February 2015 Reading List

A very weird mixture of books completed this month:

1. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
2. Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese
3. The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean
4. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
5. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

My second book by Murakami in as many months, I would have to say that Kafka is more enjoyable than 1Q84. Murakami's stories are just so haunting and memorable.  I am still thinking about this book weeks and other reads later.  Again I found that there are some aspects to the plot that are completely unexplained but it doesn't seem to matter - one takes them at face value.  This book was my favorite for the month.

Cutting for Stone would have to be a close second however.  It wasn't long into this story that I found the graphic descriptions of applied medicine a little more vivid than you could expect from someone without medical exposure.  Sure enough when I looked up Verghese I found he is doctor.  Furthermore he was born in Ethiopia which explains a lot more about this story's context.  Both of these aspects made the story very enjoyable and informative -- if a little clinical (if you can pardon the pun).

The mechanism of telling a story through flashbacks at the end of a protagonist's life is somewhat overused.  However, the twist with Dean's work is that the teller of the story is suffering from the advanced stages of Alzheimer's and the recollections become longer lasting as the elder version loses hold of their faculties.  I have to admit I found this aspect of the telling more interesting than the recollections themselves.  However that is not to detract from a vivid accounting of the horrors that must have been experienced by the inhabitants of Leningrad during the war years.

My second attempt at a Vonnegut story (partly inspired by my recent read of The Universe versus Alex Woods), Cat's Cradle is supposedly one of the best.  Some people rave about Vonnegut but I guess I don't really appreciate the satire.  Sure you can admire the fun that Vonnegut is poking at the nature of society and at human nature in the telling of this story but I find it just a little bit silly.  What the hell is wrong with me?  Am I missing the point?

And if Cat's Cradle is a little odd then Master and Margarita is just plain bizarre!  What a ride!  The first part of the story is just this zany collection of practical jokes played upon the populace of Moscow.  The second part, to me, made more sense even if it was less believable.  I loved the ending that brought it all together but at times I during the reading of the story I considered abandoning the book.  However I took encouragement from the many reviewers of this story stating that it was the best book they've ever read so I figured there must be something more to it.  I'm glad I did finish it if for no other reason than to claim that I have diverse reading interests.

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