drachenbraut's attempt at BOMBS the rest of 2012

Hello everyone,
from this month I am going to participate in your group and hope to get rid of some of my TBR's. Checking my library properly, I have noticed since being on LT and since having a Kindle my TBR pile went up from an average of 30 - 60 books to 468. I know, absolutely awful. I have not even managed to enter all my books yet, and I know I still have lots of books on my kindle which I have not entered yet. Well, at least I am going to make an effort now. :-)
So, far I managed 16 books from my TBR pile this year. However, my goal for the reminder of the year will be another 15 books, starting this month.

Good luck with the TBR reading and listing of your books. I've been working on getting my entire library on LBT for oh, about two years! I have added the new ones since I joined this group last year but about half the time when I pull a book out of the TBR shelves that I acquired before then it's not listed. So obviously my TRB number continue to climb too!

Hello Clue,

Exactly the same problem I have, but hopfully - fingers crossed - I finally will manage to come down on my TBR pile again. :)

BOMB 01 - SJ Watson - Before I go to Sleep

Genre: Thriller - 384 pages
Rating: 4/5

My first thriller in a very long time, and my first BOMBS in this group.This one was already collecting dust on my Kindle (if that is possible).

“We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.”

“What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?”

I felt this was a very daunting book, which made me shiver all the way through. The book is written in an epistolary style and narrated by Chrissy who suffers due to an accident almost 20 years earlier under a combination from anterograde and retrograde amnesia. Every morning she wakes up, doesn't know who she is and who the man lying beside her is.
The novel opens with a phone call she receives from a Dr. Nash who tells her that he has been secretely working with her for weeks, to help her to regain her memory. He encouraged her to start a daily journal to write down the daily events and whatever snatches of memory she gets. This is what the book is about, every day she reads the journal to find her past and present, trying to build a new life with that. By reading the journal every day, she finds some unsettling things and starts to query events in her past. Ben, her husband, whom she is supposed to trust, lies to her, and she finds herself in a scary and upsetting position. She doesn't know who she can turn to, and what to believe, as everyday of her life starts the same - with no yesterday - and only her journal to go by.

The story was excecutated brilliantly and the tension in the book was built nicely, also 1/2 through I started to guess the outcome. A brilliant read, I can recommend very much.

And here my second BOMB :)



# BOMB 02 Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore

Genre: Contemporary, Sureal - 615 pages
Rating: 4/5

I have to say, I had to ponder on this book for quite some time. I have read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and 1Q84, and from the structure, and the overall theme they are remarkably similar to this one. Again, we have an utterly absurd and surreal story, which IMO can’t be pursued with logic. So, why do we get sucked into the stories like that? Maybe, it is that he tells his inexplicable stories with such a straight face? Exceptionally it is certainly not that, but how he does it. Although, notable is that his main protagonists are usually loners who find it difficult to find their place in society. Murakami works a lot with the subconscious and conscious mind, and intensly often it becomes apparent that awareness is deeper than we think and that all the time is not enough for the protagonist to explore the depths of their self. Only their constant search creates the kind of energy that is worth living for, and when they eventually find realization, they are rewarded with the most precious of all emotions: namely wonder. Murakami obviously prefers in his novels the open end, which leaves us with a variety of options in the way of interpretation and imagination.

The story starts with Kafka Tamura, who decides, on his 15th birthday, to leave his father’s home, in Tokyo, to embark on his personal odyssey, to live in a distant strange town in a corner of a small library. Years earlier his father had cursed him and told Kafka, that one day he would kill his own father and would have intercourse with his lost mother and sister. An allegory borrowed from Sophocles prophecy. In fact, the father is killed, but Kafka has nothing to do with it.
Kafka is not our typical teenager, but a typical Murakami protagonist – at least what I noticed so far – he is solitary, taciturn, independent and desperately seeking love. His journey brings him to a town with a mystical library where he meets Oshima and Miss Saeki. Kafka is not his real name, but one he chose after his favorite author Franz Kafka. I couldn’t help but chuckle when he discussed The Penal Colony with Oshima. Oshima asked him why he was so fascinated with the Penal Colony, and he said after some thought:

“I think what Kafka does is give a purely mechanical explanation of that complex machine in the story, as sort of a substitute for explaining the situation we’re in. What I mean is…” I have to give it some more thought. “What I mean is, that’s his own device for explaining the kind of lives we lead. Not by talking about our situation, but by talking about the details of the machine.”

I thought that was such an incredible understanding of literature, for a 15 year old boy, and a fearless conception of reality. He actually ceased to look for a meaningful context and focused on the individual parts instead. With Kafka, Murakami builds a relationship with an author whose books are as open to interpretation as his own.

Nakata is the second main protagonist. Nakata had an accident as a child where he lost all memories and most of his natural intelligence. He remains illiterate for the rest of his life, but for some reason acquires the skill to speak to cats and the ability to make it rain fish and leeches. He is the one who kills Kafka’s father and his role is, to see things (life) as it is. After the murder, he leaves Tokyo and follows some kind of inner calling. On his journey, he meets Hoshino a young man who stays with him the rest of his journey. Without knowing it, he follows the footsteps of Kafka Tamura. The stories of these two gravitate more and more towards each other, and then everything comes to a conclusion in the small town with the mystical library – well, whatever conclusion you are coming too.

Murakami managed again to weave a beautiful story. In this story, it is the legend of King Oedipus, which determines the fate of his main protagonist Kafka Tamura. However, several riddles remain unanswered and left to your own imagination. If you don’t mind open endings, a surreal and logic defying story with unanswered riddles, than this story is certainly for you.

