Book list Archives - Where to Kim?

Most interesting and engaging books of 2022

Kim — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 15:00:00 +0000

What are the best new books in 2022? And how about surprisingly good older gems? A year of reviewing books led me to some very engaging books.

What a year this was!

I read fewer books this year because I spent most of my time taking care of my newborn son. During his first few months, I picked up light books (for me, that’s fantasy and science fiction) that I didn’t review. No wonder the only new book list for 2022 is called stuck in one place.

Many books were either hit or miss this year. More so than in other years. I gave quite a few two star ratings (also to books I didn’t review), but also many four stars. Four stars is a good rating: most of the books I enjoy get four stars. Five stars are reserved for books that fascinate me for whatever reason.

So let’s move on to my 2022 list. Here come the best, most engaging, unique, and inspiring stories of 2022.

Extremes

Guaranteed rereads

Flock Without Birds by Filip Dousek (review): the most intriguing book I read this year. Also one that I somehow can never explain well when recommending it to friends. That’s a good thing right? This book is not for everyone, but if it’s for you then you’ll enjoy it very much.
Vita Nostra by Marina & Sergey Dyachenko (Amazon)- An older book that I picked up because I wanted to read something from Ukraine this year. This is what I want from a book: an absurd and enchanting way of telling a story about a theme that I love.

The opposite

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik (Amazon): I saw this coming when I finished The Last Graduate last year. The end of my magical dream…
Rabbits by Terry Miles (Amazon): A book that came with good reviews but lacked a story.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (Amazon): This author is just not right for me. A rather boring book that ended exactly as I predicted at the beginning.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig (Amazon): Easy to read but oh so cliche. Am I the only one?

Old and new obsessions

Meeting new cultures

Witches by Brenda Lozano (review): The author explores the role of gender and culture in Mexican society through a story about the lives, families, and strengths of a healer (curandera) and a journalist. Loved the content, but was less fond of the writing style.
Where the Language Lives by Janet Yoder (review): Essays about the life’s work of Vi Hilbert who saved the nearly dormant indigenous language Lushootseed. Most readers will regard this ode to the teacher who changed lives as educational (me), but the passion will be lost in paper.

Return to Korea

I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Se-hee (review): The bestseller status of this book got me curious. This book is first and foremost a collection of dialogues and essays about the author’s experiences dealing with depression, anxiety, and dysthymia.
Wolves by Jeon Sungtae (review): This short story collection is worth reading because of the author’s good storytelling skills that have been preserved (or perhaps even improved) in the translation. The stories are about change that happens to you and change that you desire.
New Seoul Park Jelly Vendor Massacre by Cho Yeeun (review): A jelly massacre embodying your heart’s desire, how can I not be intrigued?
Endless Blue Sky by Lee Hyoseok (review): The theme and story were a pleasant surprise that created a culture clash for my stereotypical view of literature from that decade.
The Library of Musical Instruments by Kim Junghyuk (review): The stories lack something essential, namely a beat that is in sync with my heartbeat and touches the strings of my heart.
Night Picture of Rain Sound: Seventeen Stories by Sue Ja Joo (review): The seventeen stories in this collection navigate the blurry line between fantasy and reality, witnessing and wit, passion and the symbolic meaning of everything in the world. Some great stories, but not all of them.
Launch Something! by Bae Myung-Hoon (review): I had high expectations for this one. Unfortunately, it wasn’t even close to being as interesting as Tower.

Into Japanese (books)

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata (review): Meet a new normal based on a fascination with the use of the human body and the way you care for it.
How Do You Live? by Genzaburō Yoshino (review): The author challenges you to answer this question from both the rooftop and the street, the middle of the city and the ocean.
Core Japanese language learning resources for N3 (link): Have you mastered JLPT N4? Then check out these resources (including books) to conquer N3.
Where to buy Japanese books online from Europe? (link): Ordering books in the original Japanese language can be quite expensive if you live outside of Japan. This blog posts lists the best options for those of you living in Europe.

I want to visit Taiwan and China in a post-apocalyptic(corona) world!

Whisper by Chang Yu-Ko (review): A ghost story with elements of indigenous folklore and Taiwan’s history with the Japanese.
Bad Kids by Zijin Chen (review): A fast-paced and entertaining suspense thriller about the accountability of teenagers.

Close to home

November by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (review): I realize this book has not been translated into English yet, but I know that there or Thomas Olde Heuvelt fans out there eagerly awaiting the translation. For now, please check out HEX and Echo.

Books that make you feel stuck in one place

Kim — Mon, 04 Apr 2022 14:00:00 +0000

Did you ever read a book that made you feel stuck in one place? In this book list you will find more of them.

Sometimes it’s fine to stay where you are and at other times you want nothing more than to move. But you’re reading a book where the characters are stuck in one place and can’t leave. Either because of external factors or cultural aspects.

The books below gave me the feeling of being stuck in one place, which gave me conflicted feelings when I read them during covid lockdowns. Not in a bad way, they just hit me more than they normally would.

This is not an exhaustive book list, but rather a selection of recently published and/or translated books. The only exception is the last book on this list, which is the book that inspired me to write this book list. Curious? Scroll down to see (or view) which book is the epitome of lockdown induced isolation.

Bae Myung-hoon - Tower

 4/5

Tower is a mirror of society; a sci-fi depiction of social and political issues. It is intense, subtle and funny.

Tower is a series of interconnected stories set in Beanstalk, a 674-story skyscraper and sovereign nation. Each story deals with how citizens living in the hypermodern high-rise deal with various influences of power in their lives: a group of researchers have to tell their boss that a major powerbroker is a dog, a woman uses the power of the internet to rescue a downed fighter pilot abandoned by the government, and an out-of-towner finds himself in charge of training a gentle elephant to break up protests. Bae explores the forces that shape modern life with wit and a sly wink at the reader.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Tower

Olga Ravn - The Employees

 4/5

What does humanity mean and who qualifies as a human being? What sacrifices are required to leave the spaceship?

The crew of the Six-Thousand Ship consists of those who were born, and those who were made. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike start aching for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Shopping and child-rearing. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory. Gradually, the crew members come to see their work in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether they can carry on as before – and what it means to be truly living. Structured as a series of witness statements compiled by a workplace commission, Ravn’s crackling prose is as chilling as it is moving, as exhilarating as it is foreboding. Wracked by all kinds of longing, The Employees probes into what it means to be human, emotionally and ontologically, while simultaneously delivering an overdue critique of a life governed by work and the logic of productivity.

Buy from Amazon

Hiroko Oyamada - The Factory

 3/5

The author has the uncanny skill to turn you into one of the main characters of the book. When reading The Factory you feel like they feel: there is no escaping The Factory.

In an unnamed Japanese city, three seemingly normal and unrelated characters find work at a sprawling industrial factory. They each focus intently on their specific jobs: one studies moss, one shreds paper, and the other proofreads incomprehensible documents. Life in the factory has its own logic and momentum, and, eventually, the factory slowly expands and begins to take over everything, enveloping these poor workers. The very margins of reality seem to be dissolving: all forms of life capriciously evolve, strange creatures begin to appear… After a while—it could be weeks or years—the workers don’t even have the ability to ask themselves: where does the factory end and the rest of the world begin?

Told in three alternating first-person narratives, The Factory casts a vivid—if sometimes surreal—portrait of the absurdity and meaninglessness of modern life. With hints of Kafka and unexpected moments of creeping humor, Hiroko Oyamada is one of the boldest writers of her generation.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Factory

Chi Ta-wei - The Membranes

 4/5

Read about a future in which intimacy, experiences, and identity are fluid. Though in the end, the membranes still keep everything in its rightful place…

It is the late twenty-first century, and Momo is the most celebrated dermal care technician in all of T City. Humanity has migrated to domes at the bottom of the sea to escape devastating climate change. The world is dominated by powerful media conglomerates and runs on exploited cyborg labor. Momo prefers to keep to herself, and anyway she’s too busy for other relationships: her clients include some of the city’s best-known media personalities. But after meeting her estranged mother, she begins to explore her true identity, a journey that leads to questioning the bounds of gender, memory, self, and reality. First published in Taiwan in 1995, The Membranes is a classic of queer speculative fiction in Chinese.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Membranes

Tom Watson - Metronome

 4/5

Although the two people imprisoned on an island escape their controlling society, the life they make for themselves is hardly less restricted.

Not all that is hidden is lost.

For twelve years Aina and Whitney have been in exile on an island for a crime they committed together, tethered to a croft by pills they must take for survival every eight hours. They’ve kept busy – Aina with her garden, her jigsaw, her music; Whitney with his sculptures and maps – but something is not right.

Shipwrecks have begun washing up, and their supply drops have stopped. And on the day they’re meant to be collected for parole, the Warden does not come. Instead there’s a sheep. But sheep can’t swim…

As days pass, Aina begins to suspect that their prison is part of a peninsula, and that Whitney has been keeping secrets. And if he’s been keeping secrets, maybe she should too. Convinced they’ve been abandoned, she starts investigating ways she might escape. As she comes to grips with the decisions that haunt her past, she realises her biggest choice is yet to come.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Metronome

Yoko Ogawa - The Memory Police

 4/5

More than dystopian, this book felt philosophical to me. Especially the last 50 pages impressed me.

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses – until things become much more serious. Most of the island’s inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with no power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten.

When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath the floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her wiring as the last way of preserving the past.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Memory Police

Guđmundur Andri Thorsson - And the Wind Sees All

 4/5

A story about missed opportunities and tough choices and about tales never told.

In this story we hear the voices of an Icelandic fishing village. On a summer’s day a young woman in a polka-dot dress cycles down the main street. Her name is Kata and she is the conductor of the village choir. As she passes, we get a glimpse of the villagers: a priest with a gambling habit, an old brother and sister who have not talked for years, and a sea captain who has lost his son. But perhaps the most interesting story of all belongs to the young woman on the bicycle. Why is she reticent to talk about her past?

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of And the Wind Sees All

Robert Seethaler - The Field

 3/5

A story full of emotion and nonchalance, carefully balancing the line between the before and after.

If the dead could speak, what would they say to the living?

From their graves in the field, the oldest part of Paulstadt’s cemetery, the town’s late inhabitants tell stories from their lives. Some recall just a moment, perhaps the one in which they left this world, perhaps the one that they now realize shaped their life forever. Some remember all the people they’ve been with, or the only person they ever loved.

These voices together – young, old, rich poor – build a picture of a community, as viewed from below ground instead of from above. The streets of the small, sleepy provincial town of Paulstadt are given shape and meaning by those who lived, loved, worked, mourned and died there.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Field

Jon Fosse - The Other Name: Septology I-II

 3/5

Norwegian author Jon Fosse takes the ‘just one more page’ feeling to a whole new level.

The Other Name: Septology I-II, a major new work by Jon Fosse, one of Europe’s most celebrated writers, follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an ageing painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbour, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours’ drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers – two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.

Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? With The Other Name, the first volume in a trilogy of novels, Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant exploration of the human condition that will endure as his masterpiece.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Other Name

Isaac Asimov - The Naked Sun

 4/5

Finally, the book that inspired this list. Read about the difference between seeing and viewing or dream away about living alone on a huge estate.

A millennium into the future, two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the Galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. On the beautiful Outer World planet of Solaria, a handful of human colonists lead a hermit-like existence, their every need attended to by their faithful robot servants. To this strange and provocative planet comes Detective Elijah Baley, sent from the streets of New York with his positronic partner, the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve an incredible murder that has rocked Solaria to its foundations. The victim had been so reclusive that he appeared to his associates only through holographic projection. Yet someone had gotten close enough to bludgeon him to death while robots looked on. Now Baley and Olivaw are faced with two clear impossibilities: Either the Solarian was killed by one of his robots–unthinkable under the laws of Robotics–or he was killed by the woman who loved him so much that she never came into his presence!

Buy from Amazon

The post Books that make you feel stuck in one place appeared first on Where to Kim?.

Most interesting and engaging books of 2021

Kim — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 15:00:00 +0000

What are the best new books in 2021? And how about surprisingly good older gems? A year of reviewing books led me to some very engaging books.

These are my highlights and surprises of 2021. While I haven’t read all books that were published – not even all of the popular ones – I found many engaging books among those that I did read.

