Never Let Me Go

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Even though Ishiguro books tend to lose me somewhere in the middle, the last hundred pages of this book are a true masterpiece. This book is about a vivid world, of Hailsham and of the world that surrounds the lives of a very specific group of people. Having the whole world created in one book, Ishiguro has touched so many aspects of life, from the broader ones such as societal behaviours, activism, and of course, love, to the smaller but not trivial ones such as community interactions and peer pressure.

It was a good read. The author really got me at this part when the two protagonists mention that they are surely in love, and then they are asked:

“Sure? You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple? So you are in love. Deeply in love. Is that what you’re saying to me?”

Maybe it is the repetition of the questions. Maybe it is because, in reality, I am in that state of life to question my previous understanding of love. Or maybe it is after this line that the plot opens up and the rest of the book will take you to think and feel so deeply about the matters of having a soul, having emotions, and of what makes us true human.

View all my reviews

Asking For It

Asking For It by Louise O’Neill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Painful. Wrenched. Heart breaking. This is Asking For It making me feel.

I tried to read the book a year ago but I was unable to continue after the part where the rape happened. It was all too painful, worse, too real. Only a year after when that incident/part became a memory, I could possibly pick it up and finish the book. I guess in a way, it is similar to the victims’ feelings that time makes processing the incident possible both in progressing and sadly, traumatizing ways.

What if the rape victim is not a traditionally nice girl? What if she wears skimpy clothings? What if she drinks? What if she takes drugs? What if she is a bad girl?

Would that change the fact that she is a victim? Would it allow those men to treat her badly as a punishment for her… dressing her ways? Can people determine that she’s asking for it and she deserves being raped? Can it justify people deciding for her that she has it coming?

No!!!!

I feel infuriating thinking of the rapists, the plastic fake friends, the community that belittles and objectifies young women, and especially the parents. All of them are so bad, yet so real and relevant it makes the read even more painful.

Nonetheless, definitely a book deserved to be read by everyone, female, male, young, and old.

View all my reviews

My Body

My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An interesting and very hard to put down read. It’s exhilarating being inside the mind and experiences of Emily Ratajkowski. The book is a reminder for me to have deeper thoughts on seeing fleeting social media products/influencers such as Emily, the author. Because honestly, if I could have imagined what a raw and soulful person she is underneath her social posts and presence, I have saved myself from being the judgemental side of objectifying her.

There are many aspects of the book that I found relatable as a woman, a daughter and a professional female. For this reason, I really appreciate the author for being so honest, and brave at many parts in the book, to allow us to know and feel her stories.

View all my reviews

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have always respected Murakami’s depth and varieties in writing. His abilities to paint a fully-imaginable world with unusual events and characters somehow always put me under the impression that he must live a really abnormal lifestyle to enable all of that.

Reading this book, I’m pleasantly surprised.

He is a discipline and hardworking writer who described writers like him having to “work hard to maintain his river”, instead of having an everflowing river of writing juice as people like Dickens and Fitzgerald. He mentioned when an idea flickered, he made sure to work hard to dig deep and make it happen.

The stories of running and writing are interlaced. Through events of running and writing, readers can grasp a good sense of what kind of man our favorite writer is. The dept does exist, varieties are there (through his passing-by locations especially!), but in the realistic, meticulous, persistent, determined and critical person who is close to both his mind and soul.

View all my reviews

So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood

So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just… have to live in Paris once. Be it work, be it studying, be it love, or travelling, I just have to live there properly, maybe for a period of at least six months to walk the streets, to wander around the Parisians’ destinations, and to live the feelings steeped in Modiano’s books.

Throughout So Your Don’t Get Lost in The Neighborhood, it really did feel like I was inside the protagonist’s mind. How the events, thoughts and wonders came through resembled the random structure of how our mind works. You know about “scatter focus”? It’s letting your mind be free to wander and to pick up details that might be hiding somewhere through the span of time and memories.

Patrick Modiano wrote this book like that. He let events unfold naturally through the mind of the protagonist. It’s not chronological, sequential or consecutive order. I guess it’s “trigger-based”. Seeing a face, hearing a name, or walking a street triggered (lost) memories of Jean Darragane, and slowly and exquisitely, led us back in time to uncover a buried trauma of his.

With deep psychology, the ability to stray-but-not-stray from the theme, together with his signature atmospheric writing, reading Modiano’s books is always a pleasure.

View all my reviews

Kafka on the Shore

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The idea of reading Murakami has been intriguing to me since I was a teenager in the robust life of Hanoi. Funny how only years later when I am an adult living a quiet, and almost alienating life in a town as far as it can be from Hanoi, the words and proses of Murakami came flowing into me.