Hello and welcome to the challenbe. Damn, you really mad me wanting to read Before I go to Sleep. Hopefully no one's giving itnawayon BookMooch ;-)

Thank you for your welcome :) I thought this group really could help me to get rid of my TBR pile. However, I noticed that this group is very tempting as well.

Before I go to Sleep was really beautifully written, and I only can recommend it.

Yes, this group is definitely tempting. Most of us found loads of book to add to their wishlists or TBR's - usually more than get read during the challenge ;-)

Welcome to the group! I've been successful in setting off quite a few BOMBS since joining, but some of the reviews (including yours) have got me adding on to the TBR pile. Musn't read review...musn't read reviews....musn't read reviews. (walking away mumbling)

Hello Tallulah Rose and Kirconnell agree with both of you. *grin* I always tell myself exactly the same. And thank you for your welcome as well Kirconnell.

#03 Caragh M. O'Brien - Birthmarked

Genre: YA, Post-Apocalyptic - 368 pages
Rating: 4/5

I had this one already on my kindle for a little while and as it fitted well in one of the TIOLI Challenges - that was it. This was definately a good read and reminded me with its concept a little bit of 1984.

“There are some things, once they are done, that we can never question, because if we did, we wouldn't be able to go on. And we have to go on, every single day.”

In a post-apocalyptic world, society is split into two classes. There are the members of the "Enclave" who live inside a walled town and have got everything they need to lead a comfortable life. Then we have got the people who live in the villages outside of the wall who live in poverty. Gaia Stone is a 16 year old girl from outside of the wall, who has been trained by her mother to become a midwife and to serve the Enclave. It is the law that the first three babies delivered by the midwife each month, are "advanced" into the Enclave. There they will be adopted and brought up with all the privileges of the Enclave. Gaia happily serves the Enclave, without ever questioning this practice, until her parents get arrested. She is told by the Enclave authorities that her parents are hiding something which the Enclave desperately wants. Initially she is confused, because all she has believed in so far, and what she accepted all her life as the right things to do, is completely turned upside down. By trying to rescue her parents she very fast realizes that nothing in their split society is as simple as she assumed and she is very quickly faced with the truth's of the shocking reality. The Enclave is scientifically much more advanced then the people outside the wall and Gaia understands very fast the reasoning behind the Enclave's laws. The plot and character development is great and the story is thought-provoking and very engaging. The author managed to create a very strong character with Gaia Stone who always does what she feels is right, and who is able to find friends and helpers in the most unlikely places. A good read which I can recommend to anyone who enjoys dystopian novels.

#04 Herta Müller - Atemschaukel
#05 Herta Müller - The Hunger Angel

Genre: Contemporary - 304 pages each Edition - 608 pages
Rating: German Edition 4.5/5, English Edition 4/5

There’s the boredom of wasted conversations, not to mention opportunities. Even the simplest request takes many words, and there’s no guarantee that any one of them will do the trick. I often avoid conversations, and when I seek them out, I am afraid of them,......

Herta Müller actually planned to write this book together with Oskar Pastior, a German/Romanian poet. Oskar Pastior was from 1946 – 1949, with other ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, in one of the forced labor camps of the USSR. Unfortunately, he died in 2006, and she had to write the book herself. The book is partly based on his experiences and on the experiences of other people Herta Müller knew, such as her own mother. Müller and Pastior still visited together, in 2004, the camp in which he spends almost five years of his young adult life.

I have read the book in German and in the English translation to be able to see how the prose poetry is conveyed. I felt that the book was translated brilliantly but that some of the strength of her writing got lost in translation.

Reading the book was not easy, even though (or because?) the language is truly expressive and, therefore, intellectually quite challenging. The story starts just behind the existential zero and at that with a highly artificial reality as well as a sensitive understanding of language. Herta Müller uses innovative and bizzare metaphors, personifications (cement, hunger, plants, everything lives) and the paradox. Thus, she created an alienating language which is disturbing and graphic at the same time. With that she succeeds to capture the mood – the experiences of severe, long, monotonous, incessant hunger, selfishness, meanness and solitude - which might not have been adequately expressed differently. Her writing is unsentimental and yet goes deep, there is nothing gaudy or unnecessarily dramatized, and yet it penetrates your innermost core. However, once I got into it and found the essential concentration the book became quickly intensely fascinating with its beautiful sweeping and extremely sad story without producing any kind of false consternation. The book is by no means about self-pity, but rather about the survival instinct of the main protagonist, the 17 year old Leopold Auberg. All events are told from his point of view and the use of prose poetry gives the story a sort of sad irony.

On the hunger angel

Hunger is an object.
The angel has climbed into my brain.
The angel doesn’t think. He thinks straight.
He’s never absent.
He knows my boundaries and he knows his direction.
He knows where I come from and he knows what he does to me.
He knew all of this before he met me, and he knows my future.
He lingers in every capillary like quicksilver. First a sweetness in my throat. Then pressure on my stomach and chest. The fear is too much.
Everything has become lighter.
The hunger angel leans to one side as he walks with open eyes. He staggers around in small circles and balances on my breath-swing. He knows the homesickness in the brain and the blind alleys in the air.
The air angel leans to the other side as he walks with open hunger.
He whispers to himself and to me: where there is loading there can also be unloading. He is of the same flesh that he is deceiving. Will have deceived.
He knows about saved bread and cheek-bread and he sends out the white hare.
He says he’s coming back but stays where he is.
When he comes, he comes with force.
It’s utterly clear:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.
Hunger is an object.

Absolute zero is that which cannot be expressed. And we agree, absolute zero and I, that absolute zero itself is beyond discussion, except in the most roundabout way. The zero’s wide-open mouth can eat but not speak. The zero encircles you with its strangling tenderness. An emergency exchange has no tolerance for compromise. It is urgent and direct, like:
1 shovel load = 1 gram bread.