Latest Reads

Sophie's World

Jostein Gaarder

What a fantastic book!! Having been told to read it for years now, it finally appeared in my world at exactly the right time. I couldn't put it down.

Part Philosophy 101, Part time warp story line that doesn't make-sense when-you-tell-someone -- Total great book with too much information to grasp with only one read.

The story starts with Sophie Amundsen, a spunky 14-year-old, who receives an anonymous letter in her mailbox, posing these two questions: Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?". What ensues is an entorague of letters from a mysterious instructor amounting to a history lesson of the timeline of Philosophy. Letters give way to lectures, questions give way to quests and Sophie (and myself!) grows her mind by engaging with the lessons.

What else can I say? : I loved it and highly recommend it!

Three Dog Night

Peter Goldsworthy

For those of you who follow my reviews, you know I don't naturally gravitate towards fiction reads. However, I absolutely loved this book! Maybe because I curently live and breath Aboriginal culture, or maybe just because it's a damn good story, I seriously ran home every day to read this book. I think I set a record for how fast I read 342 pages.
 
Martin Blackman, a respected psychiatrist, returns to Australia after living and working in London for 10 years. He brings home his new bride, also a physciatrist, whom he is blissfully in love with. They settle in Adelaide and reunite with some of Martin's old friends, one in particular -- his best friend, Felix. Felix, once a brilliant surgeon, has spent a large amount of time working as a physician in the Australian outback helping Aboriginal communities. The whole of him has drastically changed because of this.
 
This story focuses on a very tricky, morally ambiguous ménage à trois that has drastic and long-lasting repercussions for all of the characters. Love, Sex, Death, Friendship -- it's got it all! It also has such perfect inferfacing with Aboriginal culture and language, as well as their beliefs and the land. Goldsworthy eloquently summed up so many culturally complex ideas that I could identify with.
 
The author also did a beautiful job painting the perfect Australian landscape that I identified with so well: for example, "a luminous morning saturated with sunlight and parrots". His prose was so crafted that I dog-eared most of the book! 
 
I don't know that it would be easy to get outside of Australia, but I recommend this book for many reasons: culture lesson, as well as a confronting & unpredictable read! 5 stars. 
 

"If love is an obsessive-compulsive disorder, then I have been illd for years. But never as sick with bliss, as diseased, as now." p.3
 
"I inhale again, immersing myself in the simple, vegetable pleasure of tobacco. Unhappiness comes from the human world, I have come to believe. The animal world. Happiness comes from the non-human -- the vegetable world, the mineral world. I am alone on the terrace, sole animal in an all-vegetable, all-mineral kingdom whose simple elements -- light, water, leaf -- have the power to gladden me directly, instinctively, entering unexamined through eye and ear. And lung. In, out, another cloud of smoke dissolves in the cold air.: p. 328
 
"There's a useful German word, Maskenfreiheit. The freedom we have when we wear masks. .... I'm interested in the masks we wear on the Net. In what those masks reveal to us when we don't have to look anyone directly in the eye. When we're hiding behind some chatline pesona...." p. 32