I moved! and I have a library card! and I work a block from the Kenya Reference and Lending Library! (January)
I feel so much more secure now that I have a library card and easy access to a library.
- the Stepford Wives -
Do you remember who wrote this? I don’t. Short and creepy. Really well done creepy. I didn’t see the new movie, but i know that it ends well and not all the women are murdered, so i don’t approve of it.
Whatever happened to the 1960s, when books and movies put forth stories with situations that didn’t end well, and they left it at that. I mean, sometimes things don’t end well. And most of the time they don’t end all happy or even end at all. Ooh. Now i feel like watching Bullitt. Steve McQueen!
- the Interpreters - Wole Soyinka
Sadly, this is the only Soyinka book that I can find in the library. Probably I need to look more - the other day i spotted 3 harry potter books - each one was the Prisoners of Azkaban book, and each one was in a different place on the “literature” shelf. One of them was right next to a treatise on socialism or something like that. Ah, the library. Anyways, this is the first book by an African author that i’ve read while in Kenya that I really enjoyed reading. Maybe because it takes place in Nigeria and not Kenya? I don’t know. But I really really enjoyed it - I really liked how it was written, and the characters are unique and believable and go through changes. I’m a fan! Wish they had more than one rotting copy (literally) of one book by Soyinka.
- Gaudy Night - Dorothy L. Sayers
Yeah! I just LOVE Dorothy L. Sayers! Lord Peter Whimsy mysteries! I just love them. According to my sources who went to Wheaton College, Sayers was Christian. So hooray for a Christian author who wrote excellent, character driven mystery novels and didn’t ever bang anyone on the head with theology! Also, this is a particularly good one, i thought. Really interesting. Especially if you’ve read other Lord Peter Whimsy mysteries.
And I would say it was that much more enjoyable and satisfying of a read because I found it at the library here, after wishing I could find some D. Sayers for about a year.
- Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami
Yes, one of my favorites by far. Absolutely. Why do I love it? Oh, man. See, I’m not a Great Reader. I’m not an analyzer, really, and I’m not a deeper person for most of my reading. Mostly I read for the emotional response, for the very tangible and physical sensation that reading gives me (i hear reading for pleasure releases similar chemicals as Ecstasy in the brain of some folks, and if it does, then i am definitely one of those folks), for the sensation of being swept off my feet and not knowing where the current is taking me (and oh but Murakami is SO GOOD for that) and also for small small expansions of my very guarded and tightly wound universe. Because it’s hard for me to get out of the universe in my head (and maybe the books are partly to blame for that), and books - well written books - help me see out and expand my own paltry universe.
So, yeah, this book. This book most of the time you are being rushed along two parallel tracks and you don’t know where you are going. Then they merge and you still don’t know where you are going. And then it ends, and there’s this wonderful sensation of stopping and looking around and you aren’t sure where you are, but it sure is different from where you started and that alone is enough for me.
~~~official shout out to sasha for sending me his copy~~~
- Memory - Margaret Mahey
Thanks to Mai-Linh Hong for getting me started on Margaret Mahey. She writes such wonderful adolescent fiction, with messed up teenagers who have believably complicated and extraordinarily messed up families and situations. And most of the books take place in her home country of New Zealand, which is quite interesting. This one is not her best, but it’s still a great story.