Stress shopping it is! SMH. Whilst most would go shopping for clothes to relieve stress, I, on the other hand, stress shops for books. I think this is the most non-book fair related purchase I had in like forever. I must be that stressed out. LOL.
Here is a list of the books I bought during the month.
Title: The Castle
Author: Franz Kafka
Translator: J.A. Underwood
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 2000
No. of Pages: 280
Synopsis: “The Castle is the story of K., the unwanted Land Surveyor who is never to be admitted to the Castle nor accepted in the village and yet cannot go home. As he experiences certainty and doubt, hope and fear, and reason and nonsense, K.’s struggles in the absurd, labyrinthine world where he finds himself seem to reveal an inexplicable truth about the nature of existence. Kafka began The Castle in 1922 and it was never finished, yet this, the last of his three great novels, draws fascinating conclusions that make if feel strangely complete.”
Title: Americanah
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publisher: Vintage Cnada
Publishing Date: 2014
No. of Pages: 588
Synopsis: “Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. At once powerful and tender, Americana is a remarkable novel of race, love, and identity by the award-winning writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.”
Title: The Silent Cry
Author: Kenzaburo Oe
Translator: John Bester
Publisher: Kodansha International
Publishing Date: 1981
No. of Pages: 274
Synopsis: “The Silent Cry traces the uneasy relationship between two brothers who return to their ancestral home, a village in densely forested wester Japan. While one brother tries to sort out the aftereffects of a friend’s suicide and the birth of a retarded son, the other embarks on a quixotic mission to incite an uprising among the local youth. Oe’s description of this brother’s messianic struggle to save a disintegrating local culture and economy from the depredations of a Korean wheeler-dealer called “The Emperor of Supermarkets” is as chillingly pertinent today as it was when first published in 1967. Powerful and daring, The Silent Cry is a thoroughly compelling classic of world literature.”
Title: Gingerbread
Author: Helen Oyeyemi
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publishing Date: 2019
No. of Pages: 258
Synopsis: “Perdita Lee may appear your average British schoolgirl; Harriet Lee may seem just a working mother trying to penetrate the school social hierarchy; but there are signs that they are. For one thing, they share a gold-painted, seventh-floor walk-up apartment with some surprisingly verbal vegetation. And then there’s the gingerbread they bake. Londoners may find themselves able to take or leave it, but it’s very popular in Druhastrana, the faraway (or, according to many sources, nonexistent) land of Harriet Lee’s early youth. The world’s truest lover of the Lee family gingerbread, however, is Harriet’s charismatic childhood friend Gretel – a figure who seems to have had a hand in everything (good or bad) that has happened to Harriet since they met.
Decades later, teenage Perdita’s search for her mother’s long-lost friend prompts a new telling of Harriet’s story. As the book follows the Lees through encounters with jealousy, ambition, family grudges, work, wealth, and real estate, gingerbread seems to be the one thing that reliably holds a constant value. Endlessly surprising and satisfying, written with Helen Oyeyemi’s inimitable style and imagination, Gingerbread is a true fest for the reader.”
Title: Kim
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
Publishing Date: 2003
No. of Pages: 278
Synopsis: “Rudyard Kipling has been attacked for championing British imperialism and celebrated for satirizing it. In fact, he did both. Nowhere does he express his own ambivalence more strongly than in Kim, his rousing adventure novel of a young man of many allegiances.
Kimball O’Hara grows up an orphan in the walled city of Lahore, India. Deeply devoted to an old Tibetan lama, but involved in a secret mission for the British, Kim struggles to weave the strands of his life into a single pattern. Charged with action and suspense, yet profoundly spiritual, Kim vividly expresses the sounds and smells, colors and characters, and opulence and squalor of complex, contradictory India under British rule.”
