Books I RED

Honestly I did not understand why this book won the booker prize in 2021. The story was fascinating in terms of themes of "otherness" and the upbringing in West Africa, Senegal I suppose but then the events of the severed arms did not make sense to me, I guess there was some hidden symbolism in it that made this book an award winner but it was not a homerun for me. The story is about two boys who are more than friends, they are almost brothers, they grow up and go to fight in the first world war together on the side of France, their colonizer and then one of them dies, shook by his friends death the other starts to sever the arms of enemy soldiers by cutting them off and hiding them as the other soldiers ostracize him and start to think that he is a "djinn" like a demon spirit of a kind. The surviving main character relates his life story but is not really a guy one has sympathy for, there's a strong streak of cultural Senegalese ingredients to the story. I crit...

Fans of literature know that Orwell imitated Zamyatin Yevgeny's We  when he wrote 1984 and I told you before dear reader, that I was not impressed by Orwell's masterpiece at all. in 2016 a South Korean author named Cho Nam-Joo released her story to the world and titled it 1982 referring to the year the heroine of the story; Jiyoung was born. From the onset the reader wonders weather Jiyoung is kind of her. The story caused quite the uproar in South Korea at the time, the reason being (according to my thought) unexplored cultural trauma resulting in misogynistic culture (or woman hate culture). What do I mean? Allow me dear reader to explain my theory on the matter: Korea was also subject to colonialization. " Unlike many other countries in Asia, Korea was colonized not by Western imperialist powers in the late 1800s and early 1900s but by  Japan , an Asian imperialist power, in the first half of the twentieth century. Japan fought China for dominance in Korea in 1894-95 an...

 There's so much to say about this book, I read it prior to Camus book but am just now giving a bit of a comment on it. I will be short, like the novels I've read this month.  Bradbury beautifully at times with an awkward and unnecessarily complicated ways describes one mans adventure and awakening. Awakening is nowadays a dirty word, since the so called "pandemic" that is.  Much of Bradbury's world reflects our own, he wrote it in the 1950's yet accurately describes what it feels like for man to be constantly connected to a screen in a world where empathy and human contact is minimal. I fear that his predictions where right, we are in a time when novels have become shorter because people don't have the patience to read, or maybe, they're like I, trying to reach my goal of 54 books this year.  However people need leisure time, and this is something that our modern world cannot afford. Like the content moderators of Hanna Bervoets book "we became l...

Continuing on my February shorter novels I came across Albert Camu's The Outsider. I read the Everyman's Library copy and enjoyed turning the quality bound pages of what I suppose is quality German paper, as Everyman's are printed and bound there.  The story of Meursault doesn't initially touch me, I find him indeed to be like everyman, a "man of the world" as Celeste describes him later in the courtroom. Celeste, his friend, means well in saying so, he means that Meursault, our guy, is just a Joe, just a regular dude with no depth, no ill intentions. But halfway through the book my love for him awakens, I understand him there's a huge soft spot in his character. There is depth to him. He is not a sociopath, he is not autistic he is a man with a particular and beautiful inner world and indeed he means no harm. The killing was perhaps not solely caused by the sun shining mercilessly in his eyes, but he was only half self aware in committing the crime.  The ...

 I read this book in just a day, partly because it was so small. How do you call a book of 137 pages and font size 14 a novel is beyond me, but I'm all for it if this is the new thing. Sounds good to me as writing time is on the card or the clock, how to say in English. This fellow writer, Berovoets is only two years older than me and she's accomplished quite a lot.  My library opens at 9 am every morning for one self-service hour and they brought a shelf of recommended pocket books next to the automatic borrowing station, so I borrowed this book.  What did I think of it? Well, like one famous author on the cover of the book stated, it was dreamlike and captivating, though it resembled more of a nightmare in my opinion. The story was about a group of content moderators who became friends. Of the friend group two became lovers and at the end they had varying opinions of what went wrong in the relationship. The story was a harrowing reminder of what bad screentime can do to...

 First of all, I love Atwood. Second of all reading Bodily Harm along side a lot of things that I've thought of and processed lately have been good for me. A year ago, around this time, I travelled with my kids and saw the place I had written a story about, namely my first fictional book in English. I thought that I was done, a year ago. I was in fact confident that the story was complete, and it was, except not in it's written form. Besides I decided to change it a lot, shake it up and write again, good decision.  When I think back to the time when it dawned on me that I am destined to write, to become an author of the many stories that flow through me it was partly at the inspiration of a letter that arrived from Canada. I had written to Atwood and she had replied me by mail, a real letter. I wrote her in autumn of 2021, so it took one year for the response to arrive. In my work i also deal with postage to far away places like Canada and hence it didn't surprise me that h...