Shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, ‘A Tale for the Time Being’ by Ruth Ozeki tells the story of a diary written a decade ago by a Japanese teenage girl called Nao which is washed up on an island off British Colombia in a Hello Kitty lunchbox after the tsunami in 2011. The diary is discovered by a novelist called Ruth who tries to find out what happened to Nao and her family, including her great-grandmother, Jiko, a Buddhist nun and her great-uncle, Haruki, a kamikaze pilot in the Second World War.
Tag Archives: Reading
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Even though I have been a book blogger for quite a while now and am generally meant to be on top of all things bookish, I have been very slow at getting round to reading the book that pretty much the entire world (no exaggeration) has been discussing for the last year or so. I got a bit fed up of my mum and my sister going into another room to talk about ‘Gone Girl’ by Gillian Flynn so I thought I had better get round to reading it so that I could join in with the conversation.
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The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
Winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’ by Adam Johnson tells the story of Pak Jun Do’s journey from life in a North Korean state orphanage to professional kidnapper to a career in Pyongyang at the heart of Kim Jong-il’s regime. It is an intriguing and sprawling story which explores several aspects of life in one of the most secretive countries in the world. Continue reading
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Banned Books Week
This year, Banned Books Week runs from 22nd to 28th September. Founded in 1982 and sponsored by the American Library Association, the campaign celebrates open access to information and aims to raise awareness of intellectual freedom.
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Freshly Pressed…. Again!
So apparently it’s possible to be Freshly Pressed twice… Just over a year after my post about eBooks was Freshly Pressed, my post about the forthcoming changes to the Man Booker Prize criteria received the honour yesterday.
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The Man Booker Prize: US authors to be considered?
The Man Booker Prize is certainly no stranger to controversy. However, reports that American writers will be eligible from next year onwards have managed to provoke even more debate than normal with many arguing that the Prize will lose its “distinctiveness”. There has been no official comment from the Booker committee yet but changes are set to be announced later this week. Continue reading
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Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
For me, one of the great things about literary awards is discovering the work of authors which might otherwise have passed me by. The Man Booker Prize longlist, for example, recently brought Jhumpa Lahiri to my attention. After reviewing ‘Unaccustomed Earth‘ just a few weeks ago, I got hold of copies of her first collection of short stories ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and her first novel ‘The Namesake’ published in 2003. I am now hoping that Lahiri’s new Booker Prize shortlisted novel ‘The Lowland’ lives up to my increasingly high expectations.
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Am I A Book Snob?
This week, I found a very interesting post by Amanda Nelson on an awesome website called Book Riot which lists the sort of things that a stereotypical book snob might say and then a “translation” for what they really mean. It’s a very humorous and tongue-in-cheek piece which isn’t meant to be taken very seriously but it got me thinking about book snobbishness and which statements are the sort of things that I might say…
E-reading isn’t REAL reading. = I need my personal preferences about my hobby to be validated as the only right and moral way do to a thing.
Not guilty. I read printed books and I read eBooks. As I have said elsewhere, e-readers are great for travel but I still read a lot of printed books. Continue reading
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Under the Skin by Michel Faber
‘Under the Skin’ is a very difficult book to summarise without giving away too much of the plot. Essentially, it tells the story of Isserley, who drives around deserted areas of northern Scotland picking up well-built lone male hitchhikers. I really don’t want to tell you any more than that and if you’ve already read it, then you’ll understand why. If you haven’t, then you’ll have to forgive me for being so cryptic. You’ll just have to trust me when I say that the book is much more intriguing if you read it without any real clues about what will happen beyond the initial set-up. Continue reading
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Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre
‘Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients’ by Ben Goldacre exposes the dodgy trial methods and practices behind the $600 billion pharmaceutical industry. In a nutshell, drug companies regularly hide negative results from clinical trials and exaggerate the benefits of medicines in order to make vast profits. Even regulators have been known to withhold information and allow ineffectual or dangerous drugs onto the market. The consequence is that both doctors and patients are unable to make well-informed decisions about healthcare. Continue reading
Best Book to Film Adaptations
There have been so many mediocre film adaptations of great novels which don’t even come close to capturing the magic of the original story. But there are quite a few gems out there and even though the book always comes first, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the film adaptations which follow are always completely inferior to the original work. Here is my list of the best book to film adaptations (where I have both read the book and seen the film).