A year of reading and reviewing books… I read over 100 books this year and reviewed half of them. Many of the books I read are now on my new book lists about China, Taiwan, Austria, Korean short story collections and Japanese short story collections.

Last year I identified some blindspots, namely books originating from or set in Africa and South America. While my reading activity for these parts of the world have not been overwhelming, I did read a few books from there: When We Cease to Understand the World (writer living in Santiago de Chile), Remote Control (set in Ghana), At Night All Blood is Black (writer from Senegal) and Bakhita (set in Sudan).

Back to 2021. Many of the books I read were released in 2021 or will be released in 2022. But aside from my more recent picks, I also read some classics or other books that are still getting a lot of attention around the world. Some of it deserved, the rest – in my eyes – baffling. That’s what is so great about the vast amount of books that exist in the world: there is a ‘right’ book for everyone.

I see it as my mission to raise awareness of all the good stories that exist in this world.

So here they come: the best, most engaging, unique, and inspiring stories of 2021.

Dare to feel

My Wow books of 2021

Popisho by Leone Ross (Review): a magical and sensual, yet down-to-earth story that only Popisho natives will fully understand. Such an entertaining story.
Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin (I didn’t review this one, check it out on Amazon). This series blew my mind: the scope is immense. Unsurprisingly, the books by Liu Cixin made it to the top of my science fiction book list.
Bolla by Pajtim Statovci (Review): I was really impressed by the writing style (in translation). The narrator’s feelings were expressed in a beautiful and touching way.

Exploring new horizons

At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop (Amazon): a powerful and gruesome novel about a Senegalese man who fought as a soldier in the French army during World War I.
Bakhita: A Novel of the Saint of Sudan by Véronique Olmi (Amazon): a book set in Sudan and Italy by the author of one of my favorite books, Beside the Sea. I didn’t particularly like the writing style in Bakhita, but the story was interesting.
Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor (Review): a magical journey through Ghana that you can’t even remotely control.
Soviet milk by Nora Ikstena (Amazon): a story about the influence of Soviet rule on individual lives in Latvia.

Into science this year?

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (Amazon): a blend of fiction and essay about the good and the bad that led to scientific advances in the 20th century. And about the minds and lives of those that came up with them.
Saving Schrödinger’s Cat by Mark Jenkins (Review): Schrödinger is back again (he also plays a role in the book by Benjamín Labatut).
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson (Amazon): I read this one because I wanted to know more about RNA. I was also interested in the ethical aspects of curing genetic diseases and to what extent it should be allowable to improve DNA.
Future Bright, Future Grimm by D.J. MacLennan (Review): explore what happens if you use scientific progress to allow time to move on in a fairy tale realm.
Three-Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin (Amazon). This series blew my mind: the scope is immense. Unsurprisingly, the books by Liu Cixin made it to the top of my science fiction book list.

Identity

LGBTQ+

Bolla by Pajtim Statovci (Review): I was really impressed by the writing style (in translation). The narrator’s feelings were expressed in a beautiful and touching way.
Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park (Review): I love how his spirit and energy changed over the course of the book. The author portrays the gradual character transformation very convincingly.
The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei (Review): shows a future in which intimacy, experiences, and identity are fluid.
To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young (Review): a dystopian story about two strangers growing close and showing affection despite their hardships.
Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin: two classics from Taiwan about the passionate relationships between (queer and lesbian) people. You need to be in the mood for these books.

Contemplative and mesmerizing

The Mountain Whisperer by Jia Pingwa (Review): this book is pure and warm, cruel and mean, and above all, absurd and compelling. The author combines historical and mythical knowledge into a turbulent and rich story set in rural China.
Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong (Amazon): a slow-paced story showing respect for nature and the culture of the people living in north-central Inner Mongolia. This book transports you right there and reads as a meditation on living with nature and maintaining balance.
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer (Amazon): about a woman and some animals in survival mode. At first, this sounds like a pleasant change, but trouble lurks. You would have liked to be kept ignorant until the very end…
Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard (Amazon): what stuck with me is the irony of a narrator stuck in a hospital bed talking about how he and some other people are the happiest travelers and the unhappiest arrivals.

Hard to judge

Stronghold by Kesha Bakunin (Review): a study of leadership styles and political and social issues in the form of a fantasy story set in a world with a rich history.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut (Amazon): a blend of fiction and essay about the good and the bad that caused scientific advances in the 20th century. And about the minds and lives of those that came up with them.
Bestiary by K-Ming Chang (Amazon): about three generations of Taiwanese American women that are haunted by the myths of their homeland. I didn’t like this book, but many people love it. It’s either hit or miss.

Whatever happened?

Books I wanted to like so much

Heaven by Mieko Kawakami (Amazon): half a year later I am trying to come up with a description. I have to read the synopsis to even remember what it was about. A heavy and interesting topic but I’ve read more impressive books about this topic.
Piranesi by Susanna Clark (Amazon): a book with great reviews that I found extremely boring.
The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik (Amazon): a book that I both love and hate because I don’t like the narrator’s personality and thoughts but I love the setting. So of course I’ll read the third installment next year.
To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young (Review): if only one of the other characters had been the main narrator…
House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune (Amazon): I actually did like this book, but it lacked the wow-factor that I was expecting after hearing other readers rave about it.

Guilty pleasures

Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow (Nevermoor #3) by Jessica Townsend (Amazon): a truly magical and fantastic children’s books series that was just what I needed at some point this year.
Sufficiently Advanced Magic (Arcane Ascension #1) by Andrew Rowe (Amazon): the Arcane Ascension trilogy by Andrew Rowe also helped to satisfy my magic school books craving.

Published by Honford Star (because I ended up buying all of them)

Astral Season, Beastly Season by Tahi Saihate (Review): a story about adoration and objectification. What does it take to grow up as a star instead of a beast?
To the Warm Horizon by Choi Jin-young (Review): a dystopian story about two strangers growing close and showing affection despite their hardships.
Tower by Bae Myung-hoon (Review): this book is a mirror of society; a sci-fi depiction of social and political issues. It is intense, subtle and funny.
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung (Review): the author will amuse you with all the unusual things that are considered perfectly ordinary.
Whisper by Chang Yu-Ko (Amazon): Whisper is a plot-driven, Taiwanese horror story, that is hopefully on its way here from Manchester (I think it is travelling on foot because it was sent to me two months ago). It will arrive someday.

Interesting Japanese Short Story Collections

Kim — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 14:00:00 +0000

What are the best Japanese short story collections? Check out these books from Japan to start immersing yourself in the culture before your visit to Japan.

In recent years, many exciting, unusual, touching and fantastic short story collections have been translated from Japanese. And what’s even better: more translations are forthcoming. I have gathered the most interesting stories from Japan in this booklist. If you are also interested in full-length novels, please check out my Best Japanese Books list.

When I’m planning a trip I like to read books originating from that country to start getting immersed and learn more about the culture. If you feel the same then look at the list below for inspiration.

For this list I’ll limit myself to books with English translations and I will only rate what I have read myself. So this list will be updated regularly when I come across interesting reads. I have added a list of other books by Japanese authors that I still want to read. If you have read any good books about Japan or by a Japanese author, please recommend them to me in the comment section below.

Best Japanese Short Stories

Yoko Ogawa - Revenge

 4/5

Eerie short story collection with a touch of the supernatural and bizarre. All stories are connected in a very interesting way.

An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Years later, the writer’s stepson reflects upon his stepmother and the strange stories she used to tell him. Meanwhile, a surgeon’s lover vows to kill him if he does not leave his wife. Before she can follow-through on her crime of passion, though, the surgeon will cross paths with another remarkable woman, a cabaret singer whose heart beats delicately outside of her body. But when the surgeon promises to repair her condition, he sparks the jealousy of another man who would like to preserve the heart in a custom-tailored bag. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders—their fates converge in a darkly beautiful web that they are each powerless to escape.

Buy from Amazon

Otsuichi - Goth

 4/5

Read this if you like dark and twisted stories. It’s hard to relate to the characters, but their descriptions fit their role well.

Intertwined short stories about two teenagers and their obsession with murder and torture, showing the dark side of humanity.

Buy from Amazon

Yoko Ogawa - The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

 4/5

Three very engaging stories. I really like Yoko Ogawa’s books and will check out any new releases.

A haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool—a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination—but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister’s? A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg.

Buy from Amazon

Misumi Kobo - So We Look to the Sky

 4/5

Misumi Kobo explores (sexual) relationships between people who make the most of life with the cards they were dealt at birth.

Searingly honest and sexually explicit, So We Look to the Sky is a novel told in five linked stories that begin with an affair between a student and a woman ten years his senior, who picks him up for cosplay sex in a comics market. Their scandalous liaison, which the woman’s husband makes public by posting secretly taped video online, frames all of the stories, but each explores a different aspect of the life passages and hardships ordinary people face. A teenager experimenting with sex and then, perhaps, experiencing love and loss; a young, anime-obsessed wife bullied by her mother-in-law to produce the child she and her husband cannot conceive; a high school girl, spurned by the student, realizing that being cute and fertile is all others expect of her; the student’s best friend, who lives in the projects and is left alone to support and care for his voracious, senile grandmother; and the student’s mother, a divorced single parent and midwife, who guides women bringing new life into this world and must rescue her son, crushed by the twin blows of public humiliation and loss, from giving up on his own.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of So We Look to the Sky

Matsuda Aoko - Where the Wild Ladies Are

 3/5

Matsuda Aoko links the present to the past by incorporating Japanese ghost and yokai tales into a modern world.

I never thought of Okon and Oiwa as terrifying monsters. If they were terrifying, so was I. If they were monsters, that meant I was a monster too.

Witty, inventive, and profound, Where the Wild Ladies Are is a contemporary feminist retelling of traditional ghost stories by one of Japan’s most exciting writers.

In a company run by the mysterious Mr Tei, strange things are afoot – incense sticks lead to a surprise encounter; a young man reflects on his mother’s death; a foxlike woman finally finds her true calling. As female ghosts appear in unexpected guises, their gently humorous encounters with unsuspecting humans lead to deeper questions about emancipation and recent changes in Japanese women’s lives.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Where the Wild Ladies Are

Edogawa Rampo - Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination

 3/5

A diverse short story collection, taking inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe (scramble the name). Some stories are really well written, like the story about the chair, others are not remarkable. This collection might have been more shocking and impressive in the 1920s. It is still an interesting read from a cultural immersion perspective.

Collected in this chilling volume are some of the famous Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Rampo’s best stories—bizarre and blood-curdling expeditions into the fantastic and the perverse.

Buy from Amazon

Asako Serizawa - Inheritors

 3/5

Inheritors by Asako Serizawa shows the effects of WWII on families through stories spanning decades. Set in the USA and Japan, it explores how history is lived.

Spanning more than 150 years, and set in multiple locations in colonial and postcolonial Asia and the United States, Inheritors paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of its characters as they grapple with the legacies of loss, imperialism, and war.

Written from myriad perspectives and in a wide range of styles, each of these interconnected stories is designed to speak to the others, contesting assumptions and illuminating the complicated ways we experience, interpret, and pass on our personal and shared histories. A retired doctor, for example, is forced to confront the horrific moral consequences of his wartime actions. An elderly woman subjects herself to an interview, gradually revealing a fifty-year old murder and its shattering aftermath. And in the last days of a doomed war, a prodigal son who enlisted against his parents’ wishes survives the American invasion of his island outpost, only to be asked for a sacrifice more daunting than any he imagined.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Inheritors

Haruki Murakami - First Person Singular

 3/5

Murakami gives you a first person’s perspective as he takes you on a trip down memory lane.

The eight masterful stories in this new collection are all told in the first person by a classic Murakami narrator: a lonely man. Some of them (like With the Beatles, Cream and On a Stone Pillow ) are nostalgic looks back at youth. Others are set in adulthood–Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova, Carnaval, Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey and the stunning title story. Occasionally, a narrator who may or may not be Haruki himself is present, as in The Yakult Swallows Poetry Collection. Is it memoir or fiction? The reader decides. The stories all touch beautifully on love and loss, childhood and death . . . all with a signature Murakami twist.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of First Person Singular

Izumi Suzuki - Terminal Boredom

In a future where men are contained in ghettoized isolation, women enjoy the fruits of a queer matriarchal utopia – until a boy escapes and a young woman’s perception of the world is violently interrupted.

