1. A Sharper Image. In other news, I can now see. Thanks to the optician, I have a pair of new and tech-savvy contacts (they orient themselves right side up and shape to fit your eye). And next week I will have glasses that don’t slide down my nose and aren’t fuzzy in one eye.
2. Kazuo Ishiguro. If you like cyclically structured, cerebral historical fiction with unreliable narrators, Ishiguro is your author. Like The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans has a slowly amassing weight that will sock you with an emotional ending. Christopher Banks, born in Shanghai and now an English detective, is driven to solve the mystery of his parents’ disappearance, but the hindrances to his case occur mostly in his own mind.
3. N. K. Jemisin. I really, really liked The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, and I really, really liked book two, The Broken Kingdoms, but now I have to wait until September before I can really, really like The Kingdom of Gods. Science fiction and fantasy fans generally shop by author, and Jemisin is someone I will now buy on sight. She just writes a fun, fast world of gods and mortals fighting and loving. It’s good stuff.
4. My Day Is Made. While shopping for textbooks today, I discovered that not only had the reading list for my American Literature class (“Uncanny Worlds and Hybrid Identities,” i.e. Science Fiction) changed to seven books instead of eight, one of those books is now The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. Actually, it doesn’t make my day, it makes my week, because I’ll finally be able to break out my hardback 40th Anniversary Edition. Yes, I do own three copies of this book, and no, I will never be sorry.
Mostly About Books 