This year, I challenged myself to read 40 books. So far, I've read 21 books, I'm currently reading five (too many, I know), and I have plenty more in my 'to be read' list. These are some of my favourites of the year!
lives begin in
Sarajevo, a small, blissful city where a young boy's life is consumed with
street soccer with the neighborhood kids, resentment of his younger
sister, and trips abroad with his engineer-cum-beekeeper father. Here, a
young man's life is about poking at the pretensions of the city's elders
with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. And then,
his life in Chicago: watching from afar as war breaks out in Sarajevo and
the city comes under siege, no way to return home; his parents and sister
fleeing Sarajevo with the family dog, leaving behind all else they had
ever known; and Hemon himself starting a new life, his own family, in this
new city.
And yet this is not really a memoir. The Book of My Lives,
Hemon's first book of nonfiction, defies convention and expectation. It is
a love song to two different cities; it is a heartbreaking paean to the
bonds of family; it is a stirring exhortation to go out and play
soccer—and not for the exercise. It is a book driven by passions but built
on fierce intelligence, devastating experience, and sharp insight. And
like the best narratives, it is a book that will leave you a different
reader—a different person, with a new way of looking at the world—when
you've finished. For fans of Hemon's fiction,
The Book of My Lives is simply indispensable; for the
uninitiated, it is the perfect introduction to one of the great writers of
our time.
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled
Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America,
where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it
means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped
to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges
into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they
reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each
other and for their homeland.
Personal review
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
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In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban
Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis's parents and load him
into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will
wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except
there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are
other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this
place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old
Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to
Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you
don’t check out.”
In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her
staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force
of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along,
you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is
brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and
more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from
the Institute.
As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the
spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is
gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good
guys don’t always win.
In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled
fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in
Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is
pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought.
Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister
passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home,
and to reject her son's powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that
will echo down through the generations.
Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love,
sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the
halls of Japan's finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the
criminal underworld,
complex and passionate
characters--strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers
shaken by moral crisis--survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of
history.
A narrative particle accelerator that zooms between Wild Turkey Whiskey and Bob Dylan, unicorn skulls and voracious librarians, John Coltrane and Lord Jim. Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded international following. Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.
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