My 1st Library Haul 📚

Libraries are definitely one of the coolest places in the world; a huge room full of books and you can borrow whatever you want for free —it sounds like heaven!

If I stay in a place for longer than one month, you can bet that I will become a member at the nearest library. Although it took me a bit longer to join the library in Ioannina, where I live now, it finally happened. So, you should expect many more library hauls from now on! 

For your information, even though I am not a student anymore, I joined the university library for two reasons: I hoped that they will have many books in English, and I wanted to have access to academic books. 

And now, I'm ready to present you the books I borrowed! All the descriptions are taken from the blurbs. 

1. Five One-Act Plays by Sean O'Casey 

Plays included:    The End of the Beginning

                            A Pound on Demand

                            Hall of Healing

                            Bedtime Story

                            Time to Go 

Sean O'Cosey was born in 1880 and lived through a bitterly hard boyhood in a Dublin tenement house. He never went to school but received most of his education in the streets of Dublin, and taught himself to read at the age of fourteen. He was successively a newspaper-seller, docker, stone-breaker, railway-worker, and builders' labourer. In 1913 he helped to organise the Irish Citizen Army which fought in the streets of Dublin and at the same time he was learning his dramatic technique by reading Shakespeare and watching the plays of Dion Boucicault. His early works were performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and Lady Gregory made him welcome at Coole, but disagreement followed and after visiting America in the late thirties O'Casey settled in Devonshire. He lived there until his death in 1964, though still drawing the themes of many of his plays from the life he knew so well on the banks of the Liffey. Out of the ceaseless dramatic experimenting in his plays O'Casey created a flamboyance and versatility that sustain the impression of bigness of mind which is inseparable from his tragi-comic vision of life. 

2. The Paradise Bird Tattoo (or, attempted double-suicide) by Choukitsu Kurumatani [written in 1998, translated in English in 2009]

Ikushima lives as a drone, slaving away for an advertising company that neither values him nor cares about his existence. He flees the city to become a vagabond, catching local trains to anywhere, eventually finding a miserable job skewering refuse animal organs for a local restaurant in Amagasaki, a town riddled with gangs and miscreants. He settles into a routine in the city, and through his brief troubled neighbours —the evil-worshipping tattoo artist, his former-prostitute-cum-Madame employer, an unclaimed child, and the fleetingly striking Ayako— he bridges the gaps in his social world and inadvertently begins to live. With this newfound, yet unacknowledged, passion for life, Ikushima embarks on a love affair with Ayako, which leads to dangerous consequences and threatens to tear through the barriers he has partitioned around his existence for so long. 

3. The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld (2018)

Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the dreary routine of their days, Jas has a unique way of experiencing her world: her face soft like cheese under her mother's hands; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads in the village; the sound of "blush words" that aren't in the Bible. 

One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family's life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame. As her parents' suffering makes them increasingly distant, Jas and her siblings develop a curiosity about death that leads them into disturbing rituals and fantasies. Cocooned in her red winter coat, Jas dreams of "the other side" and of salvation, not knowing where this dreaming will finally lead her. 

4. The Stranger by Harlan Coben (2015)

The Stranger appears out of nowhere, perhaps in a bar, or a parking lot, or at the grocery store. His identity is unknown. His motives are unclear. His information is undeniable. Then he whispers a few words in your ears and disappears, leaving you picking up the pieces of your shattered world. 

Adam Price has a lot to lose: a comfortable marriage to a beautiful woman, two wonderful sons, and all the trappings of the American Dream: a big house, a good job, a seemingly perfect life. 

Then he runs into the Stranger. When he learns a devastating secret about his wife, Corinne, he confronts her, and the mirage of perfection disappears as if it never existed at all. Soon Adam finds himself tangled far darker than even Corinne's deception, and realizes that if he doesn't make exactly the right moves, the conspiracy he's stumbled into will not only ruin lives —it will end them. 

And that's the end! Do you go to the library often?