett - (5/5 Stars) I enjoyed the audiobook too much. People doing voices particularly tough guy talk has always been a weakness. I do think the narrative holds as well. A solid crime noir. 2. Number9Dream by David Mitchell - (5/5 Stars) Mitchell is as impressive as always, what can possibly be a hodge podge of dreamworld mess in another's hands is masterfully interwoven in Mitchell's. 3. Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - (5/5 Stars) Excellent pacing for a book that I feared would go too slow for me. And I never realized how heart wrenching this could be. And how funny.  July Required Reading: 1. The Quite American by Graham Greene - TFG's book of the month 2. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes - My entry for Book Riot's challenge item: Man Booker winner from the last decade. Have a great July!

Summary from Goodreads :  The year is 1949 and Valdimar Haraldsson, an eccentric Icelander with elevated ideas about the influence of fish consumption on Nordic civilization, has had the singular good fortune to be invited to join a Danish merchant ship on its way to the Black Sea. Among the crew is the mythical hero Caeneus, disguised as the second mate. Every evening after dinner he entrances his fellow travelers with the tale of how he sailed with the fabled vessel, the Argo, on the Argonauts' quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece. Iceland, I remember from an episode of Bizzare Foods with Andrew Zimmern, as this idyllic land with an abundance of natural wonders (and extremely bizarre foods). Hot springs, geysers, volcanoes, glaciers. They even gave it the name, the land of fire and ice (which is very appropriate because guess where they shoot parts of Game of Thrones?) So this land, I mistakenly assumed, would be populated by ice fishermen, or puffin hunters, or Lady Sif a...