These are the books I wrestled with that month. Some won. Some lost.
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Japan. Timeless, brutal Japan. A fishing village so poor the seasons dictate survival. The strongest men rent themselves out to neighboring villages just so their families can eat. This is how they live. This is how they've always lived.
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This January's not even cold. Winter's on strike. But I'm still dreaming of islands. What better cure for the mid-winter blues than mentally escaping to somewhere tropical? Even if the weather doesn't cooperate, my books will.
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Tehran, 1958. Nasser Ali Khan is a famous musician. His tar gets smashed. He goes to buy another one. But none of them sound right. None of them give him back that feeling. So he decides to die.
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Japanese literature forces me to slow down. I'm the type who does three things at once. Always rushing. Always trying to outrun time itself. But these books demand patience. They demand I sit still and pay attention.
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Before he was a writer, Michel Tremblay was a reader. Hungry, passionate, curious. Like you. Like me. This is his reading autobiography. The books that shaped his childhood and adolescence. Every reader who became a writer started somewhere.
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A short, haunting story for cat lovers and garden enthusiasts. A childless couple moves into a cottage on a larger estate. An elegant garden surrounds them. Then a cat appears. Not theirs, but somehow theirs.
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Volume 3: The Meteor. This one illustrates the commandment about not making graven images. We jump back to Greece, 1958. Snow falls in the Meteora mountains. Each volume of this graphic novel series tackles one of the Ten Commandments.
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Can two people with nothing in common fall in love? That's the question this delightful Swedish novel asks. She's a librarian obsessed with books and opera. He's a farmer who only cares about his cows and tractor. What could possibly go wrong?
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Starting my Japanese literature cycle with a mix-up. I meant to grab a book by Yasushi Inoué and grabbed Hisashi Inoué instead. These Japanese names all look the same to me. But sometimes the best discoveries come from mistakes.
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My first big disappointment of the 2006 literary season. The theme's fascinating: what image of me do others hold? Is the version of me in their heads even remotely accurate? But the execution fell flat.
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