Tag: bookreviews

All The Light We Cannot See -By Anthony Doerr

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Let me talk today about one of my most precious treasures. As a good treasured it fell into my hands by a simple coincidence. I was in Sydney, where I used to live, and as it always happens —it is still happening to me here in France—, when I cannot find books in Spanish I don’t know what to choose. I was randomly looking inside Harry Hartog, my favourite bookstore in Bondi, when I found it. Strange title, I thought. I then saw a note of recommendation classifying it as one of the best books in fiction. I bought it and left it in my own little library for two months. And when I finally took it  I regret of having lost two months in which I should had known everything about this book.

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Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Book Reviews

Being creative is like playing hide-and-seek. She runs in every direction, I chase her, with all my speed and my strength. She stops, looks at me an laughs. She disappears. I run again, this time determined to catch her, I find her, and I touch her, yes, I think I just touched her, but when I try to grab her from her muscular arm she scapes and runs again, laughing at me, once again.

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The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin

.Reading time 7 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

Gretchen Rubin has been famous for some years now. Not to me. I ran into her book by only a coincidence, looking for those books that are chicken soup for the soul. It was the word happiness that got my attention because, Are we not all looking to find it? Is it not the last end of life that all the philosophers talk about? The aim of all religions and theories in this world? She said she could find it and I was up for it.

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The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Novel by Milan Kundera

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

‘The absolute absence of weight makes the man to become lighter in the air, to fly higher, distance from the Earth, from his earthy being, that is real only in half and his movements are as free as they are insignificant’ [my own translation]

Milan Kundera loves Nietzsche. He loves his country, Czech Republic, he loves Prague. He speaks with great sadness of the communists times that swelled the ‘before’ of his country to turn it into a group of people with fear. But it also rescues the long-lasting and stubborn braveness of his fellow countrymen who didn’t get drown by the regime despite the consequences. Tomas, the protagonist of this story, was one of them. Tomas scaped to Europe but returned because he could not stand the solitude without Tereza, who went back to Prague tired of his infidelities. Others were more strategic. They migrated for good to Europe, right in the moment they could have done it, leaving the ‘Kitsch’, the communist dream, behind. In Czech Republic the citizens only ambition mundane things. Be born, grow up, fall in love, have children and die. There is no more aspiration that living in this utopia.

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List of Books I Read on 2020 -Many More to Come!

.Reading time 1 minute.

Book Reviews

In English:

  • Big Magic -Elizabeth Gilbert
  • The Moons of Jupiter -Alice Munro
  • What I loved -Siri Hustvedt
  • A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women -Siri Hustvedt
  • To Kill a Mockingbird -Harper Lee
  • When We Were Orphans -Kasuo Ishiguro
  • A Gentleman in Moscou -Amor Towles
  • Little Fires Everywhere -Celeste Ng
  • The Happiness Project -Gretchen Rubin
  • The Great Gatsby -F. Scott Fitzgerald
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Half of a Yellow Sun- By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

.Reading time 5 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Before reading this book I had heard her name. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, the Orange Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (precisely for this book). She has been an honour guest at the Hay Festival in certain occasions. She is a writer with a long and wonderful career.  A feminist with a lot to say in this subject, her feminist vision already contained in two books – Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions and We Should All be Feminist. All the books written by this great author have had great literary success. Half of a Yellow Sun is one of my favourites.

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The Moons of Jupiter- A Story of Emotional Intelligence

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Female Talks– Tap to see the video

The women in Alice Munro’s book, ‘The Moons of Jupiter‘, are constantly looking for validation by men. Unfortunately, being born in a rich country like Canada, being professional and being smart, doesn’t relate with what they are constantly looking for: Love and acceptance from their partners. Most of the time, these women leave themselves behind, giving everything for only crumbs of love in return.

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A Gentleman in Moscow- by Amor Towles

.Reading time 6 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

This book fell in my hands after Bill Gates recommended it as one of his favourite summer readings. At the beginning I thought it was a Spy’s thriller (one of my favourite genres) and that is why I ran out to buy it.

There is this shock when you realize that even before opening a book you have had a misconception. A Gentleman in Moscow was not about spies. Yes, you could feel them breathing in the main character’s neck from time to time but the story is not typical. As I was expecting the usual spy thriller, the book seemed slow and calm at the beginning. It was good that I decided to go up to the end, otherwise I would have missed a wonderful piece of literature.

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The Moons of Jupiter- by Alice Munro

.Reading time 8 minutes.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Book Reviews

This review has no spoilers but a recap of my favourite tales. Everyday life magnificent stories!

Says Alice Munro in the introduction to her book that once a story is published she cannot read it again, not even can she remember the details that someday gave the story its shape. 

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The Shadow of the Wind- by Carlos Ruiz Safón

.Reading time 4 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

This review has no spoilers. It is a posthumous honorary review to one of the best Spanish speaking authors that have ever existed!

Because it is not what he says. Although that too. It is more the way he says it. It is the description of the human emotions, that sometimes are so predatory. It is the analogy, the magical idealism, the use of the dialect of those years, the Spanish traditions of the XX Century that we thought were long gone.

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