Book reviews for April, 24
For all books list see Books with reading date.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice is one of my all time favourite stories. I have perhaps watched the Edgar Wright movie 10 times and adore the BBC show. So, no wonder at some moment I was going to pick up this novel. When 2024 had started I had decided that I would mix up my reading genres and books. If last year was dedicated to Christie. This year I want to explore more classics and other genre like Horror.
Pride and Prejudice was thus the first classic I read this year. Knowing the story by heart made it a very easy read. I was not expectin me to devour such an old novel in a few days but I was able to finish it in less than two weeks while travelling to and fro between home and campus. I love the character of Darcy and the way Jane Austen writes about his unflinching honour and pride is simply brilliant. It is amazing how you can feel for these characters separated by decades living in victorian england, strutting about in mansions and participating in social dances. No matter what the era is, fundamental human emotions remains the same.
Mrs Bennet's character is so insufferable. I could not have belived her character would get worse from the big screen. And it does. That woman just cannot calm down. I loved this book a lot. And perhaps this could be a comfort read that I return to in the future.
Tales from the Cafe
Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Before your Memory Fades
Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Before We Say Goodbye (read in July)
Toshikazu Kawaguchi
I will talk about the whole series in a separate entry, but briefly Tales from the Cafe, Before Your Memory Fades and Before we say Goodbye are sequels to my March read, Before The Coffee Gets Cold. One of them feature the same cafe that lets you travel back in time and the second sequel is in another cafe in northern Japan with similar quirk.
The episodic nature of the books leads to a lot of repetition. The rules are explained in every chapter, the surroundings are described again and again. It gets exhausting a lot. The stories are quick read. You can read the whole book in a few hours with perhaps a cup of coffee getting cold. The stories are once again heart warming. Some of them connect really well. Others just didnt work for me. The third book was a bit better in handling the intertwining story thread. The new cafe and how it was connected with the older one is what drove me into finishing these books in one setting. The writer is trying to slowly craft a story of the cafe and the family that runs the cafe. And this is the only intriguin part of this series.
Thougts for books I read in July, 24
Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked The World
Pénélope Bagieu
This is a non-fiction graphic novel. Illustrated beautifully the book details accounts of many women who took chances, they were the rebels, they are women from across the world who showed the world that being a woman does not mean they cannot achieve anything achievable in the world.
This is a book for all the people who say things like "Do not enter this field, this is a field of Men". Some of them are pretty well known while others were really interesting women that perhaps should be well known. These are the women who were not afraid. They dared to achieve success, to do the right thing, to go against the society and made their name eternal.
The book is a really quick read ofcourse being a graphic novel. The artstyle is really gorgeous, the use of colors in myriad of stories among these pages is so thoughtful and beautiful. The book is careful in collecting the stories of very diverse women. There are women across time, across the globe and across race. This is an important book. I think everyone should know about these women. A lot of these women I had not heard of before and many of them I had heard of but didn't know all the hardships they had crossed to reach success. I really hope to get back to this book once more and take my time with it admiring the artwork and the lives of these "rebel ladies".
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas (Manga)
Yoru Sumino
No, this book is not about some crazy canibal who wish to eat someone's pancreas. As crazy as the title of this book is sounds, the book infact is a gentle story about loss and love. A certain terajerker for the people who have a gentle heart, this Manga is a story of a boy who finds out by accidentally reading from a classmate's journal that the said classmate has pancreatic disease and the disease is fatal.
The story then evolves around the fact that the boy is the only one in the girl's social life who knows about her disease and she can be herself around him. Weirdly similar to the famous anime Your Lie in April, I want to eat your pancreas is heartwarming tale that deals with life and death. It revolves around friendship and its importance in life. A really quick read, I really liked this Manga and later found out there are anime movies based on it. So I know what im streaming soon.
White Nights
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Disclaimer, this was not my first time reading Dostoevsky. I had read Crime and Punishment a few years back and still believe that to be the best novel I have ever read in my life. The understanding of the human condition of Dostoevsky is realy unmatched. First of all, this beautifully Clothbound hardcover is so pretty, I just felt really happy holding it in my hand. Comfortable to travel around with the small clothbound edition is just perfect.
This book involved three short stories written by Dostoevsky, the first one called 'A Nasty Business' is about a russian general who has been discussing some interesting ideas about how dealing with people below him with kindness can improve the state of the country, he leaves his fellow civil servants and tries out these new methods in a wedding function of his inferior officer that he accidentally finds is happening close by. What follows is a comedy of errors, where the general Ivan is unable to handle his liquor and just is unable to explain and use his new ideas. The class difference and its rigid structure in the russian society of that time is satirised really well in this story.
The second story called 'The meek one' was even more interesting. The story is a narrative account of a man who is beside his dead wife and is telling an account of how he, a pawnbroker met one of his customer and married her. And how this 'meek' girl's life led to the point where she klled herself. Insert quotes:
The third story is the titular one. White Nights is a really famous story by Dostoevsky and I had head that it was a love story. And that's all I had known about it. It is not just a love story. It is the love story. A story full of so many cliches that we see in romances that have been written or shown on the big screen. So many stories have been adapted around this story of a lonely man walking across the streets one winter night and encountering and helping a woman. The man then falls in love with this woman and it turns out that the woman is in love with someone else. And it eventually after many winter nights leads to a classic moment where the man can either sacrifice his love, or he could lie and get the woman for his life. It was so unexpected for me to find such a modern style of story in such an old short story. But I guess romance has not changed in the decades that has passed since White Nights was published. But I thnk the story feels so modern because I have seen or read a lot of renditions of this story in modern time. The story is moving, heart breaking and the prose is so beautifullt crafted that I do not have more words.
The Girl from the Other Side: Siúil, a Rún Vol. 1 (Manga)
This one is different from other reads, I found out about it from a book club I have joined. The Girl from the other side is a 12 Volume long Manga illustrated and written by Nagabe. It tells a story of a girl, a very young kid who lives with a dark skinned inhuman looking creature that she calls Teacher. Teacher is what is known as an outsider. In this dystopian world, the world has been divided by walls, the inside is where the humans dwell and the outside lirks people who have been cursed by a deadly condition, this curse spreads by touch and turns humans to these scary creatures. The divide is made stronger by the mythological elements of origin of the curse from the gods. I loved the premise of the book and so decided to take part on this group read. We have been reading the whole series Volume by Volume and it has been interesting to say the least. The art style is very simlistic yet pretty. The artist is successful in capturing the innocense of the child and is able to manage to portray the teacher's innocence with the scary look he has. I cannot say more without going into spoiler category so I won't but being a manga with very interesting premise these are really quick and easy read.Nagabe
Amygdalatropolis
B.R. Yeager