January 2021 📚 Wrap Up
Well, I think that it comes as no surprise that I share my January Book Wrap up late, but this time I have a good excuse; I had to wait for the results of my winter term to be released because this post was part of one of my assignments and I wanted to be extremely easy for the examiners to find it. So now that the grades have been announced -I could have done better, but I am satisfied with my grade- I can finally share the great books I read last month.
Pi is a sixteen-year-old boy, and he finds himself on a boat with a zebra, an orangutan, a hyena and a tiger in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Readers experience the events through Pi's perspective, and it feels like they are one more passenger going through that bizarre and dangerous journey. The author did a great job so that we get to know Pi and care for him before getting him into this crazy adventure. Yann Martel experimented with the role of the narrator and added an extra layer of creativity to the whole story as the narrator of the book adopts the voice of Pi, who had told him all about his life in the course of several meetings between the two men.
The Foreign Student by Susan Choi (1998)
After the Korean War, Chunk travels from South Korea to South America to study at a university. There he meets Katherine. There is an instant connection between the two as they both suffer from trauma. The timing, however, doesn't seem favourable for their relationship to bloom.
It was a truly beautiful historical romance; two troubled souls coming together by chance. The best thing about it is that the writer doesn't spoon-feed readers. There are several scenes full of symbols and connotations that make readers understand the real intentions of the characters. It is the two completely different background stories of the two protagonists, which show how traumatic experiences can affect people irreparably and how difficult it can be to connect and trust others, that make this stand out from other romance novels. Nevertheless, I have two criticisms about this book. Firstly, there are a lot of descriptions of landscapes, some of which feel redundant. Secondly, both of the protagonists went through traumas, but it seems that Chunk's experience is given more space. I just wished that Katherine's past had been expanded more.
This Isn't The Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You by Jon McGregor (2012)
This is a short story collection about moments that have stigmatised or heavily impacted ordinary people. The author experimented not just with the length since we have some stories that occupy just one page and others with ten, but also with the form as some stories are structured as notes or there is one story that combines prose with poetry. I have to note that the subheadings of each short story, which are names of cities and towns in the UK, add to the realism and the likelihood that the events narrated can actually happen to people, and consequently to the reader as well. There are 30 amazing short stories in this collection, but I would like to share my absolute favourite ones: In Winter The Sky, Keeping Watch Over The Sheep, Vessel, The Chicken And The Egg, We Wave And Call, Wires, What Happened To Mr Davison, The Cleaning, Dig A Hole, I'll Buy You A Shovel.
And this is the end. Did you read any interesting book in January? Let me know in the comments below ☺
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