Tag: literature

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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When We Were Orphans- By Kazuo Ishiguro

.Reading time 3 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

This review has no spoilers.

I have dedicated this week to Japanese authors. Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki. Although he was raised in England and all reviews refer to him as British, I do think it is precisely his Asiatic background what has allow him to write such beautiful pieces of literature.

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Little Fires Everywhere- By Celeste Ng

.Reading time 3 minutes.

Book Reviews

Pop Culture

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I have always been attracted to currents of thinking, not necessarily to adopt them myself, but to know why is something likeable to people. This way I feel that I can get a hitch of what people is thinking and why a trend is a trend. And this is why I bought this book. Because it is a national bestseller. Because it is a television series whose protagonists are Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington. Because it is everywhere I look. I wanted to know what was it about.

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How to Avoid Workplace Discrimination

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

Female talks- Tap on the title to see the video

Don’t get discouraged with the rampant discrimination women suffer on work environments. Here are some tips for you to diminish the impact that discrimination causes !

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The Reflect of the Candle on my Wall

.Reading time 11 minutes.

Fiction Story

He appeared like a ghost would at my bedroom’s door. It was him, yes, with his face riddle with wrinkles, with his skin of a colour dark caramel, tired of waking up at dawn to work on the little piece of land that he has owned forever. It was him, there was no doubt, because we were still talking about that same piece of land that Eulalio said, back when we were together, that it would be mine, that it would be for both of us. He is making that promise again, fifty years later, and again, as it was before, it is my only hope for scape.

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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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FLIGHTS by Olga Tokarczuk

.Reading time 7 minutes.

Book Reviews

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Note: This review has some spoilers…

Olga Tokarczuk does not need an introduction. Well, she is from Poland, Nobel Literature Prize 2018. That’s it. She has won several literature prices before. I understand why. She writes as if she were rolling over sentences in a beautiful song and each one of those sentences are attached to one another in perfection. But it was not this what left me with an open mouth. After several days and weeks of finishing ‘Flights’ my head is still spinning trying to guess how was she capable of put such simple stories, that could happen to anyone, in paper. Some of us have lived those stories, or at least one of the stories (exploration of the human body, migration, travel, languages, romance, life and death), but none of us would have been capable of telling them in such a sublime way.

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Literature Lover

.Reading time 7 minutes.

If there is something I find difficult is to make a description of myself. For me, the best way is cutting layers from the outside into the inside. Let’s see: I think I am an average woman of 1.67 cms high, brown hair and eyes. Nothing much nothing less. However, I was always skinny as an arrow. You must be thinking ‘how lucky is she?’ or ‘yes, now what?’ but be mindful that I was growing up in the 80s in Colombia, the country of the beautiful curvy-perfectly-measured women! So it was not always fun. I should say being all bones and skin brought me trouble at school as a lot of jokes were directed at my appearance -from constant questions about the state of my health to some comparisons at cartoons and so on- so, for the first 18 years of my life, I focused my efforts in trying to enlarge my body.

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