We Need To Talk About Kevin (book by Lionel Shriver published in 2004, film directed by Lynne Ramsay released in 2011)
I loved this understated and creepy adaptation of ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’. The sparse style and atmosphere of the film contrasts with the comparatively “wordy” text of the book but it works. The casting of Tilda Swinton and Ezra Miller as Eva and Kevin were both excellent choices.
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The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín
‘The Testament of Mary’ by Colm Tóibín will probably be the only book longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize that I will definitely be able to read before the shortlist is announced in a few weeks time. The story is told from the point of view of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is still grieving for her son many years after his death and does not believe that he is the son of God. Her testament in her old age focuses mainly on her son’s last days before the crucifixion and what happened afterwards. Continue reading
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Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper
I recently won another book from the Waterstones read and review competition in which cardholders receive a free copy of a book in return for posting an honest review on the website. This time, it was a pot luck draw and I got a copy of Artemis Cooper’s biography of the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Again, I am not sure if I can publish my official review in full on my blog but you can read it here under the name Clare90. Continue reading
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Books I Thought I Would Struggle With But Didn’t
Generally, I avoid picking up books which I don’t think I will enjoy. However, that doesn’t mean I always have super high expectations for everything I read. Here is my list of books I initially thought I would struggle with but actually liked a lot.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
I wasn’t sure if I would like a book as ‘philosophical’ as this one but I did. It’s still a pretty weird book and might be viewed as pretentious, but as I said in my review, it’s a very readable sort of pretentiousness. Continue reading
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The Last Life by Claire Messud
‘The Last Life’ by Claire Messud is a coming-of-age story set in the early 1990s about Sagesse LaBasse, a French-American girl whose family own a hotel in the south of France which was opened by her grandfather after he emigrated from Algeria. The story follows Sagesse as she explores her multiple identities and comes to terms with the events of the past. Continue reading
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Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
I am probably not going to have the chance to read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Man Booker Prize longlisted novel ‘The Lowland’ any time soon as it isn’t due to be published in the UK until the end of September so I thought I would try a collection of her short stories instead. ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ contains eight exquisitely written stories. The first half of the collection consists of five stand-alone stories while the second half is more of a novella in three parts featuring the same characters, Hema and Kaushik. Continue reading
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Take Me to the Castle by F. C. Malby
Firstly, I must thank F. C. Malby for her patience as she sent me a copy of her first novel ‘Take Me to the Castle’ several months ago and I have only just got round to reviewing it. Set in the Czech Republic in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, ‘Take Me to the Castle’ tells the story of a young woman called Jana and how the tumultuous political changes in her home country are affecting her life following the recent death of her dissident father. Much of the story also focuses on a love triangle between Jana and her two potential suitors, Milos and Lukas. Continue reading
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The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers
Winner of the 2012 Guardian First Book Award, ‘The Yellow Birds’ by Kevin Powers is about two young soldiers from Virginia fighting in the Iraq war in 2004 on their first tour of duty in Al Tafar. The story is told from the point of view of twenty-one year old Private John Bartle as he describes what happened to him and fellow soldier, Daniel Murphy, who we quickly learn will not make it home alive. The chapters alternate between the war in Iraq and the events after Bartle’s homecoming as details slowly emerge of exactly what happened to them.
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The Man Booker Prize Longlist 2013
The longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2013 was announced today. 151 books were submitted for consideration and the final 13 are:
Five Star Billionaire: Tash Aw We Need New Names: NoViolet Bulawayo The Luminaries: Eleanor Catton Harvest: Jim Crace The Marrying of Chani Kaufman: Eve Harris The Kills: Richard House The Lowland: Jhumpa Lahiri Unexploded: Alison MacLeod TransAtlantic: Colum McCann Almost English: Charlotte Mendelson A Tale for the Time Being: Ruth Ozeki The Spinning Heart: Donal Ryan The Testament of Mary: Colm Tóibín Continue readingFiled under Books
Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
‘Giving Up the Ghost’ is Hilary Mantel’s memoir first published in 2003, six years before she won the Booker Prize in 2009 for ‘Wolf Hall‘. The ghosts in question are the ghost of her step-father, the ghost she saw in the garden at the age of seven and the ghost of the child she could never have. Continue reading
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