Kokoro

May 22

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki
Reviewed by Linda
📕📙

Hmmm, what to make of this one? In no other way to describe this but a tragedy, this piece of modern Japanese literature was an extremely slow burner for me. Set during the Meiji era in Tokyo, a young student develops a strong (and frankly random) friendship with the mysterious Sensei. Too many pages went past without anything actually happening, until the last third of the book! Exploring themes of loneliness, disinheritance, morality and just pure melancholy, Sensei writes a powerful narrative to the impressionable young student in such wonderful prose. As much as I love to dip my toe into new genres, I think I'm done with this kind of fiction for now!

KokoroNatsume Sosekjapanese literaturefictionLinda

Linda Malek

I've always had the urge to set up a forum and voice my thoughts after each read, but never had the confidence to do so alone. 18 months ago, I got my fellow book-loving friends involved and formed The Candid Book Club! Aside from having an exponentially growing to-read pile and deteriorating shortsightedness, we've been lucky to have been invited to publisher events and have attended several talks with our favourite authors (Thank you and long may they continue!) To take a break from the pressures of PhD Chemistry, Jess and I exchanged books all the time and in my youth, I was that kid with the first editions of Harry Potter having already read Gulliver’s travels and some Charles Dickens. At work, my desk is a library and luckily for me I sit next to another bookworm Jack who entertains all the photo-taking. I'm suffering from a chronic case of wanderlust (age-related crisis) so books which are set as far away from home as possible tend to float my boat: Middle East, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Asia...you name it. But if it's got anything to do with Egypt then I'm all over it. So you get the drift...I read all the time, everywhere (on the tube mostly), everyday, a book a week, and very quickly I'm onto the next! And then sometimes there is a book that stops me in my tracks, makes me want to swallow the pages whole, and have it next to me at all times, with some sentences staying with me forever: Shantaram by David Gregory Roberts, anything by Khaled Hosseini, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo (absolute gem of a woman), A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shuklaand and anything by Naguib Mahfouz.

Kokoro

The Awakening

Sex Object