Books Catch-up: After the Quake, An Unquiet Mind, The Yellow Wallpaper, All the Pretty Horses
/
After the Quakeby Haruki Murakami
Rating: four out of five stars
Prior to this book, I’d only ever read The Wind Up Bird Chronicle –which is, as I've mentioned before, a strange, strange book that mixes mystery, relationships, WWII, mysticism … basically the kitchen sink and a bunch of cats. So, I knew that there is something to love about Murakami. His short stories are a treat, because for the most part, they keep to one story line and allow you to appreciate his sparse writing style. A master story-teller, Murakami is inventive. I particularly enjoyed “Landscape with Flat Iron” followed by “Honey Pie” and “All God’s Children Can Dance.”
-----------------------
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
by Kay Redfield Jamison
Rating: three out of five stars
An Unquiet Mind is an inside look at manic depressive disorder – how difficult it is, even for a doctor to recognize in herself, acknowledge, treat, and live with it. I found the book a lot less sensational than I anticipated, and for this I am grateful. Not only is it a brave work of someone going through something I cannot quite understand, but it also provides an historical perspective of the illness and its treatments. This book is brave on both a personal and professional level, as Jamison risked her professional career to be so honest about an illness that comes with so much stigma and misunderstanding.
-----------------------
The Yellow Wallpaper
by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Rating: three out of five stars
This is a re-read, of course, and a reliable one. These stories are simple but still enjoyable. It’s nice to read a short story with a straight-forward (for the most part) moral and lesson. More current short stories are often so complicated that, as a reader, I cannot remember what took place or what point the author was trying to make, just a few weeks after I close the book covers. But these stories stick with me. Yes, they are dated, but still thoughtful.
-----------------------
All the Pretty Horses (Border Trilogy, Vol 1)
by Cormac McCarthy
Rating: four out of five stars
This book did it for me. McCarthy is a master. He uses spare language – he doesn’t spoon feed readers the story. Rather, the reader is expected to make connections, to make themselves comfortable with the fact that they don’t know all the information upfront and that they will learn more by...wait for it...reading. All the Pretty Horses has everything I want in a book: love, courage, heartbreak, redemption, injustice, and sentences that can stand alone as poems – oh yes, and horses. I’ve ordered the other two books of this border trilogy.
