Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman By Haruki Murakami (A Collection of Short Stories) Published Year: 2007(by Vintage) Page Count: 435 pages Medium Used: Paperback Genre: Mixed, Short Stories, 2024-read. Rating : 4/5 This book took me longer to read than expected .. perhaps because I was juggling it with other books as well. I wanted to read something by Murakami and went for this one because it only recently arrived in my mail box. Some of these stories .. which are magical, containing supernatural .. made me think and ponder a lot. For instance, a woman suddenly starts forgetting her name and how is it resolved without the help of western, omnipresent meds. A woman can't stop shoping for new clothes and what happens when her husband puts a stop to her unnatural addiction? And so on.. This book is a collection of selected short stories by Murakami. Some of them are small, some are big. Some have a twist .. in the form of an unexpected monkey or they are just explained away with a
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan Winner of Booker Prize 1998 Published Year: 1997 Page Count: 178 pages Medium Used: Paperback Genre: Drama, Domestic Fiction, Euthanasia, Booker Prize, 2024-read. Rating: 3/5 Some Spoilers ahead!! I don't know what it is - either the prose or the story itself - I found my mind wandering into a thousand different places, into a thousand different concepts while reading this book. I had to backtrack and re-read some sections. I can't comment on whether this book deserves a booker or not - it is different from the other books I read which have won the Booker. This book seems more moral based and nuanced. Two men - who both dated the same woman that is now dead from a mental deprivation - who also make a mutual pact to euthanize the other should a mental deprivation set in within themselves - actually go through it at the end!! I think they both harbored mutual hatred towards the end and killed each other in cold blood. They justified to each other tha