The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu is one of those books that I bought because I loved the cover. Love the font, love the image, love the finish. It’s a book that felt great in my hands when I picked it up. The story is meant to be an Asian take on traditional fantasy. Kuni Garu and Mata Zyndu are young men living under the regime of an emperor who took over the seven kingdoms of the Islands of Dara, Garu from a middle […]
Hating, after all, was just a drier form of drowning
The Woman Next Door concerns two elderly women, neighbors and antagonists for the past twenty years or so, since shortly after the abolition of Apartheid, in an upscale suburb of Cape Town. One is black, the other white. Circumstance forces them to turn to each other for help. I picked this book up in Cape Town last fall, wanting to buy at least a few books by South African authors I hadn’t heard of. I thought I knew where this story was headed. Old white […]
We need to talk about Haruki
My other possible title for this review was “Now I know how to quit you”. You see, I have a long, complicated relationship with Murakami. I read Wind-Up Bird Chronicle something like thirteen years ago. I devoured that book. It was weird and fun and compelling. And deeply unsatisfying. Much like his other books, the whole is far less than the sum of its parts. And yet, I keep reading more. I’m honestly not sure why, when there are so many books to read in this way-too-short […]