2015 Reading List #3

These are the books I read in April and May, thanks to the local library.

I tackled 2 award-winning heavyweights - The Luminaries (2013 Man Booker Prize) and The Goldfinch (2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction). Both of these took a while to get into but if you keep at it for the first 100 pages or so, the rest becomes easy. The challenge I had with The Luminaries was the number of main characters, keeping track of who's who and who did what, and switching between present and past in the narrative. The Goldfinch was more straightforward, but just as thrilling. It felt like an achievement when everything finally made sense at the end. I picked up The Book of Lost Things at the library because of the cover. I liked the typography and design, which evokes mystery. The story reminded me of the movie Pan's Labyrinth, otherworldly and dark. I chose Kitchen just because I have not read a Banana Yoshimoto book before. This did not disappoint.

#9. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

It is 1866, and young Walter Moody has come to make his fortune upon the New Zealand goldfields. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: A wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into the mystery: a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is a brilliantly constructed, fiendishly clever ghost story and a gripping page-turner (from Goodreads).

#10. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

Two stories, "Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow," told through the eyes of a pair of contemporary young Japanese women, deal with the themes of mothers, love, transsexuality, kitchens, and tragedy (from Goodreads).

#11. The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

High in his attic bedroom, twelve-year-old David mourns the death of his mother, with only the books on his shelf for company. But those books have begun to whisper to him in the darkness. Angry and alone, he takes refuge in his imagination and soon finds that reality and fantasy have begun to meld. While his family falls apart around him, David is violently propelled into a world that is a strange reflection of his own -- populated by heroes and monsters and ruled by a faded king who keeps his secrets in a mysterious book, The Book of Lost Things (from Goodreads).

#12. The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

It begins with a boy. Theo Decker, a thirteen-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by his unbearable longing for his mother, he clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the underworld of art (from Goodreads).