The last family in a desolate city struggles to approximate 20th century life on Earth, lifting what notions they can from 1960s popular culture. But beneath these badly learned behaviors lies an atavistic appetite for destruction.

Two new friends enjoy drinks on a holiday resort planet where all is not as it seems, and the air itself seems to carry a treacherously potent nostalgia. Back on Earth, Emma’s not certain if her emotionally abusive, green-haired boyfriend is in fact an intergalactic alien spy, or if she’s been hitting the bottle and baggies too hard.

Buy from Amazon

Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder

A housewife takes up bodybuilding and sees radical changes to her physique–which her workaholic husband fails to notice. A boy waits at a bus stop, mocking businessmen struggling to keep their umbrellas open in a typhoon–until an old man shows him that they hold the secret to flying. A woman working in a clothing boutique waits endlessly on a customer who won’t come out of the fitting room–and who may or may not be human. A newlywed notices that her husband’s features are beginning to slide around his face–to match her own.

In these eleven stories, the individuals who lift the curtains of their orderly homes and workplaces are confronted with the bizarre, the grotesque, the fantastic, the alien–and, through it, find a way to liberation. The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most fearlessly inventive young writers.

Buy from Amazon

Taeko Kōno - Toddler Hunting & Other Stories

Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories introduces a startlingly original voice. Winner of Japan’s top literary prizes for fiction (among them the Akutagawa, the Tanizaki, the Noma, and the Yomiuri), Taeko Kono writes with a strange beauty, pinpricked with sadomasochistic and disquieting scenes.

In the title story, the protagonist loathes young girls, but compulsively buys expensive clothes for little boys so that she can watch them dress and undress. The impersonal gaze Taeko Kono turns on this behavior transfixes the reader with a fatal question: What are we hunting for? And why?

Multiplying perspectives and refracting light from the strangely facing mirrors of fantasy and reality, pain and pleasure, these ten stories present Kono at her very best.

Buy from Amazon

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa - Murder in the Age of Enlightenment

The stories in this fantastical, unconventional collection are subtly wrought depictions of the darkness of our desires. From an isolated bamboo grove, to a lantern festival in Tokyo, to the Emperor’s court, they offer glimpses into moments of madness, murder, and obsession. Vividly translated by Bryan Karetnyk, they unfold in elegant, sometimes laconic, always gripping prose.

Akutagawa’s stories are characterised by their stylish originality; they are stories to be read again and again.

Buy from Amazon

The post Interesting Japanese Short Story Collections appeared first on Where to Kim?.

Exciting Korean Short Story Collections

Kim — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 14:00:00 +0000

What are the best Korean short story collections? Check out these books from South Korea to start immersing yourself in the culture before your visit to Korea.

In recent years, many exciting, unusual, touching and fantastic short story collections have been translated from Korean. And what’s even better: more translations are forthcoming. I have gathered the most interesting stories from South Korea in this booklist. If you are also interested in full-length novels, please check out my Best Korean Books list.

When I’m planning a trip I like to read books originating from that country to start getting immersed and learn more about the culture. If you feel the same then look at the list below for inspiration.

For this list I’ll limit myself to books with English translations and I will only rate what I have read myself. So this list will be updated regularly when I come across interesting reads. I have added a list of other books by Korean authors that I still want to read. If you have read any good books about South Korea or by a Korean author, please recommend them to me in the comment section below.

Best Korean Short Stories Books

1) Park Seongwon - What Makes a City?

 5/5

The writing style (or translation) made the stories more intense and had the power to draw my mind into the world inside the book. The book provides you with possible meanings and messages, but you can come up with many more while considering how it applies to your life and the way you live. What Makes a City? is not a book to read from cover to back, but rather one where you read a story a day and ponder on the meaning of that single story.

What Is It That Makes Up a City? provides the reader with an intelligent perspective on the strange culture of our times and a series of adventures through which we explore universal human problems. Family, education, the media, popular culture, technology, alienation, financial power or the lack thereof . . . These are among the most prominent components of the eight stories which comprise this book, in which characters struggle—sometimes in despair, but usually with a sense of humor—to understand or at least accept their place in a world that often makes no sense.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of What Makes a City?

2) Bae Myung-hoon - Tower

 4/5

Tower is a mirror of society; a sci-fi depiction of social and political issues. It is intense, subtle and funny.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Tower

3) Bora Chung - Cursed Bunny

 4/5

Bora Chung will amuse you with all the unusual things that are considered perfectly ordinary.

Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.

Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Cursed Bunny

4) Choi Eunyoung - Shoko's Smile

 4/5

It takes skill to write and translate a scene that makes the reader sympathize so strongly with a character, both while reading and when thinking about the book weeks later.

In crisp, unembellished prose, Choi Eunyoung paints intimate portraits of the lives of young women in South Korea, balancing the personal with the political. In the title story, a fraught friendship between an exchange student and her host sister follows them from adolescence to adulthood. In ‘A Song from Afar’, a young woman grapples with the death of her lover, travelling to Russia to search for information about the deceased. In ‘Secret’, the parents of a teacher killed in the Sewol ferry sinking hide the news of her death from her grandmother.

Buy from Amazon

5) Kim Bo-young - I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories

 4/5

An immersive, sci-fi short story collection that takes you to another time and place. Find out what a talking wall and Artificial Intelligence have in common, and how AI and gods share some similarities.

In the title story, an engaged couple working in distant corners of the galaxy plan to arrive on Earth simultaneously and walk down the aisle together. But small incidents wreak havoc on their vast journeys, pushing the date of their wedding far into the future. As centuries pass on Earth and the land and climate change, one thing is constant: the desire of the lovers to be together.

Through two pairs of interlinked stories, Kim Bo-young explores the driving forces of humanity – love, hope, creation, destruction, and the very meaning of existence.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of I’m Waiting for You and Other Stories

6) Ha Seong-nan - Flowers of Mold

 4/5

The stories challenge you to understand them and to grasp their underlying meaning. Most of them take place in various neighborhoods in Seoul.

Praised for her meticulous descriptions and ability to transform the mundanity of everyday life into something strange and unexpected, Ha Seong-nan bursts into the English literary scene with this stunning collection that confirms Korea’s place at the forefront of contemporary women’s writing. From the title story told by a woman suffering from gaps in her memory, to one about a man seeking insight in bags of garbage, to a surreal story about a car salesman and the customer he tries to seduce, The Woman Next Door charms and provokes with an incomparable style.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Flowers of Mold

7) Ha Seong-nan - Bluebeard's First Wife

 4/5

If you’re looking for stories that make you question everything you read, then read this book.

Disasters, accidents, and deaths abound in Bluebeard’s First Wife. A woman spends a night with her fiancé and his friends, and overhears a terrible secret that has bound them together since high school. A man grows increasingly agitated by the apartment noise made by a young family living upstairs and arouses the suspicion of his own wife when the neighbors meet a string of unlucky incidents. A couple moves into a picture-perfect country house, but when their new dog is stolen, they become obsessed with finding the thief, and in the process, neglect their child. Ha’s paranoia-inducing, heart-quickening stories will have you reconsidering your own neighbors.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Bluebeard’s First Wife

8) Kang Kyeong-ae - The Underground Village

 4/5

A storybook giving insight into the lives of those that came before us. Placeless stories, sometimes timeless, showing the harsh reality of life.

Kang Kyeong-ae (1906-1944) was a Korean writer whose stories are remarkable for their rejection of colonialism, patriarchy, and ethnic nationalism during a period when such views were truly radical and dangerous. Born in what is now North Korea, Kang wrote all her fiction in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation and witnessed the violence and daily struggles experienced by ethnic Koreans living in the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Kang’s riveting stories are full of sensitivity, defiance, and a deep understanding of the oppressed people she wrote about.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Underground Village

Kim Un-su - The Cabinet

A mind-bending work of literary fiction from one of South Korea’s hottest new novelists.

Cabinet 13 looks like an old, ordinary cabinet. But it is filled with stories – peculiar, strange, eye popping, disgusting, enraging, and touching stories. The life of the man who manages cabinet 13, an ordinary office manager, is similarly filled with stories. Un-Su Kim intricately interweaves the all these stories with precise prose and in rich style, and will leave you thinking about the stories inside your own cabinet long after you turn the final page.

Buy from Amazon (available 12 October 2021)

Kim Jung-hyuk - The Library of Musical Instruments

The second short-story collection by Kim Jung-hyuk, the author of Penguin News, features a total of eight short stories, including Syncopation D which won the 2nd Kim You-jeong Literary Award in 2008. They represent the many sounds sampled by the author when he recorded over 600 kinds of musical instruments. Like instruments coming together in a symphony, the stories combine to make an opus consisting of variations on a theme. While the stories begin in an upbeat fashion and work to a crescendo, they end with notes in a minor key filling the vacuum. The Library of Musical Instruments is a collection to contemplate on more than one occasion.”

Buy from Amazon

Sue Ja Joo - Night Picture of Rain Sound

Seventeen short stories transcending the line between fantasy and reality. Sue Ja Joo is on the frontier of ‘Smart Fiction’. A new genre between poetry and the short story, unique to the Korean literary world. ‘Night Picture of Rain Sound’ opens the small door in the corner where certitude is imagination, and imagination is certitude. ‘Night Picture of Rain Sound’ creates a world where it’s possible to run into Don Quixote at the store or discuss physics with Einstein in a café.

Buy from Amazon

Jung Young-moon - A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories

Considered an eccentric in the traditional Korean literary world, Jung Young-moon’s short stories have nonetheless won numerous readers both in Korea and abroad, most often drawing comparisons to Kafka. Adopting strange, warped, unstable characters and drawing heavily on the literature of the absurd, Jung’s stories nonetheless do not wallow in darkness, despair, or negativity. Instead, we find a world in which the bizarre and terrifying are often put to comic use, even in direst of situations, and point toward a sort of redemption to be found precisely in the weirdest and most unsettling parts of life.

Buy from Amazon

Kim Bo-young - On the Origin of Species and Other Stories

Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, the writings of award-winning author Bo-Young Kim have garnered a cult following in South Korea, where she is widely acknowledged as a pioneer and inspiration. On the Origin of Species makes available for the first time in English some of Kim’s most acclaimed stories, as well as an essay on science fiction. Her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially. Kim’s literature of ideas offers some of the most rigorous and surprisingly poignant reflections on posthuman existence being written today.

Buy from Amazon

Kim Tongin - Sweet Potato

Kim Tongin (1900-1951) is one of Korea’s earliest and most respected modern writers whose naturalist fiction brilliantly depicts Korean life during a period of profound social change. Namesake of the prestigious Dong-in Literary Award, Kim Tongin’s succinct writing style can still inspire readers and provide insight into early 20th century Korea over 60 years after his death.

Translated by Grace Jung and introduced by Youngmin Kwon, Adjunct Professor of Korean Literature at the University of California, Berkley.

Buy from Amazon

Jeon Sungtae - Wolves

Sungtae’s short stories build a unique world through their consummate construction and firm roots in reality. With Mongolia as the physical background and through the perspectives of outsiders, Jeon’s imaginative tales mercilessly expose the hypocrisy and duality that lie within all of us. The stories address important issues including North-South Korean relations, migrant workers, capitalism in an era of neo-liberalism, and racially mixed families.

Buy from Amazon

Yi Sang - The Wings

The three stories gathered in this volume display Yi Sang’s inventive manipulation of autobiographical elements, a method which expands his intensely private narratives into broader meditations on love, life, and death. “The Wings,” a dark allegory of infidelity and self-deception, probes the ambiguities of perception and language through an unreliable narrator who bears an uncanny resemblance to the author himself. “Encounters and Departures,” a tale of ill-fated love revolving around erotic passion and physical illness as metaphors presents a female protagonist modelled on the woman who was, in real life, the author’s muse and femme fatale. Similarly, in “Deathly Child,” Yi Sang offers a witty, incisive examination of sexual mores through a fictional reenactment of his ambivalent feelings toward the woman he married toward the end of his life.

Buy from Amazon

Chul-Woo Lim - The Dog Thief

As a college student, Chul-Woo Lim witnessed the Kwangju Uprising during which hundreds of prodemocracy protesters were massacred by the South Korean government of Chun Doo Hwan. Lim’s desire to bear witness to this tragic event became one of the motivating forces behind his writing. One year after the massacre, Lim published his first short story, The Dog Thief.