His writing is heavily metaphorical, with vivid descriptions of the worlds his characters are in as well as their emotions. It’s kinda amazing for a reader to feel like being in the book’s world and dwelling into the experiences of the characters, rather than just reading, judging or relating as an outsider “looking” into the book.

Kafka on The Shore’s styles remind me of The Alchemist in the way that words from a character’s dialogues can always turn into an ideal insight to life. I enjoy being taken into the notions of fate, the power lies beyond you, or the beauty and importance of not being in control.

In general, reading Murakami in this new quiet life which gave me all the time and space to feel his book has been a lovely experience.

View all my reviews

Normal People

Normal People by Sally Rooney

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Beautiful reading experience.

As a foreigner in Ireland who got mixed up in the Irish adolescent environment, this book gave me insights, understandings, and thrills thinking about my Irish acquaintances and relationships.

The notion of being normal while being a special human being is delicately transcribed in this book. Each character is described to live in their world, so so delicately, acting and believing (and sometimes trying to prove to themselves) that they are special. Yet, as a reader and an observer, when I see resemblances in the characters and young Irish souls around me, their specialties or uniquenesses have become “normal” as the author suggested. Normal not as in boring, or uncategorized. Normal as in, every normal person is unique and special.

It evolves into something even much more beautiful and touching later in the book when the different souls somehow find a comforting and collective strength in each other. A remarkable last few words in the book:

“But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another.”

View all my reviews

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of my favorite parts is when Cheryl wrote about her mother. She put some similar emotions I had inside me into words, something I believe exists inside every woman.

“All through my childhood and adolescence I’d asked and asked, making her describe those scenes and more, wanting to know who said what and how, what she’d felt inside while it was going on, where so-and-so stood and what time of day it was. And she’d told me, with reluctance or relish, laughing and asking why on earth I wanted to know. I wanted to know. I couldn’t explain.
But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.”

I believe that inside a woman lives the same story and same feelings as so many others, and that’s why and how we can deeply feel the experiences of each other so much. The society pressure, the heartbreaks, the nervousness when one moves into a new world with so many hopes and dreams about her life being changed there. Maybe with a man, maybe not. And with mothers specifically, the bond is much much stronger.

A very wild and raw book, with heart-felt emotions spreading out on every page. Great for soul-searching women out there.

View all my reviews

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I always believe that in every human’s life, there actually exists one person who affects us so much despite of having no real-life relationship at all. In my case, that person is Nirvana’s frontman, Kurt Cobain.

I came to Perfume as a suggestion of Kurt, saying that this had been one of the stationary things he always kept within him. Having been deeply captivated by Kurt’s style of writing music and his own emotion, I had had a pretty high expectation of the book itself and of what reasons that it had so much effect on Kurt.

In the progress of reading Perfume, I was literally stunned. The book was so detailed, sophisticated, intriguing, and yet, simply ingenious. Apart from these words, I hardly find any proper sentence to describe its brilliance since each of every chapters, every pages and every paragraphs of this book deserves well-researched literary analysis.

It seems to me that the main character, Grenouille, bore quite a lot of similarities to Kurt. It all came to me as an emotional explosion at this part near the end of the book in chapter 49 (I love it so much that I HAVE to quote it!):

“He was terrified because he could not enjoy one second of it. In that moment as he stepped out of the carriage into the sunlight of the parade grounds, clad in the perfume that made people love him, the perfume on which he had worked for two years, the perfume that he had thirsted to possess his whole life long… in that moment, as he saw and smelled how irrestible its effect was and how with lightning speed it spread and made captives of the people all around him – in that moment, his whole disgust for humankind rose up again within him and completely soured his triumph, so that he felt not only no joy. but not even the least bit of satisfaction. What he had always longed for – that other people should love him – became at that moment of its achievement unbearable, because he did not love them himself, he hated them. And suddenly he knew that he had never found gratification in love, but always only in hatred – in hatting and being hatted.

But the hate he felt for people remained an echo. The more he hated them at this moment, the more they worshipped him, for they perceived only his counterfeit aura, his fragrant disguise, his stolen perfume, and it was indeed a scent to be worshipped.”

As a fan of Nirvana, it was so painful for me when I read this part. At that moment, I can fully understand why a soul like Kurt’s would find such a book to read, to be absorbed and to be understood. Likewise, the ending of Perfume is surely going to depress me for not such a short period of time…

View all my reviews