Book Recommendations

Since I get the chance for a lot of reading in Korea (and since I bought a bunch of super cheap, illegally photocopied books in Vietnam), here are, briefly, my recommendations.


Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins

Man, this is some throwback to the 1970's, when tofu was still a novel "food." But in a rather awesome way. As the cover flap claims, it "deals with the problem of redheads."

My favorite quote:
"Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning." 



Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

A month after finishing this, I am still puzzling over what this book was about. I think that says something about both its engagingness and it's amount of making me really effing confused. Awesome.

"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."





The Quiet American by Graham Greene

I read this while traveling through Vietnam. Graham Greene's writing is amazing, as is his take on the situation in Vietnam leading up to the Vietnam War.

"If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation."

"I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings."  





Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I feel I should strive to read at least 1 in 2 classics. Truth be told, I generally stay away from contemporary fiction. This book was amazing.

On a side note, as my friend pointed out, Marquez seems to have a fixation with erotic enemas - they're mentioned in almost all of his novels. Please don't let this dissuade you from reading this book.



And that is all for now.