WHAT STRANGE PARADISE by Omar El Akkad
A quiet, simple tale, creating a delicate and intricate mood. And yet, it screams at the horrors and hypocrisy of the bigger picture. Timely and important. Loved it.
And the next 7 books I read, taking me to the end of March, were these beauties:
With a quarter of the year gone, my reading hasn’t been anywhere as prolific as in other years, but there’s been plenty of quality, challenging fiction as well as thought provoking non-fiction.
My ninth completed book of the year is Common Ground by Naomi Ishiguro. In a lot of ways my favourite way of story telling, tip toeing along the line between out-and-out page turner and pure literary fiction. Gorgeously narrated and full of truth, despair and frustration as well as hope. Lovely.
It’s taken me 4 1/2 months to get to 10 books this year. I certainly didn’t rush To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara – every single sentence of its glorious prose needed to be treasured, on all of the 700+ pages. After discovering Yanagihara through her previous opus, A Little Life, I’m pleased to say that the follow up is certainly not a disappointment. Beautiful and scarily plausible.
And then my next four books, taking me to the middle of June were these:
And then these four…..
Packing Our Trunks 