Buy from Amazon

The post Exciting Korean Short Story Collections appeared first on Where to Kim?.

Most Interesting Books Set in Austria

Kim — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 14:00:00 +0000

What are the most interesting Austrian books? Check out these books set in Austria to start immersing yourself in the culture before your visit to Austria.

I’ll focus on more recent works and will only mention one or two works of well-known writers such as Stefan Zweig, Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, Viktor Frankl and Sigmund Freud. Many great writers were born in Austria(-Hungary), did you know?

If you have read any good books set in Austria or by an author from Austria, please recommend them to me in the comment section below.

Best Austrian Books

Marianne Fritz - The Weight of Things

 4/5

I admire the structure of this story. Rarely have I been so subtly led to understanding the plot.

This rediscovered modernist classic tells the story of a young woman who, while still traumatized by the Second World War, struggles to resign herself to domesticity and motherhood. Slowly consumed by a weight of circumstances beyond her control, Berta endures the deep hypocrisies and the abiding cruelty of everyday life, behind which bloody tragedy threatens to break free.

The Weight of Things was Fritz’s debut novel and the first of her books to be translated into English. It won her tremendous acclaim and was awarded the Robert Walser Prize in 1978. Fritz subsequently embarked on a brilliant and ambitious literary project called The Fortress, which earned her cult status, comparisons to James Joyce, and admirers including Elfriede Jelinek and W. G. Sebald.

Buy from Amazon
Check out the free online pictures of her epic and stylish (untranslated) work Naturgemäß III.

Thomas Bernhard - Wittgenstein's Nephew

 4/5

What sticks with me is the irony of a narrator stuck in a hospital bed talking about how he and some other people are the happiest travelers and the unhappiest arrivals.

It is 1967. In separate wings of a Viennese hospital, two men lie bedridden. The narrator, Thomas Bernhard, is stricken with a lung ailment; his friend Paul, nephew of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, is suffering from one of his periodic bouts of madness. As their once-casual friendship quickens, these two eccentric men begin to discover in each other a possible antidote to their feelings of hopelessness and mortality — a spiritual symmetry forged by their shared passion for music, a strange sense of humor, disgust for bourgeois Vienna, and fear in the face of death. Part memoir, part fiction, Wittgenstein’s Nephew is both a meditation on the artist’s struggle to maintain a solid foothold in a world gone incomprehensibly askew, and an eulogy to a real-life friendship.

Buy from Amazon
Check out other great works by Thomas Bernhard

Marlen Haushofer - The Wall

 4/5

Back to the basics: a woman and some animals in survival mode. At first, this sounds like a pleasant change, but trouble lurks. You would have liked to be kept ignorant until the very end…

“I can allow myself to write the truth; all the people for whom I have lied throughout my life are dead…” writes the heroine of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a quite ordinary, unnamed middle-aged woman who awakens to find she is the last living human being. Surmising her solitude is the result of a too successful military experiment, she begins the terrifying work of not only survival, but self-renewal. The Wall is at once a simple and moving talk — of potatoes and beans, of hoping for a calf, of counting matches, of forgetting the taste of sugar and the use of one’s name — and a disturbing meditation on 20th century history.

Buy from Amazon
Other interesting translated works: Nowhere Ending Sky and The Loft

Viktor E. Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning

 4/5

The most interesting thing about this book is the tone he uses to describe his time in the concentration camps.

Viktor Frankl’s riveting account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps, and his insightful exploration of the human will to find meaning in spite of the worst adversity, has offered solace and guidance to generations of readers since it was first published in 1946. At the heart of Frankl’s theory of logotherapy (from the Greek word for “meaning”) is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but rather the discovery and pursuit of what the individual finds meaningful. Today, as new generations face new challenges and an ever more complex and uncertain world, Frankl’s classic work continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living, in spite of all obstacles.

Buy from Amazon

Robert Seethaler - The Field

 3/5

A story full of emotion and nonchalance, carefully balancing the line between the before and after.

If the dead could speak, what would they say to the living?

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Field

Linda Stift - The Empress and the Cake

 3/5

Psychological thriller. Beware that it talks about eating disorders and contains a wide range of vomiting scenes.

Madness lurks behind the pretty façade of everyday life.

An elderly lady offers a young woman a piece of cake. She accepts. The lady resembles the Austrian Empress Elisabeth and lives with her servant in an apartment full of bizarre souvenirs. More invitations follow. A seemingly harmless visit to the museum turns into a meticulously planned raid to steal a royal cocaine syringe. Without realizing, the young woman has become the lady’s accomplice. Does she realize she is losing control?

Buy from Amazon

Daniel Glattauer - Love Virtually

 2/5

The style of the book (100% emails) and the tone of the emails were not my cup of tea.

It’s a virtual romance that begins by chance. When Leo mistakenly receives e-mails from a stranger named Emmi, he replies–and Emmi writes back. Soon, secrets are shared, sparks fly, and erotic tension simmers. Even though Emmi is married, it seems only a matter of time till they meet. But will their feelings survive a real-life encounter? And, if so-what then? Funny and fast-paced, Love Virtually offers plenty of twists, turns, and satisfaction.

Buy from Amazon
The sequel Every Seventh Wave has also been translated to English

Thomas Glavinic - The Camera Killer

 2/5

A rather boring account of people following the news with an unsurprising ending. I included it here so you know you can skip it.

On Good Friday, a brutal double murder takes place in the woods, and the killer records the sickening crime on videotape. With the local media building up excitement — and outrage — at the scheduled airing of the footage, two couples in the midst of celebrating the Easter holiday find their idyll interrupted by the breaking news.

Against the backdrop of twenty-four-hour news coverage, the four friends spend the weekend playing cards, chatting, eating, and drinking. Despite their best efforts to enjoy this rare time together, they’re unable to stop talking about the murders and the search for the elusive killer. Repulsed by the airing of the crime, they question the ethics of showing such atrocities on television — yet they can’t stop watching.

Buy from Amazon

Wolf Haas - The Bone Man (Brenner #2)

 2/5

I did not enjoy this book, but that is probably because the humor was lost in translation (or so they say…).

At a wildly popular chicken shack in the Austrian countryside, where snooty Viennese gourmands go to indulge their secret passion for fried chicken, a gruesome discovery is made in the pile of chicken bones waiting to be fed into the basement grinder: human bones.

But when private eye Simon Brenner shows up to investigate, the manager of the restaurant, who hired him, has disappeared … while the owner of the place urges him to stay on and eat chicken.

Brenner likes chicken, so he stays, but as he waits for the manager, he discovers that the bucolic countryside is full of suspicious types: prostitutes, war profiteers, unsavory art dealers, Slavic soccer champs with dubious pasts — and at least one rather grisly murderer. And the more Brenner looks into things, the more it dawns on him that there’s a cleaver somewhere with his name on it.

Buy from Amazon
Resurrection (Brenner #1) has also been translated, but the reviews aren’t that great.

Elfriede Jelinek - The Piano Teacher

Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears to be a seamless tissue of boredom, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night to watch live sex shows and sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first, but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher’s subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity, suppressed violence, and human degradation.

Buy from Amazon

Ingeborg Bachmann - Malina

Bachmann tells the story of lives painfully intertwined: the unnamed narrator, haunted by nightmarish memories of her father, lives with the androgynous Malina, an initially remote and dispassionate man who ultimately becomes an ominous influence. Plunging toward its riveting finale, Malina brutally lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourse between women and men.

Buy from Amazon

Daniel Kehlmann - You Should Have Left

A screenwriter, his wife, and their four-year old daughter rent a house in the mountains of Germany, but something isn’t right. As he toils on a sequel to his most successful movie, the screenwriter notices that rooms aren’t where he remembers them—and finds in his notebook words that are not his own.

Buy from Amazon
Another well-known book by Daniel Kehlmann is Measuring the World

Sigmund Freud - Civilization and Its Discontents

Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the last of Freud’s books, written in the decade before his death and first published in German in 1929. It is considered his most brilliant work. In it he states his views on the broad question of man’s place in the world. It seeks to answer several questions fundamental to human society and its organization: What influences led to the creation of civilization? Why and how did it come to be? What determines civilization’s trajectory? Freud’s theories on the effect of the knowledge of death on human existence and the birth of art are central to his work.

Many of humankind’s primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such commandments are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens. Freud’s theme is that what works for civilization doesn’t necessarily work for man. Man, by nature aggressive and egotistical, seeks self-satisfaction.

Buy from Amazon
Check out other works by Sigmund Freud

Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes.”

With it’s startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.

Buy from Amazon
Check out other works by Franz Kafka

Stefan Zweig - Chess Story

Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig’s final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.

Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig’s story.

Buy from Amazon
Check out other works by Stefan Zweig

The post Most Interesting Books Set in Austria appeared first on Where to Kim?.

Interesting books set on mysterious, magical and absurd islands

Kim — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 14:00:00 +0000

Interesting books set on or featuring mysterious, magical and absurd islands that drag you into the most fascinating situations.

Sometimes you simply want to spend some time in a mysterious place. Islands are perfect for that because of their isolation. In 2020 and 2021, many new books were published and are still being published about interesting, mysterious and absurd islands, helping to keep the mystery alive.

Keep on reading for some obvious and less obvious book suggestions.

Leone Ross - Popisho

A sensual novel, Popisho conjures a world where magic is everywhere, food is fate, politics are broken, and love awaits. Everyone in Popisho was born with a little something… The local name for it was cors. Magic, but more than magic. A gift, nah? Yes. From the gods: a thing that felt so inexpressibly your own.

Somewhere far away– or maybe right nearby– lies an archipelago called Popisho. A place of stunning beauty and incorrigible mischief, destiny and mystery, it is also a place in need of change.

Xavier Redchoose is the macaenus of his generation, anointed by the gods to make each resident one perfect meal when the time is right. Anise, his long lost love, is on a march toward reckoning with her healing powers. The governor’s daughter, Sonteine, is getting married, her father demanding a feast out of turn. And graffiti messages from an unknown source are asking hard questions. A storm is brewing. Before it comes, before the end of the day, this wildly imaginative narrative will take us across the islands, their history, and into the lives of unforgettable characters.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Popisho

Yoko Ogawa - The Memory Police

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Memory Police

Yun Ko-eun - The Disaster Tourist

An eco-thriller with a fierce feminist sensibility, The Disaster Tourist engages with the global dialog around climate activism, dark tourism, and the #MeToo movement.

For ten years, Yona has been stuck behind a desk as a coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specializing in vacation packages to destinations devastated by disaster and climate change. Her work life is uneventful until trouble arises in the form of a predatory colleague.

To forestall any disruption of business-as-usual, Jungle makes Yona a proposition: a paid “vacation” to the desert island of Mui. But Yona must pose as a tourist and assess whether Jungle should continue their partnership with the unprofitable destination.

Yona travels to the remote island, whose major attraction is an underwhelming sinkhole, a huge disappointment to the customers who’ve paid a premium. Soon Yona discovers the resort’s plan to fabricate a catastrophe in the interest of regaining their good standing with Jungle–and the manager enlists Yona’s help. Yona must choose between the callous company to whom she’s dedicated her life, or the possibility of a fresh start in a powerful new position. As she begins to understand the cost of the manufactured disaster, Yona realizes that the lives of Mui’s citizens are in danger–and so is she.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Disaster Tourist

Shelly Nolden - The Vines

In the shadows of New York City lies forbidden North Brother Island, where the remains of a shuttered hospital hide the haunting memories of century-old quarantines and human experiments. The ruins conceal the scarred and beautiful Cora, imprisoned by contagions and the doctors who torment her. When Finn, a young urban explorer, arrives on the island and glimpses an enigmatic beauty through the foliage, intrigue turns to obsession as he seeks to uncover her past—and his own family’s dark secrets. By unraveling these mysteries, will he be able to save Cora? Will Cora meet the same tragic ending as the thousands who’ve already perished on the island?

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Vines

Katłıà - Land-Water-Sky

A vexatious shapeshifter walks among humans. Shadowy beasts skulk at the edges of the woods. A ghostly apparition haunts a lonely stretch of highway. Spirits and legends rise and join together to protect the north.

