I recently wrote about both these books for
Frontier Psychiatrist. One I loved, one was meh. Let's start with the meh.
9.
There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (finished March 6th)
Obviously the title is what attracted me to this book. Ominous, morbid, bizarre, I figured it'd be right up my alley. Unfortunately, the collection of short stories by the celebrated Russian author failed to really grip. What few moments of perceptive insight (is that a redundancy?) were overshadowed by the failure to create well-rounded characters, offering only a sketch of disappointingly unfulfilling stories. I try to seek the good in every censored writer, as it is something I doubt I will ever have to encounter and it takes courage to write in such an oppressive society, but there just wasn't anything memorable to me in the collection.
(
click here for the full, original review)
10.
A Tale For the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki (finished March 12th)
READ THIS BOOK. RIGHT NOW. I've gushed about this enough on Facebook and Twitter and to anyone who has had the (mis)fortune talking to me while I've been drunk since I read this book because I've just been going on and on about. Please someone else read this so we can talk about it. Long story short: woman in Vancouver finds a diary written by a girl in Tokyo, woman tries to find out more about this girl and her family's history. Learn about environmental devastation, crows, Marcel Proust, "the half-life of information," meta-fiction, and the differences (or lack thereof) between Zen Buddhism and quantum mechanics.
(
click here for the full, original review)
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