Rating: 6.3/10. Novel originally written in Icelandic by author Sjon and translated into English, takes place in medieval Iceland (in the 1600s). Back then, Iceland was poor and in a remote corner of the world, people starved during the winter. The main character, Jonas, is a talented naturalist that explores the world through science. However,…
Category: Novels / Fiction
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
Rating: 8.4/10. This book is about the life of an Ojibway Indian, living in northern Ontario and growing up in the 60s. When he was young, they sent him to a residential school where he was badly treated and not allowed to speak his own language. He found hockey and got really good at it,…
Man by Kim Thuy
Rating: 4.9/10. A short novel by a Vietnamese-Canadian refugee, it tells the story of a girl who immigrated from Vietnam to Montreal to escape the war, just like herself. Translated from French, the book is comprised of short chapters of a paragraph to a page each. There is a lot of poetic descriptions of scenery…
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Rating: 7.4/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] Second book I read by Agatha Christie, it was okay but I liked the first one better (And Then There Were None). In this mystery, detective Hercule Poirot is on a train in Eastern Europe when one of the passengers is murdered, and also the train gets stuck in a snowbank…
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Rating: 8.5/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] This is the first mystery novel and Agatha Christie novel that I’ve read, and it also happens to be the bestselling title in the entire mystery genre of all time. Ten strangers are invited to a fancy party on an island, and then, one by one, they start dying, and they…
Sky Burial by Xinran Xue
Rating: 8.7/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] In this novel, a Chinese women, Shu Wen from Suzhou, travels to Tibet to search for her missing husband. This was in 1958, when the Chinese Communist Party annexed Tibet. On the way there, she picks up a Tibetan woman, Zhuoma. They get into some trouble in the mountains and meet…
The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier
Rating: 4.0/10. Book about the Haitian revolution, originally written in Spanish and translated to English. Although the topic is interesting, the writing is confusing, uses too much unfamiliar vocabulary, and it was hard to follow what was going on. At least it was short, with less than 200 pages. I’m not sure why this has…
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Rating: 8.3/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] Pachinko is the name of the Japanese pinball game, where you watch metal balls tumble through a machine. It’s also the name of this novel, that traces a Korean family in Japan through four generations (Yangjin/Hoonie/Hansu -> Sunja/Isak -> Noa/Mozasu -> Solomon/Phoebe). Sunja is the first generation to immigrate to Japan…
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
Rating: 8.1/10. [WARNING: SPOILERS!] This novel tells the story of the geisha Sayuri, from her childhood until her death. It pretends to be a real memoir, but it’s written by an American man. The facts are thoroughly researched, so we get a feel of what Kyoto was like before the war. Essentially, society in Japan…
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Rating: 7.0/10. A pretty famous crime thriller novel at about 650 pages. It was moderately interesting but took me a while to get through because I was busy with other stuff. The journalist Michael Blomkvist and detective Lisbeth Salander investigate a crime involving a disappearance of a 14 year old girl half a decade ago,…
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
Rating: 5.8/10. This is Isaac Asimov’s collection of short stories about robots, where the three laws of robotics comes from. The laws are, in this order: (1) robots may not hurt humans through action or inaction; (2) robots must obey human orders; and (3) robots must not allow itself to be destroyed. The nine short…
Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
Rating: 8.0/10. A classic Japanese novel, written over a hundred years ago, fairly short novel but quite profound. It’s a story about friendship and loneliness, and is divided into three equal parts. The first part deals with the author and Sensei, a reserved but intellectual man. Sensei seems to be wise but doesn’t really do…