Land-Water-Sky/Ndè-Tı-Yat’a is the debut novel from Dene author Katłıà. Set in Canada’s far north, this layered composite novel traverses space and time, from a community being stalked by a dark presence, a group of teenagers out for a dangerous joyride, to an archeological site on a mysterious island that holds a powerful secret.

Riveting, subtle, and unforgettable, Katłıà gives us a unique perspective into what the world might look like today if Indigenous legends walked amongst us, disguised as humans, and ensures that the spiritual significance and teachings behind the stories of Indigenous legends are respected and honored.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Land-Water-Sky

Wu Ming-yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

On the island of Wayo Wayo, every second son must leave on the day he turns fifteen as a sacrifice to the Sea God. Atile’i is one such boy, but as the strongest swimmer and best sailor, he is determined to defy destiny and become the first to survive.

Alice Shih, who has lost her husband and son in a climbing accident, is quietly preparing to commit suicide in her house by the sea. But her plan is interrupted when a vast trash vortex comes crashing onto the shore of Taiwan, bringing Atile’i with it.

In the aftermath of the catastrophe, Atile’i and Alice retrace her late husband’s footsteps into the mountains, hoping to solve the mystery of her son’s disappearance. On their journey, memories will be challenged, an unusual bond formed, and a dark secret uncovered that will force Alice to question everything she thought she knew.

Buy from Amazon

Terry Pratchett - Nation

Alone on a desert island — everything and everyone he knows and loves has been washed away in a storm — Mau is the last surviving member of his nation. He’s completely alone — or so he thinks until he finds the ghost girl. She has no toes, wears strange lacy trousers like the grandfather bird, and gives him a stick that can make fire.
Daphne, sole survivor of the wreck of the Sweet Judy, almost immediately regrets trying to shoot the native boy. Thank goodness the powder was wet and the gun only produced a spark. She’s certain her father, distant cousin of the Royal family, will come and rescue her but it seems, for now, that all she has for company is the boy and the foul-mouthed ship’s parrot, until other survivors arrive to take refuge on the island. Together, Mau and Daphne discover some remarkable things (including how to milk a pig, and why spitting in beer is a good thing), and start to forge a new nation.

Buy from Amazon

Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

In 1950, a young doctor called Norton Perina signs on with the anthropologist Paul Tallent for an expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu’ivu in search of a rumored lost tribe. They succeed, finding not only that tribe but also a group of forest dwellers they dub “The Dreamers,” who turn out to be fantastically long-lived but progressively more senile. Perina suspects the source of their longevity is a hard-to-find turtle; unable to resist the possibility of eternal life, he kills one and smuggles some meat back to the States. He scientifically proves his thesis, earning worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize, but he soon discovers that its miraculous property comes at a terrible price. As things quickly spiral out of his control, his own demons take hold, with devastating personal consequences.

Buy from Amazon

Ali Shaw - The Girl with Glass Feet

Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda’s Land. Magical winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts who has only visited the islands once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure.

Buy from Amazon

Jess Richards - Snake Ropes

Set on an isolated island off the Scottish coast, in a community run by women who are in awe of a mysterious structure called the Thrashing House, the novel is narrated by two teenage girls in very different circumstances. Mary is doing her best to protect her younger brother, Barney, as the island’s sons are mysteriously disappearing. Morgan is scheming to escape the prison her parents have made of their home. The two girls unite, each on a desperate mission in which secrets will be revealed and lives changed forever.

Buy from Amazon

Kirsty Logan - The Gracekeepers

As a Gracekeeper, Callanish administers shoreside burials, laying the dead to their final resting place deep in the depths of the ocean. Alone on her island, she has exiled herself to a life of tending watery graves as penance for a long-ago mistake that still haunts her. Meanwhile, North works as a circus performer with the Excalibur, a floating troupe of acrobats, clowns, dancers, and trainers who sail from one archipelago to the next, entertaining in exchange for sustenance.

In a world divided between those inhabiting the mainland (“landlockers”) and those who float on the sea (“damplings”), loneliness has become a way of life for North and Callanish, until a sudden storm offshore brings change to both their lives – offering them a new understanding of the world they live in and the consequences of the past, while restoring hope in an unexpected future.

Buy from Amazon

Michael Crichton - Jurassic Park

An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Now humankind’s most thrilling fantasies have come true. Creatures extinct for eons roam Jurassic Park with their awesome presence and profound mystery, and all the world can visit them—for a price.

Until something goes wrong. . . .

Buy from Amazon

The post Interesting books set on mysterious, magical and absurd islands appeared first on Where to Kim?.

Most interesting books set in China

Kim — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 14:00:00 +0000

What are the most interesting Chinese books? Check out these books set in China to start immersing yourself in the culture before your visit to China.

If you have read any good books set in China or by an author from China, please recommend them to me in the comment section below.

Best Chinese Books

Liu Cixin - The Three-body Problem (#1)

 3/5

An intriguing science fiction trilogy that incorporates science and Chinese culture and history. I gave #1 only three stars, but I rated the sequels with 4 and 5 stars respectively.

Set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Meanwhile, on Earth, different camps start forming, planning to either welcome the superior beings and help them take over a world seen as corrupt, or to fight against the invasion. The result is a science fiction masterpiece of enormous scope and vision.

The Three-Body Problem is the first chance for English-speaking readers to experience the Hugo Award-winning phenomenon from China’s most beloved science fiction author, Liu Cixin.

Buy from Amazon
The sequels The Dark Forest and Death’s End have also been translated to English.

Jia Pingwa - The Mountain Whisperer

 4/5

Jia Pingwa combines historical and mythical knowledge into a turbulent and rich story set in rural China. This book is pure and warm, cruel and mean, and above all, absurd and compelling.

In a cave high in the ageless mountains of China’s desolate interior, an ancient funeral singer awaits the end. From his deathbed he gives voice to the generations of villagers to whom he devoted his life’s work, and four all-too-human souls whose struggles defined an era.

A soldier, a peasant, a revolutionary and a politician. When revolt and reform take hold of the wartorn plains, all play their debased roles in the mythic cycle of avarice, vengeance and suffering.

As his four tragedies interweave, the cracked lips of the dying sage conjure a stark vision: a retelling of the forging of the People’s Republic – from turbulent birth to absurd reversal – whispered from its uncharted margins.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Mountain Whisperer

Jiang Rong - Wolf Totem

 4/5

A slow-paced story showing respect for nature and the culture of the people living in north-central Inner Mongolia. This book transports you right there and reads as a meditation on living with nature and maintaining balance.

Part period epic, part fable for modern days, Wolf Totem depicts the dying culture of the Mongols – the ancestors of the Mongol hordes who at one time terrorized the world – and the parallel extinction of the animal they believe to be sacred: the fierce and otherworldly Mongolian wolf.

Searching for spirituality, Beijing intellectual Chen Zhen travels to the pristine grasslands of Inner Mongolia to live among the nomadic Mongols-a proud, brave, and ancient race of people who coexist in perfect harmony with their unspeakably beautiful but cruel natural surroundings. Their philosophy of maintaining a balance with nature is the ground stone of their religion, a kind of cult of the wolf.

The fierce wolves that haunt the steppes of the unforgiving grassland searching for food are locked with the nomads in a profoundly spiritual battle for survival-a life-and-death dance that has gone on between them for thousands of years. The Mongols believe that the wolf is a great and worthy foe that they are divinely instructed to contend with, but also to worship and to learn from. Chen’s own encounters with the otherworldly wolves awake a latent primitive instinct in him, and his fascination with them blossoms into obsession, then reverence.

Buy from Amazon

Zhou Haohui - Death Notice (#1)

 4/5

Zhao Haohui’s Death Notice trilogy is one of the bestselling crime series in China.

Chengdu, China: The vibrant capital of Sichuan Province is suddenly held hostage when a shocking manifesto is released by an anonymous vigilante known as Eumenides. It is a bold declaration of war against a corrupt legal system, with Eumenides acting as judge and executioner. The public starts nominating potential targets, and before long hundreds of names are added to his kill list.

Eumenides’s cunning game has only just begun. First, he publishes a “death notice,” announcing his next target, the crimes for which the victim will be punished, and the date of the execution. The note is a deeply personal taunt to the police. Everyone knows who is going to die and when it’s going to happen, but the police fail to stop the attack. The 4/18 Task Force, an elite group of detectives and specialists, is assembled to catch Eumenides before he strikes again. In the process, they discover alarming connections to an eighteen-year-old cold case, and they find out that some members of the team have much to hide.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of the sequel Fate (only if you have already read #1!)

Hao Jingfang - Vagabonds

 4/5

No world is perfect. This is more of a dystopian discussion about society (the economic system and freedom) than anything else.

A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars, but when they return home, they are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth in this spellbinding novel from Hugo Award–winning author Hao Jingfang.

This genre-bending novel is set on Earth in the wake of a second civil war…not between two factions in one nation, but two factions in one solar system: Mars and Earth. In an attempt to repair increasing tensions, the colonies of Mars send a group of young people to live on Earth to help reconcile humanity. But the group finds itself with no real home, no friends, and fractured allegiances as they struggle to find a sense of community and identity, trapped between two worlds.

Buy from Amazon

Yu Hua - The Seventh Day

 4/5

A nicely woven story providing a pleasant reading experience.

Yang Fei was born on a moving train. Lost by his mother, adopted by a young switchman, raised with simplicity and love, he is utterly unprepared for the tempestuous changes that await him and his country. As a young man, he searches for a place to belong in a nation that is ceaselessly reinventing itself, but he remains on the edges of society. At age forty-one, he meets an accidental and unceremonious death. Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest. Over the course of seven days, he encounters the souls of the people he’s lost.

As Yang Fei retraces the path of his life, we meet an extraordinary cast of characters: his adoptive father, his beautiful ex-wife, his neighbors who perished in the demolition of their homes. Traveling on, he sees that the afterworld encompasses all the casualties of today’s China—the organ sellers, the young suicides, the innocent convicts—as well as the hope for a better life to come. Yang Fei’s passage maps the contours of this vast nation—its absurdities, its sorrows, and its soul. Vivid, urgent, and panoramic, The Seventh Day affirms Yu Hua’s place as the standard-bearer of modern Chinese fiction.

Buy from Amazon

Can Xue - I Live in the Slums

 3/5

A mesmerizing short story collection featuring stories that are both mysterious and beautiful in its elegance.

In Can Xue’s world the superficial is peeled away to reveal layers of depth and meaning. Her stories observe no conventions of plot or characterization and limn a chaotic, poetic state ordered by the extreme logic of philosophy.

Combining elements of both Chinese materiality—the love of physical things—and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between consciousness and unconsciousness. She brings us to a place that is both readily familiar yet unmappable and can make us hyperaware of the inherent unreliability in our relationship to the world around us. Delightful, enchanting, and full of mystery and secrets, Can Xue’s newest collection shines a light on the forces that give contours to the visible terrain we acknowledge as reality.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of I Live in the Slums

Mo Yan - Frog

 3/5

An insightful story that sheds light on the impact of national policies. Not necessarily the most entertaining narrative.

Mo Yan chronicles the sweeping history of modern China through the lens of the nation’s controversial one-child policy.

Frog opens with a playwright nicknamed Tadpole who plans to write about his aunt. In her youth, Gugu—the beautiful daughter of a famous doctor and staunch Communist—is revered for her skill as a midwife. But when her lover defects, Gugu’s own loyalty to the Party is questioned. She decides to prove her allegiance by strictly enforcing the one-child policy, keeping tabs on the number of children in the village, and performing abortions on women as many as eight months pregnant.

Buy from Amazon

Sheng Keyi - Death Fugue

 3/5

A dystopian satire with a womanizer as the main character. Interesting because of its metaphors but not a very enjoyable read.

In a large square in the centre of Beiping, the capital of Dayang, a huge tower of excrement appears one day, causing unease in the population, and ultimately widespread civil unrest. The protest, in which poets play an important part, is put down violently.

Haunted by the violence, and by his failure to support his girlfriend Qizi, who is one of the protest leaders, Yuan Mengliu gives up poetry in favour of medicine, and the antiseptic environment of the operating theatre.

