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Book review

doki-doki

Hello everybody. I'm back. Did you think I forgot?

No, I didn't.

I just been not doing my homework.

すみません Sumi Masen (excuse me in japanese)

I am sorry. When I was in Japan last month,

i didn't really have much chance to read I

I knew my time there was limited. So I really just wanted to focus on

Being in Japan. There's been a lot of news articles about book club.

I don't know if you read them. But so- some of them are great.

Just praising the idea that

uhhhh..

Obviously getting more people into reading a British bookstore a very very big British bookstore

they had a select table of books and there were all books that I had reviewed and

It made me think wow, it

definitely had an influence on sales if they

feature these books in in a specific way

It's not like they'd said Pewdiepie Isle

or anything like that,

but it's cool. Should I force anything else positive into this before

I begin? I don't think we need to do that. Thank you.

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Now, first book I read was the "Dice Man."

Written by Luke Rhinehart this was suggestion by Brad

Hooray for Brad Thank You Brad for suggesting

A lot of you guys suggested this book as well and I can definitely see why. I think Brad told me that he read it

when he was younger and I

Think it's the kind of book I would probably appreciate

If I was younger as well not saying that it's stupid or anything like that

It's just it has a lot of flaws that I thought was a bit hard to

Over- oversee is that how they say it (overlook) doesn't matter. The book is written by Luke Rhinehart who is also

Conveniently the protagonist. Mmm how strange. It follows a story of Luke who is a

Psychiatrist he's very successful. He earns a lot of money. He has his wife

He has his kids, but he just doesn't feel happy where he is in life

His best friend is advancing before him even though he's not as clever as he is

He just feels stuck in a rut basically so in a drunken idea

Late at night. He decides that he's going to roll a dice and if it lands on a six

I think it was a six. It doesn't matter

he is going to rape his best friend's wife who has been sort of flirting with him a little bit and

Here it sort of shows how amateurish the writer is or maybe just needs a better editor. I don't know

There's really no reason for him to want to rape his

Best friend's wife. I understand that he needs to undergo this drastic change of character, but they justify it as "Oh well

"she- she liked it more than I did" *weird noise*

I feel weird i've been talking about it and it's not like I'm prude or anything like that

But nevertheless this event has such a drastic change of his character that he becomes the dice man

And he decides to live his life by the roll of the dice

he will write down a couple things that he wants to do and a couple of things that he doesn't want to do and he

place them on the number of the dice

So if it rolls a 1 or a 2, he'll do this two to three or four he'll do this

five or six he'll do this, so that determines his life and it's interesting in a way how that makes him break free from his

Rut essentially his character that's just too comfortable. A lot of times

it's obvious what you want to do and you always go for the obvious choice and

he explains that the dice man as

You there's so many things that you miss out on by not doing and

that never gets to live because you always go with the obvious choice and by

Constantly going with the obvious choice you may end up too comfortable and in the way that Luke was in the beginning of the novel

Luke really decides that he's going to push this for

Scientific purposes or for his studies. He's going to push the limit of the dice and

Following the dice as a godly figure to its very limits. It's not like the whole idea of flipping a coin is anything new

it's not like there's anything that

Special about it, but it becomes a cult and he becomes a cult leader of that of the dice. It's an interesting concept of

self-control also letting go of that control to something else and while reading it I was feeling

Like I want to try this out when I was in Japan, for example

Me and Marzia a lot of times the things that we enjoyed the most were not the we had planned for

but things that we just happened to stumble upon which I think is why what it's trying to get at. The book very

Confidently says on the cover. This book will change your life

It won't. I really enjoyed it at the first half but the second half was just

Unnecessary, I think it tried too hard to be commercialized

The story takes almost like a movie like plot

The FBI is after him and there's just so many sex scenes in this book

I think there's like 30 sex scenes in it and it just became cringe-worthy after a while

I'm like, this is just ridiculous. At the end of it

it sort of made me question the

the skill of the author and if the concept of the dice was even that great to begin with. It just seems so like some sort

of pseudo-psychiatry and

who knows? maybe that's what it was trying to mock anyway. Next! I read "Stoner" by John Williams.

This was a book that when he came out it barely sold anything, but then later- fifty years later

It got translated and it picked up in popularity. Now,

it's very highly regarded.

When I explain my favorite novel to people, or at least a novel that I really enjoyed, a lot of times I met with

a skeptic look like:

"That doesn't sound interesting at all!" What are you talking about? A good testimony of a good writer is that if you can tell a

seemingly uninteresting story and captivate your your reader

That's a great way to test it

And I think Stoner is exactly that. Now I was reading this and I kept thinking

"When is the punchline coming?" "When is the weed joke coming?"

I was on page

420 and I realized, "I've just spent hours reading a boring book about a boring man's life!"

It has nothing to do with weed. Not a single weed reference. I'm just kidding. Obviously. It's actually a really great book

I really enjoyed reading it

It follows a story a William Stoner, which can be summarized as "Life sucks, and then you die."

"So fuck the world and let's get high! 420 everybody!" It's so cringe-worthy jokes. I'm sorry.

William Stoner grows up on a farm. He goes to study agriculture and

a part of his study

he- it's obligatory to study English literature and he completely falls in love with it and he loves- and he switch

his studies completely to literature instead of agriculture and

At the day of his graduation, he very selfishly

Tells his parents, "I'm not coming back to help at the farm. I'm going to keep studying to become a teacher."

