I have not read any books for the past few months as I have been devoting my time to my online business of selling stamps, currency notes and coins. I was at Popular Bookstore a week or so ago when the book “Death Notice” by Zhou Haohui caught my attention and I bought it on the spot. Three days ago, ...

The Good Earth by Pear S. Buck is a book that I wanted to read when I was still in secondary school but for some strange reason, I never got around to reading it. Until now. More than 4 decades later! The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize and Pearl S. Buck was a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. ...

Haruki Murakami is one of the most popular authors in the world today, having been honoured with the Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the World Fantasy Award. The publication of the English translation of Murakami’s 1Q84 was the most anticipated literary event of 2011, with midnight openings, queues around the block, magazine covers and unprecedented pre-orders. The original Japanese ...

The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris is a compelling and unforgettable true story of Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, who was imprisoned at Auschwitz in 1942. When his captors discovered that he spoke several languages, he was assigned the job of a Tätowierer (the German word for tattooist), tasked with permanently tattooing numbers onto the arms of incoming prisoners. ...

Here I lie on my favourite sofa New Year Day has been fine so far Trying to read J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye But my eyes are heavy I don’t know why.   The Old Man and the Sea was my final book for last year The best Ernest Hemmingway classic that’s what I hear So it seems fitting ...

I set myself a reading target of 12 books for December 2018 and I exceeded the target by 5 books, partly due to the fact that some of the books I read in December are short books. The last book that I read this month is The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway which is only 117 pages ...

A few years ago, I read The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler and it left quite a good impression on me. The Hypnotist is the first in the bestselling Joona Limna series that have sold multi-million copies worldwide. Lars Kepler is the pseudonym for husband-and-wife team of Alexandra and Alexander Ahndoril. The Sandman is the fourth book in the Joona Limna ...

I have a few Michael Connelly books in my collection but I have not read any of them.  A friend lent me “The Poet” by Michael Connelly several weeks ago and I managed to finish reading it (480 pages) within 2 days. In The Poet, the hero is Jack McEvoy, a Rocky Mountain News crime-beat reporter. The Poet opens with ...

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini is a heart-wrenching story of family, love and friendship and a chronicle of three decades of Afghan history, from the Soviet invasion to the tribal wars and the vicious reign of the Taliban to American intervention and attempted reconstruction by world powers. It is a story of two women, Mariam and Laila. Mariam ...

Knots & Crosses is Book One of the Inspector Rebus series written by Ian Rankin. Published in 1987, it was written while the author was a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh. As the story begins, Edinburgh has been shocked by the abduction and subsequent strangling of two young girls. The police are working around the clock to catch ...