But every year he travels in search of Qizi, and on one of these trips, caught in a storm, he wakes to find himself in a perfect society called Swan Valley. In this utopia, as he soon discovers, impulse and feeling are completely controlled, and every aspect of life regulated for the good of the nation, with terrible consequences.

Buy from Amazon

Yan Ge - Strange Beasts of China

In the fictional Chinese town of Yong’an, human beings live alongside spirits and monsters, some of which are almost indistinguishable from people. Told in the form of a bestiary, each chapter of Strange Beasts introduces us to a new creature – from the Sacrificial Beasts, who can’t seem to stop dying, to the Besotted Beasts, an artificial breed engineered by scientists to be as loveable as possible. The narrator, an amateur cryptozoologist, is on a mission to track down each breed in turn, but in the process discovers that she might not be as human as she thought.

Buy from Amazon

Xiaolu Guo - A Lover's Discourse

A story of desire, love and language – and the meaning of home – told through conversations between two lovers

A Chinese woman comes to London to start a new life – away from her dead parents, away from her old world. She knew she would be lonely, but will her new relationship with the Australian-British-German landscape architect bring her closer to this land she has chosen, will their love give her a home?

A Lover’s Discourse is an exploration of romantic love told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers. Playing with language and the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in a Britain still reeling from the Brexit vote, Xiaolu Guo shows us how this couple navigate these differences, and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a cramped and stifling flat share in east London… Suffused with a wonderful sense of humour, this intimate and tender novel asks universal questions: what is the meaning of home when we’ve been uprooted? How can a man and woman be together? And how best to be a woman and a mother?

Buy from Amazon

Li Juan - Distant Sunflower Fields

An iron-willed mother, an ageing grandmother, a pair of mismatched dogs and 90 acres of less-than-ideal farmland: these are Li Juan’s companions on the steppes of the Gobi Desert.

Writing out of a yurt under Xinjiang’s endless horizons, she documents her family’s quest to extract a bounty of sunflowers amid the harsh beauty and barren expanses of China’s northwest frontier. Success must be eked out in the face of life’s unnegotiable realities: sandstorms, locusts and death.

While this small tribe is held at the mercy of these headwinds, they discover the cheer and dignity hidden in each other. But will their ceaseless labours deliver blooming fields of green and yellow? Or will their dreams prove as distant as they are fragile?

Buy from Amazon

An Yu - Braised Pork

One morning in autumn, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her Beijing apartment to find her husband – with whom she had been breakfasting barely an hour before – dead in the bathtub. Next to him a piece of paper unfolds like the wings of a butterfly, and on it is an image that Jia Jia can’t forget.

Profoundly troubled by what she has seen, even while she is abruptly released from a marriage that had constrained her, Jia Jia embarks on a journey to discover the truth of the sketch. Starting at her neighbourhood bar, with its brandy and vinyl, and fuelled by anger, bewilderment, curiosity and love, Jia Jia travels deep into her past in order to arrive at her future.

Braised Pork is a cinematic, often dreamlike evocation of nocturnal Beijing and the high plains of Tibet, and an exploration of myth-making, loss, and a world beyond words, which ultimately sees a young woman find a new and deeper sense of herself.

Buy from Amazon

A Yi - A Perfect Crime

A chilling literary thriller about a motiveless murder in provincial China.

On a normal day in provincial China, a teenager goes about his regular business, but he’s also planning the brutal murder of his only friend. He lures her over, strangles her, stuffs her body into the washing machine and flees town, whereupon a perilous game of cat-and-mouse begins.

A shocking investigation into the despair that traps the rural poor as well as a technically brilliant excursion into the claustrophobic realm of classic horror and suspense, A Perfect Crime is a thrilling and stylish novel about a motiveless murder that echoes Kafka’s absurdism, Camus’ nihilism and Dostoyevsky’s depravity. With exceptional tonal control, A Yi steadily reveals the psychological backstory that enables us to make sense of the story’s dramatic violence and provides chillingly apt insights into a country on the cusp of enormous social, political and economic change.

Buy from Amazon

Qiu Xiaolong - Death of a Red Heroine

A young “national model worker,” renowned for her adherence to the principles of the Communist Party, turns up dead in a Shanghai canal. As Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Special Cases Bureau struggles to trace the hidden threads of her past, he finds himself challenging the very political forces that have guided his life since birth. Chen must tiptoe around his superiors if he wants to get to the bottom of this crime, and risk his career—perhaps even his life—to see justice done.

Buy from Amazon

Yu Hua - China in Ten Words

From one of China’s most acclaimed writers, his first work of nonfiction to appear in English: a unique, intimate look at the Chinese experience over the last several decades, told through personal stories and astute analysis that sharply illuminate the country’s meteoric economic and social transformation.

Framed by ten phrases common in the Chinese vernacular—“people,” “leader,” “reading,” “writing,” “Lu Xun” (one of the most influential Chinese writers of the twentieth century), “disparity,” “revolution,” “grassroots,” “copycat,” and “bamboozle”—China in Ten Words reveals as never before the world’s most populous yet oft-misunderstood nation. In “Disparity,” for example, Yu Hua illustrates the mind-boggling economic gaps that separate citizens of the country. In “Copycat,” he depicts the escalating trend of piracy and imitation as a creative new form of revolutionary action. And in “Bamboozle,” he describes the increasingly brazen practices of trickery, fraud, and chicanery that are, he suggests, becoming a way of life at every level of society.

Buy from Amazon

Yang Zhijun - Mastiffs of the Plateau

Old blood feuds on the Tibetan plateau flare up when seven children and their Tibetan mastiff, Gangri Senge, follow a Han journalist to a rival tribe’s territory during the early days of the People’s Republic of China. As the tribe plots to punish the children for their forefathers’ crimes, it is up to Gangri Senge and the journalist who befriends him to rescue the children from a grisly fate.

Based on first-hand accounts from author Yang Zhijun’s father, this tale follows the lives of Tibet’s legendary mastiffs as Gangri Senge and the dog-loving journalist struggle to save the captured children. Together they embark on an extraordinary journey across the vast Tibetan wilderness that will change the plateau and its tribes forever.

Buy from Amazon

The post Most interesting books set in China appeared first on Where to Kim?.

Most interesting books set in Taiwan

Kim — Wed, 16 Jun 2021 14:00:00 +0000

What are the most interesting Taiwanese books? Check out these books set in Taiwan to start immersing yourself in the culture before your visit to Taiwan.

For this list I’ll limit myself to books with English translations and I will only rate what I have read myself (I hardly ever give five stars by the way). So this list will be updated regularly when I come across interesting reads. I have added a list of other books by Taiwanese authors that I still want to read.

If you have read any good books set in Taiwan or by an author from Taiwan, please recommend them to me in the comment section below.

Best Taiwanese books

Chi Ta-wei - The Membranes

 4/5

Read about a future in which intimacy, experiences, and identity are fluid. Though in the end, the membranes still keep everything in its rightful place…

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of The Membranes

Chang Yu-Ko - Whisper

 4/5

The setting and cultural aspects of this ghost story will appeal to a foreign audience; they add to the creepy feeling because you don’t know what to expect.

Victims all describe hearing a voice before they die gruesomely. Sometimes it’s singing an old Taiwanese song, sometimes it’s in Japanese, and sometimes it’s an anguished call for help from a loved one. Can Wu Shih-Sheng, a degenerate taxi driver in Taipei, hunt down the source of the voice that killed his wife before he becomes the next victim?

Whisper is a plot-driven, Taiwanese horror story. As well as being a chilling read, Chang Yu-Ko cleverly combines Taiwanese folklore, the Japanese occupation of Taiwan, and the long-term mistreatment of the country’s aboriginal people into a story of how the past can still kill.

Buy from Amazon

Read my review of Whisper

Wu Ming-yi - The Man with the Compound Eyes

 3/5

Ultimately, this book is about the environment. Wu Ming-yi uses magical realism to mix timelines, myth, and reality to share people’s experiences with the land and the sea. Despite the magical realism, it tells you many things about cultures and traditions in Taiwan.

Buy from Amazon

Sakinu Ahronglong - Hunter School

 3/5

I value the cultural significance of these stories, but I ended up giving it a three-star rating because of the writing style and repetition. I would say that this book is a must-read for anyone visiting Taiwan and I will reread the stories in Hunter School many times in the future because they do appeal to me.

Hunter School is a timely piece of fiction, drawing on the recollections, folklore, and autobiographical stories of an aboriginal Taiwanese man aiming to reconnect with his lost tribal identity, a Paiwan identity lost in the name of development.

It is impossible to be unaware of the effect of development, invariably at the hands of outsiders, upon the lands, inhabitants and very nature of faraway climes. Hunter School shows us first-hand the immediate and long-reaching effects of such changes upon an indigenous people. The fabric of the community is changed, its balance and its self-sufficiency undermined, and confusion reigns. A common theme running throughout this charming but important book is that of a young man learning about himself and his heritage from the past, elders, ancestors, and nature itself.

Buy from Amazon
Read my review of Hunter School

Lo Yi-chin - Faraway

 3/5

I eagerly absorbed every comment that related to the narrator’s complicated relationships with his father and son.

In Taiwanese writer Lo Yi-Chin’s Faraway, a fictionalized version of the author finds himself stranded in mainland China attempting to bring his comatose father home. Lo’s father had fled decades ago, abandoning his first family to start a new life in Taiwan. After travel between the two countries becomes politically possible, he returns to visit the son he left behind, only to suffer a stroke. The middle-aged protagonist ventures to China, where he embarks on a protracted struggle with the byzantine hospital regulations while dealing with relatives he barely knows. Meanwhile, back in Taiwan, his wife is about to give birth to their second child. Isolated in a foreign country, Lo mulls over his life, dwelling on his difficult relationship with his father and how becoming a father himself has changed him.

Faraway is a powerful meditation on the nature of family and the many ways blood can both unite and divide us. Lo brings a keen sense of irony and sensitivity to everyday absurdity to his depiction of both family dynamics and fraught politics. He offers a deft portrayal of the rift between China and Taiwan through an intimate view of a father-son relationship that bridges this divide. One of the most celebrated writers in Taiwan, Lo has been greatly influential throughout the Chinese-speaking world, but his work has not previously been translated into English. Jeremy Tiang’s translation captures Lo’s distinctive voice, mordant wit, and nuanced portrayal of Taiwanese culture.

Buy from Amazon (available 7 September 2021)

Shawna Yang Ryan - Green Island

 3/5

A family epic that shows the tough situation many Taiwanese found and still find themselves in.

February 28, 1947: Trapped inside the family home amid an uprising that has rocked Taipei, Dr. Tsai delivers his youngest daughter, the unnamed narrator of Green Island, just after midnight as the city is plunged into martial law. In the following weeks, as the Chinese Nationalists act to crush the opposition, Dr. Tsai becomes one of the many thousands of people dragged away from their families and thrown into prison. His return, after more than a decade, is marked by alienation from his loved ones and paranoia among his community — conflicts that loom over the growing bond he forms with his youngest daughter. Years later, this troubled past follows her to the United States, where, as a mother and a wife, she too is forced to decide between what is right and what might save her family — the same choice she witnessed her father make many years before.

As the novel sweeps across six decades and two continents, the life of the narrator shadows the course of Taiwan’s history from the end of Japanese colonial rule to the decades under martial law and, finally, to Taiwan’s transformation into a democracy. But, above all, Green Island is a lush and lyrical story of a family and a nation grappling with the nuances of complicity and survival, raising the question: how far would you be willing to go for the ones you love?

Buy from Amazon

Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

 3/5

I’m not a fan of reading letters, but they grew on me. It is impressive how the eloquently author expresses such a wide range of emotions.

When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece, Last Words from Montmartre. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.

The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed.

Buy from Amazon

Emily X.R. Pan - The Astonishing Color of After

 3/5

Young Adult (or Middle School) romance and family drama, combined with a trip to Taiwan.

Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.

Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.

Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.

Buy from Amazon

Julie Wu - The Third Son

 3/5

Great start (the part in Taiwan), but less ‘spirited’ story and character development in the US. The Third Son illustrates the meaning of powerlessness.

In the middle of a terrifying air raid in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, Saburo, the least-favored son of a Taiwanese politician, runs through a forest for cover. It’s there he stumbles on Yoshiko, whose descriptions of her loving family are to Saburo like a glimpse of paradise. Meeting her is a moment he will remember forever, and for years he will try to find her again. When he finally does, she is by the side of his oldest brother and greatest rival.

