The Time Keeper and After The Quake

I love reading while traveling, it makes the flights endurable and it adds value to my trips, because it brings together two of my greatest passions, reading and traveling. This was one of those books that I just grabbed because the blurb looked interesting. It is VERY EASY to read - short sequences, direct language, simple plot - so it's a good one to read even if your English level is not that high. I mean, you'll learn English and still enjoy the fun of a good plot.

Here's an extract from a review, whose opinion I share.

The Time Keeper is one of those books that, despite almost farcical sequences, works because of its message. Albom’s style of writing is fluent, simple and with an emphasis on brevity. It explores time from various aspects: its creation, its use and abuse and how its value varies from person to person.

It is not easy to imagine a world without timekeeping and yet, Albom’s right: the more we count time — and there are many ways of counting it — the more misery it creates. “Man alone measures time. And, because of this, man alone suffers a paralyzing fear that no other creature endures. A fear of time running out.”

Another lovely, easy-to-read book. And a pleasure to read too! Here's an extract from a review too.

Each of these stories, as their collective title suggests, takes place in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake, but because none of them is directly linked to it, they allow Murakami to examine its effects obliquely, from within his own infinitely nuanced metaphysical world.

If an earthquake is what happens beneath the ground, beyond our sight and immediate comprehension, then so too are our individual lives shaped by psychological and emotional tremors that we find hard to grasp, and subject to numerous unpredictable and violent aftershocks.

HAVISHAM - Prelude to Great Expectations

I quite enjoyed Great Expectations, and Miss Havisham was quite a disturbing character. This book by Ronald Frame presents itself as the prequel to Great Expectations.

Here's an extract from a review:

The greatest difficulty with Havisham, however, lies at the very heart of the endeavour. Frame seeks to recast Miss Havisham as a woman of flesh and blood, driven mad by heartbreak, but that is to miss the point of Dickens's creation. Miss Havisham is not an elusive ghost like Brontë's Bertha but nor is she real, as Pip is real. She is an illusion of startling intensity, like the gods of fable or the witch in a fairy story. Trapped in her mausoleum of a house, the embodiment of disillusionment and bitterness, of a life wasted and anguish turned inside out, she derives her power from her otherness. By making a real person of her, Frame is obliged not only to scale her down to human size but to explain all the awkward logistical quibbles that Dickens imperiously overlooked. In so doing, he diminishes both her majestic inhumanity and her terrible pathos, and loosens her hold over our imaginations.

ALAN BENNETT "I've often wanted to be bolder"

You know how I was telling you about Smut? Here's a comment taken from an interview published in the Guardian (click here to read it) where he talks about one of the stories published in the book.

Never more so than in the beautiful and filthy short story, The Greening of Mrs Donaldson, written for a recent edition of the London Review of Books. Mrs Donaldson, a widow in her late 50s, has a part-time job at a medical school acting out cases to the students to test their diagnostic skills. She takes in two students as lodgers, and when they run short of rent money they suggest a lubricious transaction that involves voyeurism, a threesome of sorts and sado-masochism.