I can't relate to that at all.

I escaped to Italy to become a youtuber and abandon my studies

so maybe I can't fault Stoner too much in this. It sets the swing of

The story in of Stoner's life whenever something positive happens to Stoner so- it's met with something negative.

he falls in love with literature, but at the cost of

Disappointing his parents. He falls in love with a woman and they get married very quickly

But then he discovers that she's actually very horrible to him and they don't match at all.

So anytime something positive happens to Stoner, it's met with something negative.

He loves teaching his students at school, but it becomes very hard for him to do so

because of the department. He gets a daughter that he loves very much and care for but the daughter

After a while sort of turns against him because of his wife

It just keeps on rocking back and forth for Stoner and you just have to, when reading it, you can't help but appreciate his immense

stoicism and

How much he endures of

bad behavior from other people that just

brings him down. You just want to pat Stoner on the back and say "It's okay you did your best, man".

I always try and find some sort of

ideas in there. I don't know if I'm right or wrong

But the way I saw it is that there's two sides of the coin in life.

You're gonna be happy sometime and you're gonna be

unhappy sometime and you can

just hope that you end up on one side more than the other just because you endure a lot of pain and a lot of

Bad behavior and just because you're a good person and work really hard for the things you love that doesn't necessarily mean

Happiness is some sort of reward or something that's owed to you. It just- doesn't work like that.

That's just a state of life

And that's the balance that we all have to go through. Stoner dusted in such grace and the way he endures it all

You just- you can't help but look up to him and his character. In a lot of ways

he's a hero and I think that's how the author described him as, as an angel in the end.

It's a fantastic read. I really enjoyed it. From start to finish,

I think this was a novel that I found the easiest to read and

flow through so if it sounded interesting give it a go. Next up, we have "Crime and Punishment."

It's a classic, you've definitely heard about this... Have you heard about this? It's written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in 1866.

It was the longest one I read, and I- I mean that.

Sometimes this book was very hard to get through, but the parts that

shines in this novel

truly shines. And I do

Understand why it's a classic and I want to just focus on the bits that I really really enjoyed which is the bits

revolving around the main character, Raskolnikov.

Raskolnikov is a young man who lives in St. Petersburg. He is, like I said, young,

attractive, intelligent and since his father died, his mother and sister had focused on him a lot more

which led him to come up with the

Insane idea that he is going to murder and rob an elderly

pawn-broker named Ivanovna. He sees

Ivanovna as a lesser human, a bad human, and she has the only thing that Raskolnikov doesn't have which is wealth.

Raskolnikov is very poor and he sees it almost as an injustice

following

Raskolnikov's ideas around why he wants to commit this murder is the bits where I really really enjoyed.

I don't know what it is about following someone's internal thoughts about something

that's just bizarre and insane, the truest honest thoughts about someone. And I think that's why I really like Japanese literature as well

nevertheless

Raskolnikov doesn't see anything wrong with murdering this woman. He thinks is it's justified and

He almost sees it as a practice of: Can he commit this crime?

Is he able to commit the perfect crime even? And he sort of sneers at other people that it hasn't

been able to commit the perfect crime. So he sneaks into Ivanovna's apartment and he murders her with an axe.

Unfortunately, Ivanovna's stepsister enters the scene of the crime and

Raskolnikov is forced to murder her as well

Now obviously this wasn't part of the plan and he sort of very clumsily

Escapes the the murder scene and he only gets a little bit of gold from the apartment, but still somehow he managed to escape

without anyone

Seeing him commit the crime. He hides all the gold and the murder weapon and

Then we're followed with the second part of the book, The Punishment. We get to follow Raskolnikov's internal struggle

with- through conversations with other people of

why he committed this crime and

What made him want to actually do it. If he didn't take the gold,

what was the reason- true reason behind it and the guilt with it?

The bits I especially enjoyed was the last third of the book. Raskolnikov wants to confess to his love, Sonya,

that he committed this murder and he stumble upon his words and he stumbles upon his reasoning that before was so clear to himself

But when explaining it to someone else he just can't get the right

Reason and words out and I really enjoyed this bit. I don't know. It's just it's so interesting following these thoughts and

The change of Raskolnikov. Eventually, he turns himself in despite the fact that he- there was no real evidence against him.

I think he was just so tired of dealing with this internal struggle and conflict and

Even though he doesn't necessarily think that what he did was wrong,

he compares his- his murder with what other- what other people have done in the past and

Not received any punishment for people doing even worse things than him and getting away with it

So why should he have to feel bad but he turns himself in because of Sonya, the one he loves, and he wants to

serve his punishment and I think the epilogue where they explained this was a bit forced. These

classic novels, they always have the a very strict conclusion to them,

at least what I read so far, so maybe that's why the reason why. The reason why Raskolnikov struggled so much

Maybe he had found logic behind what he but he put himself above society and that was his demise

What do you think? Have you read it? What what do you think? Personally,

I was extremely bored with the family conflict that was going on throughout this book

It didn't interest me at all. But nevertheless, I really enjoyed it. I would love to read more from Dostoevsky in the future

I'm told that "The Idiot" is even better. Are you still with me? Next up, we have "No Longer Human" with Osamu Dazai

I feel my voice is just different