In The Third Son, author Julie Wu has created an extraordinary character, determined to fight for everything he needs and wants, from food to education to his first love. The Third Son is a sparkling and moving story about a young boy with his head in the clouds who, against all odds, finds himself on the frontier of America’s space program.

Buy from Amazon

Qiu Miaojin - Notes of a Crocodile

 3/5

A classic that is more interesting because of its message than because of its story. Not a very happy book.

Set in the post-martial-law era of late 1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile depicts the coming-of-age of a group of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, Qiu Miaojin’s cult classic novel is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and countercultural icon.

Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman who is alternately hot and cold toward her, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes the devil-may-care, rich-kid-turned-criminal Meng Sheng and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover Chu Kuang, as well as the bored, mischievous overachiever Tun Tun and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend Zhi Rou.

Buy from Amazon

Loa Hô - Scales of Injustice: The Complete Fiction of Loa Hô

 3/5

For those with an (academic) interest in this historical period and Taiwan’s literary scene.

Lōa Hô (also Lai He, 1894-1943) was a pioneering writer from Taiwan often called the ‘father of New Taiwanese Literature’. As a doctor during the colonial period in Taiwan, Loa witnessed the cruelty of Japanese rule and wrote stories which display both his sense of justice and social insight. His writing often utilized irony and satire to criticize the status quo, and his work provides a fascinating window into the struggle for Taiwanese self-determination during the early twentieth century.

Scales of Injustice contains the complete fiction of Loa Hô, with an expert introduction from Pei-yin Lin and explanatory notes by translator Darryl Sterk.

Buy from Amazon

K-Ming Chang - Bestiary

 2/5

Half of you will love this book and the other half will have a hard time finishing it. The sentences are beautiful and the story is unique, raw and surreal. I should have loved this book – it has all the right elements – but I struggled to finish it. The narrative style and the characters didn’t work for me.

Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this spellbinding, visceral debut about one family’s queer desires, violent impulses, and buried secrets.

One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman’s body. She was called Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her grandmother; a visiting aunt arrives with snakes in her belly; a brother tests the possibility of flight. All the while, Daughter is falling for Ben, a neighborhood girl with strange powers of her own. As the two young lovers translate the grandmother’s letters, Daughter begins to understand that each woman in her family embodies a myth–and that she will have to bring her family’s secrets to light in order to change their destiny.

Buy from Amazon

Li Ang - The Lost Garden

 2/5

Non-linear story (in an unpleasant way) with alternating perspective (I/she) and unclear theme (romance, business and politics or gardens).

In this eloquent and atmospheric novel, Li Ang further cements her reputation as one of our most sophisticated contemporary Chinese-language writers. “The Lost Garden” moves along two parallel lines. In one, we relive the family saga of Zhu Yinghong, whose father, Zhu Zuyan, was a gentry intellectual imprisoned for dissent in the early days of Chiang Kai-shek’s rule. After his release, Zhu Zuyan literally walled himself in his Lotus Garden, which he rebuilt according to his own desires.

Forever under suspicion, Zhu Zuyan indulged as much as he could in circumscribed pleasures, though they drained the family fortune. Eventually everything belonging to the household had to be sold, including the Lotus Garden. The second storyline picks up in modern-day Taipei as Zhu Yinghong meets Lin Xigeng, a real estate tycoon and playboy. Their cat-and-mouse courtship builds against the extravagant banquets and decadent entertainments of Taipei’s wealthy businessmen. Though the two ultimately marry, their high-styled romance dulls over time, forcing them on a quest to rediscover enchantment in the Lotus Garden. An expansive narrative rich with intimate detail, “The Lost Garden” is a moving portrait of the losses incurred as we struggle to hold on to our passions.

Buy from Amazon

Jessica J. Lee - Two Trees Make a Forest

 2/5

A non-fiction family history and travel log with a focus on the geography and flora and fauna of Taiwan. I found it boring and not engaging, but other people seem to praise the prose.

Taiwan is an island of extremes: towering mountains, lush forests, and barren escarpment. Between shifting tectonic plates and a history rife with tension, the geographical and political landscape is forever evolving. After unearthing a hidden memoir of her grandfather’s life, Jessica J. Lee seeks to piece together the fragments of her family’s history as they moved from China to Taiwan, and then on to Canada. But as she navigates the tumultuous terrain of Taiwan, Lee finds herself having to traverse fissures in language, memory, and history, as she searches for the pieces of her family left behind.

Interlacing a personal narrative with Taiwan’s history and terrain, Two Trees Make a Forest is an intimate examination of the human relationship with geography and nature, and offers an exploration of one woman’s search for history and belonging amidst an ever-shifting landscape.

Buy from Amazon

Wu Ming-yi - The Stolen Bicycle

On a quest to explain how and why his father mysteriously disappeared twenty years ago, a writer embarks on an epic journey in search of a stolen bicycle and soon finds himself immersed in the strangely overlapping histories of the Japanese military during World War II, Lin Wang, the oldest elephant who ever lived, and the secret world of antique bicycle collectors in Taiwan. The result is a surprising and moving meditation on memory, loss, and the bonds of family.

Buy from Amazon

Chang Ying-tai - The Bear Whispers to Me

A reclusive young boy stumbles upon his father’s diary. Filled with drawings, photos and anecdotes, the diary reveals an alpine world that his father once inhabited as a child: where tribes were fashioned by tree spirits; animals could be spoken to; fleas danced; and the moon and stars were guiding lights in darkling forests. His father’s world was alive with birdsong and hidden spirits, serene yet fleeting—but it all changed when he befriended two bears.

Bewitching and timeless, award-winning Taiwanese author Chang Ying-Tai’s The Bear Whispers to Me is a poignant forest fable about the vivid beauty of the natural world, childhood, loss and the transient nature of time.

Buy from Amazon

Horace Ho - The Tree Fort on Carnation Lane

Daniel Fang’s mid-thirties are marked by the birth of his daughter and the death of a childhood friend. His daughter’s birth and infancy reminds him of his own boyhood, his friend’s death of the good times he had with back in their old neighbourhood.

They were the kids from the wrong side of the temple, kids who grew up in the night market and next to the red light district. Their parents didn’t like them visiting the market by themselves and expressly forbade them from taking a single step into Carnation Lane. But the appearance of a chained orangutan in a night market spectacle the year the three friends turned twelve convinced them to defy the parental ban. While the adults were away at a protest against Taiwan’s endless Martial Law, they stole into the banned zone, released the beast from bondage and led it upstream, on a quest to find the fabled zoo.

The memory of this all-but-forgotten childhood experience comes back after news of his friend’s suicide. It seems to Daniel Fang that the two events must somehow be connected. A cryptologist by training, he decides to investigate, hoping to solve the mystery of his friend’s death and decode the message contained within the memory that has shaped, even warped, their later lives.

Buy from Amazon

Wang Ting-kuo - My Enemy's Cherry Tree

A man who has come from nothing, from poverty and loss, finds himself a beautiful wife, his dream love. When she vanishes without a trace, he sets up a small café in her favourite spot on the edge of the South China Sea, hoping she’ll return.

Instead, he is confronted by the man he suspects may be responsible for everything he has suffered: Luo Yiming, a prominent businessman and philanthropist who holds the small town in his sway. In the few moments the two men spend together, Luo is driven mad.

So begins a story of desire and betrayal set against the tumultuous first decade of Taiwan’s 21st Century. The recipient of all three of Taiwan’s major literary prizes, My Enemy’s Cherry Tree is a story of love, money and coercion, in which two men who have sought to acquire something unattainable, instead lose something irreplaceable.

Buy from Amazon

Huang Chun-ming - The Taste of Apples

In “The Two Sign Painters,” TV reporters ambush two young workers from the country taking a break atop a twenty-four-story building. “His Son’s Big Doll” introduces the tortured soul inside a walking advertisement, and in “Xiaoqi’s Cap” a dissatisfied pressure-cooker salesman is fascinated by a young schoolgirl.

Huang’s characters–generally the uneducated and disadvantaged who must cope with assaults on their traditionalism, hostility from their urban brethren and, of course, the debilitating effects of poverty–come to life in all their human uniqueness, free from idealization.

Buy from Amazon

Zhong Lihe - From the Old Country: stories and sketches of China and Taiwan

Though he lived most of his life in rural South Taiwan, Zhong Lihe spent several years in Manchuria and Peking, moving among an eclectic mix of ethnicities, social classes, and cultures. His fictional portraits unfold on Japanese battlefields and in Peking slums, as well as in the remote, impoverished hill-country villages and farms of his native Hakka districts. His scenic descriptions are deft and atmospheric, and his psychological explorations are acute. The first anthology to present his work in English, this volume features two novellas, ten short stories, and four short prose works.

Buy from Amazon

Shih Chiung-yu - Wedding in Autumn and Other Stories

Haunted by memories of the Chinese Civil War in the late 1940s, nationalist soldiers from all over mainland China are doomed to live out their days in exile in Taitung County, along the southeastern shore of the island of Taiwan.

The three novellas in this collection tell stories of Chinese men who were forced to leave their loved ones behind and the aboriginal Amis locals they marry or adopt to try to make themselves at home, often in vain, for their wives and adopted daughters and sons end up knocked up, sexually abused, sold into prostitution, happily married, or insane.

Set in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s, Wedding in Autumn and Other Stories captures the suffering and the will to survive of marginalised people everywhere.

Buy from Amazon

Chu T'ien-wen - Notes of a Desolate Man

The narrator, Xiao Shao, recollects a series of friends and lovers, as he watches his childhood friend, Ah Yao, succumb to complications from AIDS. The brute fact of Ah Yao’s death focuses Shao’s simultaneously erudite and erotic reflections magnetically on the core theme of mortality. By turns humorous and despondent, the narrator struggles to come to terms with Ah Yao’s risky lifestyle, radical political activism, and eventual death; the fragility of romantic love; the awesome power of eros; the solace of writing; the cold ennui of a younger generation enthralled only by video games; and life on the edge of mainstream Taiwanese society. His feverish journey through forests of metaphor and allusion–from Fellini and Levi-Strauss to classical Chinese poetry–serves as a litany protecting him from the ravages of time and finitude.

Impressive in scope and detail, Notes of a Desolate Man employs the motif of its characters’ marginalized sexuality to highlight Taiwan’s vivid and fragile existence on the periphery of mainland China.

Buy from Amazon

Li Ang - The Butcher's Wife

Chen Jiangshui is a pig-butcher in a small coastal Taiwanese town. Stocky, with a paunch and deep-set beady eyes, he resembles a pig himself. His brutality towards his new young wife, Lin Shi, knows no bounds. The more she screams, the more he likes it. She is further isolated by the vicious gossip of her neighbors who condemn her for screaming aloud. As they see it, women are supposed to be tolerant and put their husbands above everything else. According to an old Chinese belief, all butchers are destined for hell—an eternity of torment by the animals they have dispatched. Lin Shi, isolated, despairing, and finally driven to madness, fittingly kills him with his own instrument—a meat cleaver. A literary sensation in the Chinese language world with its suggestion that ritual and tradition are the functions of oppression, this novel also caused widespread outrage with its unsparing portrayal of sexual violence and emotional cruelty. This tale has made a profound impact on contemporary Chinese literature and today ranks as a landmark text in both women’s studies and world literature.

Buy from Amazon

Hsiao Li-Hung - A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers

At once a bittersweet romance and a vividly detailed portrait of life in a southern Taiwanese coastal town in the 1970s, A Thousand Moons on a Thousand Rivers captures the intimacy of agricultural life in the midst of an increasingly industrialized society. At the heart of the story is Zhenguan, a sensitive young woman whose coming of age is influenced by new experiences in the city, the wisdom of her elders, and her strong, unique identity. In Zhenguan’s journey of first love, suffering, disillusionment, and–ultimately–zenlike triumph, Hsiao Li-hung celebrates the values and traditions that have sustained and nurtured life in Taiwan through the centuries.

Hsiao traces the relationship of Zhenguan and her childhood friend Daxin against the background of daily existence and festival celebrations in their extended family. Daxin, in many ways Zhenguan’s male counterpart, is fascinated by ancestral worship during Lunar New Year, riddle-solving during the Lantern Festival, and the noontime water and sticky rice dumplings of the Dragonboat Festival. These rituals, part of a rich cultural heritage, add charm to their romance while shedding light on the reasons for their eventual separation.

