Happy lunar new year!

An early happy Lunar New Year everyone! Every lunar new year is characterized by one of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac, and this year is the Year of the Monkey. To find out more about how the lunar calendar works, see this pretty good explainer from The Telegraph .

Personally, Lunar New Year is one of my favorite festivals because my family always makes it a point to gather together and celebrate it with good food and company. Being away from my family this year did not diminish the importance this day meant to me, and I have been busy the past week preparing for a lovely dinner on Sunday with some friends.

So here’s wishing you a happy Lunar New Year, and stayed glued next week for a love-filled literary post!

See HERE and HERE for my past Lunar New Year posts.

2016, a new start

Hello everyone,

Happy New Year to you, you and you! I hope 2015 has been an eventful and fruitful year where you have tried to challenge yourself to do something meaningful. Here is me wishing you a beautiful year ahead.

I apologize for the long hiatus I took from this blog. I confess that I have unwittingly neglected this space since last publishing my post more than a year ago. My most sincere apologies to all writers/publishers who have tried to contact me or sent me their new books for review for I did not responded to most of the requests.

Late in 2014, I made a personal decision to pack my bag and cross the ocean to pursue my master’s degree. I was so caught up with adjusting to my new life and spending an inordinate amount of time poking my nose into a mountain of academic literature that I had no time on hand to be manning this space. But I am back in 2016 with more book reviews and literary bits and bobs, including trilogies from the Commandant Camille Verhoeven and Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series.

More new content will be popping up on this site in the next few days, so stay tuned. And as usual, leave in the comment box below if you have read any new books that you want to recommend to me or want me to review.

HAPPY NEW YEAR AND COME WHAT MAY 2016!

Five books I would never throw away

As much as electronic books have been a lifesaver, or more appropriately a shoulder/back saver, the book lover in me still loves possessing physical copies of books, especially when they hold special memories for me. Below are five books that are very dear to me, with little stories of their own and I cannot see myself throwing them out anytime soon.

Let me know down below if you have any books that you love so much that you will not part with it so easily.

1. Murder on the Orient Express
One of the masterpieces of English writer Agatha Christie, it is a must have on the bookshelves for all die-hard fans of ‘The Queen of Crime.’ I absolutely adore this book and think that it epitomizes the beauty of her huge collection of crime fiction writings.

An ode to Kindle

RIP Kindle.

You were my first Kindle, my first reading device I have ever owned and you liberated me from the weightiness of paper to free up my reading experience. Thank you for all the amazing, albeit bumpy times we had together through some long rough journeys where you introduced me to so many more fantastic worlds than I have ever imagined.

Adieu my friend. Those were some great memories we shared.

Updates and a bit of Murakami

Sorry folks for the lack of book review this week because I have been struck by this mega flu bug that has left me crippled in bed for many days. I am currently still recovering from the illness and have been unable to keep up with the comments left by many kind readers, so do give me some time to play catch up when I am feeling much better.

But last week, I was pretty excited to learn that the English translation of Haruki Murakami’s latest book “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Year of Pilgrimage” has finally hit the stores! I cannot wait to read this bestseller, with a million copies flying off the shelves a month after its release in Japan. The hardest part though is to resist perusing all the online reviews before actually reading it myself except for THIS article from The Atlantic that hits spot on with regards to the Murakami appeal in spite of his formulaic approach to his novels.

Murakami writes genre fiction—formulaic, conventional, with an emphasis on plot. But it is a genre that he has invented himself, drawing elements from fantasy, noir, horror, sci-fi, and the genre we call “literary fiction.” The other ingredient, which we tend to think of as antithetical to genre fiction, is a hostility to tidy resolution.

Ending off with this post with a lovely Murakami bingo game that succinctly summarizes the typical recurrent themes found in most Murakami books. This drawn by LA-based comic artist Hunter Nesbitt and a poster of this can be bought HERE.