Category: Reading List

  • 2017 Reading List aka Unbounded Ambitions

    2017 Reading List aka Unbounded Ambitions

    Daniel’s 2017 Reading List In 2016, I’ve learned that doing graduate program and pursuing an aggressive extracurricular reading list is an overly ambitious task. Luckily, it’s 2017 and I am still going to give it another shot. I’m stubborn. New Socio-Economic Systems Part of my foresight interest is researching new economic systems. When it comes…

  • Book Review: Piercing by Ryu Murakami

    Book Review: Piercing by Ryu Murakami

    Ryu Murakami (not Haruki Murakami with the talking cat) writes about two thoroughly damaged souls in Tokyo where they accidentally seek and meet each other in a story that’s somewhere between horror and dark humour. The plot is shallow, but you’re here mostly for the quick ride across a disturbing psychological landscape. The story makes…

  • Book Review: Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

    Book Review: Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

    Crazy Rich Asian by Kevin Kwan was a fantastic contrast to my last read How to Get Filthy Rich in Raising Asia by Mohsin Hamid. Crazy Rich Asian is a quick, breezy superficial yet fun read.  While it may try to be satire, Crazy Rich Asians seems more like a balance between parody and voyeurism…

  • Mini-Review: Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife

    Mini-Review: Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife

    I’m a little behind my book reviews for The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin by Leonid Solovyov and The Hunger Games by Suzanna Collins. To catch-up, I’ll start on the latest book: The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht. I have read fiction of the Balkans before – none of them happy, but each sad in their own way.…

  • Mini-Review: Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

    Mini-Review: Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore

    After finishing Mikhil Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir, I found myself needing to move away from my beloved dead Russian authors to living and non-Russian writers. This took me directly to Haruki Marakami’s Kafka on the Shore. The writing is airy and the story itself contains so many layers, wrinkles, turns that reveal unlikely connections,…

  • Mini Review: Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir

    Mini Review: Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir

    Recently, a friend gave me a copy of Mikhail Bulgakov’s A Dead Man’s Memoir. As Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is one my favourite books, I eargerly dug into A Dead Man’s Memoir. It is a different beast of a book, so it would be unfair to compare the two. A Dead Man’s Memoir feels semi-autobiographical, a…