Buy from Amazon

Chang Hsi-Kuo - The City Trilogy

Taiwan’s most innovative science fiction writer presents three tales of intrigue, espionage, betrayal, political strife, time travel, and Chinese history and mysticism. After thousands of years of civil unrest and countless wars, the weary Huhui people of Sunlon City have once again succumbed to a ruthless and overpowering enemy. In “Five Jade Disks,” the first book in the trilogy, the imperialistic Shan have enslaved the inhabitants of Sunlon City and imposed a harsh martial order. The story continues in “Defenders of the Dragon City.” The Shan have been defeated, but the victory celebrations of the Huhui are quickly brought to an end. The third novel, “Tale of a Feather,” opens with images of chaos and devastation. The conflict with the Shan has left the city in flames, and refugees are fleeing in droves through the main gates.

Buy from Amazon

Zhang Guixing - My South Seas Sleeping Beauty

My South Seas Sleeping Beauty is a captivating coming-of-age tale set in the magical jungles of Borneo. Told through the vivid recollections of a Chinese-Malay youth, the novel recounts the life of Su Qi, a troubled, sensitive son of a wealthy family, and exemplifies the imaginative range of one of Taiwan’s most innovative writers.

In an effort to escape the oppression of home, Su Qi loses himself in the surrounding jungle, full of Communist guerillas and strange tropical fauna. The jungle further blurs the line between fantasy and reality for Su Qi, until he meets Chunxi, the beautiful, frail daughter of his father’s best friend. Chunxi is an oasis of kindness and honesty in an otherwise cruel and evasive world, but after a bizarre accident, Chunxi falls into a deep coma, and Su Qui flees to Taiwan.

In college Su Qi meets Keyi, a vivacious siren who helps Su Qi forget not only his violent past but also the colorful tales of his youth. When a family member dies, however, Su Qi is pulled back to the jungles of Borneo where he begins to unravel the secrets of his family’s past-a story stranger than any fairy tale-and learns that his cherished dream of awakening his beloved Chunxi may be more than just a fantasy.

Buy from Amazon

Yang Mu - Memories of Mount Qilai

Hualien, on the Pacific coast of eastern Taiwan, and its mountains, especially Mount Qilai, were deeply inspirational for the young poet Yang Mu. A place of immense natural beauty and cultural heterogeneity, the city was also a site of extensive social, political, and cultural change in the twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and the American bombings of World War II to the Chinese civil war, the White Terror, and the Cold War.

Taken as a whole, these evocative and allusive autobiographical essays provide a personal response to history as Taiwan transitioned from a Japanese colony to the Republic of China. Yang Mu recounts his childhood experiences under the Japanese, life in the mountains in proximity to indigenous people as his family took refuge from the American bombings, his initial encounters and cultural conflicts with Nationalist soldiers recently arrived from mainland China, the subsequent activities of the Nationalist government to consolidate power, and the island’s burgeoning new manufacturing society.

Nevertheless, throughout those early years, Yang Mu remained anchored by a sense of place on Taiwan’s eastern coast and amid its coastal mountains, over which stands Mount Qilai like a guardian spirit. This was the formative milieu of the young poet. Yang Mu seized on verse to develop a distinct persona and draw meaning from the currents of change reshuffling his world. These eloquent essays create an exciting, subjective realm meant to transcend the personal and historical limitations of the individual and the end of culture, “plundered and polluted by politics and industry long ago.”

Buy from Amazon

The post Most interesting books set in Taiwan appeared first on Where to Kim?.

Most interesting and engaging books of 2020

Kim — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 15:00:00 +0000

What are the best new books in 2020? And how about surprisingly good older gems? A year of reviewing books led me to some very engaging books.

These are my highlights and surprises of 2020. While I haven’t read all books that were published – not even all of the popular ones – I found many engaging books among those that I did read.

A year of reading and reviewing books… I read over 100 books this year and reviewed half of them. Many of the books I read are now on my Korea, Japan, Finland, Malaysia, or Hong Kong book lists.

While I read books from all over the world, I still have some blindspots. So my resolution for next year: read a book originating from or set in Africa and South America. If you know a good one, please suggest it to me in the comments below.

Back to 2020. Many of the books I read were released in 2020 or will be released in 2021. But aside from my more recent picks, I also read some classics or other books that are still getting a lot of attention around the world. Some of it deserved, the rest – in my eyes – baffling. That’s what is so great about the vast amount of books that exist in the world: there is a ‘right’ book for everyone.

I see it as my mission to raise awareness of all the good stories that exist in this world.

So here they come: the best, most engaging, unique, and inspiring stories of 2020.

Feelings

My Wow books of 2020

Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Review): a beautiful story, wonderfully crafted with a deeper layer underneath.
What Makes a City? By Park Seongwon (Review): deep and moving, and above all, intriguing stories that discuss heavy themes in a dark humor kind of way.
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (Review): a mix of humor, rich fantasy, and survival on top of everything that is wrong in society. I like books with (dark) twists in the end.
The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun (Review): a perfect blend between reality and imagination. Who doesn’t love to read about traveling to unique places?
No One Writes Back by Eun-Jin Jang (I didn’t review this one, check it out on Amazon): even though the plot might not come as a surprise, the journey there is beautiful to read.

Engaging my mind

Dead Money by Srinath Adiga (Amazon, 2021 release date): what if the economy of your present life and afterlife would mingle? My review of this book will be published on January 18th.
The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov (Amazon): this book feels so 2020 when talking about the difference between seeing and viewing, and the characters living alone on their estates.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo (Amazon): painful and confronting. The last chapter from the doctor’s point of view was brilliant.
There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumara (Review): a book that is funny at times, deep at others. An excellent read about passion and finding meaning.

This one holds a special place in my heart

Children of the Cave by Virve Sammalkorpi (Review): I have no rational explanation for liking this book. The book is not very exciting, yet it made me feel a lot.

The three unfortunate books that I expected more from

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (Amazon): Fredrik Backman is one of my favorite authors and I’ve read and enjoyed most of his books. This book just didn’t work for me.
Free Food For Millionaires by Min Jin Lee (Amazon): I read this book because the Dutch translation was published this year. Nothing in it inspired me to write a review. Too underwhelming.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow (Amazon): Why couldn’t I like this book about traveling through doors? 🙁 Fortunately, many other people do like it very much.

Extra spotlight for my favorite books of last year (pre-review era)

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins (Amazon): fun, engaging, and refreshing fantasy book.
Beside the sea by Véronique Olmi (Amazon): painfully real, just painful.
Echo by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Amazon): Dutch horror book of my favorite Dutch author. The English translation will be released in 2021. His earlier book Hex has already been translated into English. I’m looking forward to the Dutch release of his new book Orakel in January 2021.
No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai (Amazon): my favorite Japanese book.

Travel and Art

The two books that resembled travel guides the most

The Ghost Moths by Harry Farthing (Review): a great read infused with history, culture, and mysteries. Set in Tibet, Nepal, and India.
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin (Review): a beautiful story, wonderfully crafted with a deeper layer underneath.

Imbued with the spirit of art

Conception by Özgür Uyanık (Review): a thought-provoking read, humorous, but in a morbid way. Conception is about an artist who challenges society with his conceptual art.
Girls Against God by Jenny Hval (Review): a book that fascinated me, but that I didn’t necessarily enjoy. Still, after rereading my review: maybe I’ll read the book again someday.

Fascinating because of its uniqueness or topic

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval (Review): a book that fascinated me, but that I didn’t necessarily enjoy. Still, after rereading my review: maybe I’ll read the book again someday.
Land-Water-Sky by Katłıà (Review): a magical story collection inspired by Dene (Canada) legends and myths. I really enjoyed reading about legends and myths I had never heard of before.

Broadening my mind with some poetry

I’ll Fly Away by Rudy Francisco (Review): a poetry collection about language barriers and (mis)communication. This one didn’t resonate with me as well as the next one.
Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun (Review): wonderful poems that read like stories. You sympathize with the characters, but sometimes, you sympathize even more with the food.

Best cover art

Some Are Always Hungry by Jihyun Yun (Review): wonderful poems that read like stories. You sympathize with the characters, but sometimes, you sympathize even more with the food.

Otherwise interesting

Golden oldies

The Underground Village by Kang Kyeong-ae (Review): a storybook that gives insight into the lives of those that came before us. Placeless stories, sometimes timeless, showing the harsh reality of life.
Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki (Amazon): a Japanese classic quietly contemplating feelings and relationships.
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata (Amazon): another Japanese classic that is highly praised. Unfortunately, I didn’t like it all that much. I couldn’t ‘feel’ what it was about.

A big role for animals

The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa (Amazon): sometime this year I got fascinated by the vast amount of Japanese books featuring cats. This is one of them. Even better: it’s about a cat that is traveling!
The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna (Amazon): animals are great companions that can have a large impact on your life. Who would have thought that meeting a hare could be this life-changing?

What is the most interesting and engaging book you read in 2020? Any books you’re looking forward to in 2021?

The post Most interesting and engaging books of 2020 appeared first on Where to Kim?.

Book list Archives - Where to Kim?

Most interesting and engaging books of 2022

Extremes

Guaranteed rereads

The opposite

Old and new obsessions

Meeting new cultures

Return to Korea

Into Japanese (books)

I want to visit Taiwan and China in a post-apocalyptic(corona) world!

Close to home

Most popular book reviews on Wheretokim in 2022

Books that make you feel stuck in one place

Bae Myung-hoon - Tower

Olga Ravn - The Employees

Hiroko Oyamada - The Factory

Chi Ta-wei - The Membranes

Tom Watson - Metronome

Yoko Ogawa - The Memory Police

Guđmundur Andri Thorsson - And the Wind Sees All

Robert Seethaler - The Field

Jon Fosse - The Other Name: Septology I-II

Isaac Asimov - The Naked Sun

Most interesting and engaging books of 2021

Dare to feel

My Wow books of 2021

Exploring new horizons

Into science this year?

Identity

LGBTQ+

Contemplative and mesmerizing

Hard to judge

Whatever happened?

Books I wanted to like so much

Guilty pleasures

Published by Honford Star (because I ended up buying all of them)

Most popular reviews on Wheretokim in 2021

Interesting Japanese Short Story Collections

Best Japanese Short Stories

Yoko Ogawa - Revenge

Otsuichi - Goth

Yoko Ogawa - The Diving Pool: Three Novellas

Misumi Kobo - So We Look to the Sky

Matsuda Aoko - Where the Wild Ladies Are

Edogawa Rampo - Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination

Asako Serizawa - Inheritors

Haruki Murakami - First Person Singular

Izumi Suzuki - Terminal Boredom

Yukiko Motoya - The Lonesome Bodybuilder

Taeko Kōno - Toddler Hunting & Other Stories

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa - Murder in the Age of Enlightenment

Exciting Korean Short Story Collections

Best Korean Short Stories Books

1) Park Seongwon - What Makes a City?

2) Bae Myung-hoon - Tower

3) Bora Chung - Cursed Bunny

4) Choi Eunyoung - Shoko's Smile

5) Kim Bo-young - I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories

6) Ha Seong-nan - Flowers of Mold

7) Ha Seong-nan - Bluebeard's First Wife

8) Kang Kyeong-ae - The Underground Village

Kim Un-su - The Cabinet

Kim Jung-hyuk - The Library of Musical Instruments

Sue Ja Joo - Night Picture of Rain Sound

Jung Young-moon - A Most Ambiguous Sunday and Other Stories

Kim Bo-young - On the Origin of Species and Other Stories

Kim Tongin - Sweet Potato

Jeon Sungtae - Wolves

Yi Sang - The Wings

Chul-Woo Lim - The Dog Thief

Most Interesting Books Set in Austria

Best Austrian Books

Marianne Fritz - The Weight of Things

Thomas Bernhard - Wittgenstein's Nephew

Marlen Haushofer - The Wall

Viktor E. Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning

Robert Seethaler - The Field

Linda Stift - The Empress and the Cake

Daniel Glattauer - Love Virtually

Thomas Glavinic - The Camera Killer