Paradise by Abdulrazak Gurnah. Professor Gurnah, born in Tanzania, won the Nobel Prize in 2021. He teaches postcolonial literature at the University of Kent in the UK. This is a very unusual coming-of-age story. It begins when Yusuf, the main character, is about 11 years old. He is the younger child in a poor family […]
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Disgrace by John W. Coetzee. This book hit me hard. It’s one of those novels that leaves you reeling. Another one that had a similar effect on me was “Blindness” by Jose Saramago. I remember feeling down for days after finishing it. “Disgrace” is all about things going terribly wrong. It asks the question: when
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Destined for war: Can America and China escape Thucydides’s trap? by Graham Allison. Lately, I’ve been reading about current global conflicts, starting with “The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy” by John Mearsheimer and “Silent Invasion” by Hamilton Clive. Both authors are academics in the US and Australia, respectively, making their books well-crafted and thoroughly
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Many years ago, I read a short story by Alejandro Jodorowsky, and what blew my mind was how rapidly evolution takes place in this story, unfolding in various directions. Alejandro truly possesses an astonishing power of imagination. He writes in Spanish and resides in France, but I have never come across this story translated into
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In 2023, I managed to finish reading 18 books, a bit more than the previous year but fewer than in 2020. During the pandemic in 2020, when I was spending long hours at home, I had more time to read. Even though I read more this year, I found myself losing interest in several books
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Letters from Thailand by Botan is a book that takes place in 1948 and follows the journey of Tan Suan U, a young Chinese man who moved to Thailand in search of a better life. The novel is constructed through the letters Suan U writes to his mother back in China. Although it is far
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The WEIRDest people in the world by Joseph Henrich. The author is professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. I learned about this fascinating book from a podcast featuring Paul Bloom, a psychologist at Yale University. What caught my attention was his observation that highly educated people show differences not just at psychological level
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“The Shadow of the Sun” is a book written by Ryszard Kapuściński, who was a journalist that traveled extensively across Africa from the late 1950s to the end of the 20th century. He was fluent in many languages, which allowed him to connect with and understand various cultures, making his work rich and insightful. In
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Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun (Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920) is a well-known novel. One of the author’s most famous works is “Hunger.” I also read another book by him called “In Wonderland.” All of these books are amazing and have different themes. One of the things that makes Knut Hamsun a
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. The author is Professor of Ethical Leadership at NYU and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. I got interested in this book after reading some comments on another book called “The power of regret”, in which the author