[[image:notw2.jpg:The Name of the Wind:center:0]] Books Read Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman (started in July)Turtle Moon by Alice HoffmanQueen of Babble by Meg CabotCompany by Max BarryThe Name of the Wind by Patrick RothfussDead Souls by Ian RankinDoomsday Book by Connie Willis Books Bought Doomsday Book by Connie WillisKushiel’s Justice by Jacqueline CareyFirst Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde This is the second installment of my Nick Hornby-inspired monthly accounting of books read and books bought. The easy things about the Books Bought list in August was that I ordered them online from the Science Fiction Book Club. Not too much to tell there – except that Kushiel’s Justice and First Among Sequels are both sequels of series that I’ve read with great pleasure, so I’ve been looking forward to getting them. I don’t usually like books with too many sequels. For instance, I greatly enjoyed Dune, but not so much […]

[[image:books.jpg:Book Image taken from the internet:center:0]] Books Read: The Storyteller by Mario Vargas LlosaSnow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa SeeThe Polysyllabic Spree by Nick HornbyLittle Children by Tom PerrottaThe History of Love by Nicole KraussFragile Things by Neil Gaiman (started by not finished by end of July) Books Bought: The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick HornbyFurious Observations of a Blue-Eyed Ojibway: Funny You Don’t Look Like One Two Three by Drew Hayden Taylor This entry was inspired by one of the books I read in July, The Polysyllabic Spree, in which Nick Hornby writes about the books he bought and the books he read on a monthly basis. Hornby, of course, was writing for a magazine and got paid for his efforts. But because of his witty descriptions not only of the books he bought and read, but also the events occurring in his life at the time of […]

Following Perdido Street Station, I went on to read a smaller book called Wild Ginger by Anchee Min. A completely different genre than my previous read, Wild Ginger is the story of a girl growing up in the 60s and 70s during the Cultural Revolution in the People’s Republic of China. [[image:wg1.jpg:Wild Ginger:center:0]] This story draws on Min’s experiences growing up in China. She was born in 1957 which makes her a contemporary of her novel’s protagonists. In 1969, Wild Ginger starts out as a 14-year-old who has had many confrontations and beatings due to the fact that she has yellow-green eyes. She has foreign (bourgeois) blood and due to her family background she has been labeled the child of enemies of the state. Told from the point of view of Maple, her only friend at school (who shares the bourgeois stigma by being the child of 3 generations of […]

Since Hisham updated the blog and enabled sort by categories, it became woefully clear that our Books category is sadly lacking. Which is a shame, considering that Hisham and I are both avid readers. I’ve decided to start blogging about the books I’m reading as sort of a book review (while trying not to put out too many spoilers). I finished reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville on Sunday. Let’s start here, shall we? [[image:pss2.jpg:Perdido Street Station:center:0]] Mieville has created a world where humans and non-human sentient beings live together, where current issues such as racism, poverty and class differences are expanded and complicated due to the non-human subclasses. These “xenons” include water creatures called Vodyanoi, insect creatures called Khepri, and birdlike creatures called the Garuda. In this world he created, magic and science work together (field named “bio-thaumaturge”, etc.). The story takes place in a city called New […]