- The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
- Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
- The Translator by Nina Schuyler
- The Humans by Matt Haig
- American Gods by Neil Gaiman
- Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
- Journeys on the Silk Road byJoyce Morgan and Conrad Walters
I really didn't know what to expect as I started Salmon Fishing but it wasn't at all what I got. The book starts in that typically British form of humor where events quickly spiral out of control in a comical way. The story is told using written items like diary entries, transcripts, news headlines, etc which I think is always very clever. I tore through the book quickly and enjoyed it a great deal. I now want to watch the movie version and see if the producers preserved the near perfect ending.
Even though I finished Translator a couple of weeks ago, it is still resonating with me. A middle aged woman who speaks many different languages loses her ability to speak anything other than Japanese after sustaining a head injury. Feeling alienated at home she travels to Japan and learns much about herself while there. How she uncovers her failures in life though is done compassionately leaving room for amends to be made but not without the risk of failure. I gained a new appreciation of the challenging work translators perform for us when we read works written in a different language from our own. This book has finally given me the nudge I needed to start reading 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami and translated by Jay Rubin. I expect it is going to take a while.
Again when starting The Humans I wasn't sure what to expect. Haig handles his alien's description of life on earth with the kind of style I'd expect from Douglas Adams in the Hitchhiker series. Laugh out loud funny at times and at others Haig finds a light hearted sensitivity to describe how his alien "goes native". Very enjoyable and just the right length.
I've read other books by Gaiman and books he also recommends but all I can say about American Gods is just "wow!". Similarly to Card's The Lost Gate, Gaiman decided to integrate all the gods throughout history into one storyline where the aforementioned deities have all found their way to life in America for one reason or another. And the old gods are heading towards a war with the new gods of the modern age like media, music, big money, etc. Caught in the middle is Shadow -- just an average guy a little down on his luck who is very important for some reason. You can feel Gaiman's first hand observations of places and people throughout his travels within the US but then there are times when I just wondered where he gets his ideas from for some parts of the story. Utterly mesmerizing. Footnote: American Gods is to be made into a tv series on Starz soon.
I had often heard that the movie version of Breakfast at Tiffany's was a whitewashed version of Capote's story but I wanted to find out for myself. I am so glad I did. The original story is so much better than the movie. For the time it was written it was so raw -- when society was just not ready for such a gritty take on the elements within our culture that no one spoke about. This is my first time reading Capote and his use of metaphor is just so striking and skilled. Masterful.
I have a fascination with books about the Silk Road -- mostly as a pet topic for a book I'd like to write myself one day. But I had never heard of Aurel Stein, who in the early 1900s explored the area around the Gobi and Taklamakan Deserts. He was in a race to uncover artifacts that had captured the attention of other european explorers of the time. Stein found a cache of scrolls that included the (still) oldest dated printed book known as The Diamond Sutra -- from 868 AD. This excellent book covers his journeys as well as describing what became of Stein later on as well as his scrolls and the area as it exists in modern day China today. I found it fascinating.