Title: The Rainbow
Author: D.H. Lawrence
Publisher: Wordsworth Classics
Publishing Date: 1995
No. of Pages: 418
Synopsis: “The Rainbow chronicles the lives of three generations of the Brangwen family of Nottinghamshire, and is a metaphysical inquiry into the possibilities that human relationships hold amid the uncompromising circumstances of industrial culture, which Lawrence continued in Women in Love. Throughout the novel the rainbow symbolizes each character’s search for self-fulfillment.
The novel concentrates on the passionate natures of the various Brangwens, in particular those of Ursula who is of the third generation of the family. The frankness with which Lawrence treated sexuality cased the books to be seized by the police and banned shortly after publication in 1915.”
Title: Less Than Zero
Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 1986
No. of Pages: 208
Synopsis: “The rich and spoiled children of Los Angles have it all – sex, drugs, fast cars, air-conditioned mansions. Theirs is a world shaped by television, rock music, and too much money; it is a world devoid of feeling and of hope.
In a startling, staccato style reminiscent of music videos, Bret Easton Ellis re-creates this world in a dizzying journey through endless parties, seedy rock clubs, and the seamy underworld of drug dealing and prostitution. Haunting, unnerving, Less Than Zero is the inside story of a generation on a desperate search for the ultimate sensation.”
Title: Death in Venice
Author: Thomas Mann
Translator: Stanley Appelbaum
Publisher: Dover Publications, Inc.
Publishing Date: 1995
No. of Pages: 62
Synopsis: “One of the most famous literary works of the twentieth century, the novella “Death in Venice” embodies themes that preoccupied Thomas Mann (1875-1955) in much of his work: the duality of art and life, the presence of death and disintegration in the midst of existence, the connection between love and suffering and the conflict between the artist and his inner self. Mann’s handling of these concerns in this story of a middle-aged German writer, torn by his passion for a Polish youth met on a holiday in Venice, resulted in a work of great psychological intensity and tragic power.”
Title: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Author: D.H. Lawrence
Publisher: The Modern Library
Publishing Date: 1993
No. of Pages: 457
Synopsis: “Lady Chatterley’s Lover was inspired by the long-standing affair between Frieda, Lawrence’s aristocratic German wife, and an Italian peasant who eventually became her third husband; Lawrence’s struggle with sexual impotence; and the circumstances of his and Frieda’s courtship and the early years of their marriage.
Constance Chatterley, married to an aristocrat and min owner whose war wounds have left him paralyzed and impotent, has an affair with Mellors, a gamekeeper becomes pregnant, and considers abandoning her husband. One of the seminal class novels of the century, it was considered flagrantly pornographic when first published in 1928.”
Title: A Bell for Adano
Author: John Hersey
Publisher: Vintage Books
Publishing Date: 1988
No. of Pages: 269
Synopsis: “Presiding over the small Sicilian village of Adano during World War II, an Italian-American major wins the love and admiration of the natives when he searches foa a replacement for the 700-year-old town bell that has been melted down for bullets by the Fascists. Although situated during one of the most devastating experiences in human history, John Hersey’s story speaks with unflinching patriotism and humanity.”
Title: The Last of the Mohicans
Author: James Fenimore Cooper
Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
Publishing Date: 1993
No. of Pages: 423
Synopsis: “The chief extended his arm, and taking the other by the wrist, they once more exchanged friendly salutations. Then the Delaware invited his guest to enter his own lodge, and share his morning meal. The invitation was accepted, and the two warriors, attended by three or four of the old men, walked calmly away, leaving the rest of the tribe devoured by a desire to understand the reasons of so unusual a visit, and yet not betraying the least impatience, by sign or word.”
Title: The Beautiful and Damned
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: World Library Classics
Publishing Date: 2010
No. of Pages: 321
Synopsis: “First published in 1922, The Beautiful and the Damned followed Fitzgerald’s impeccable debut, This Side of Paradise, thus securing his place in the tradition of great American novelists. Embellished with the author’s lyrical prose, here is the story of Harvard-educated, aspiring aesthete Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria. As they await the inheritance of his grandfather’s fortune, their reckless marriage sways under the influence of alcohol and avarice. A devastating look at the nouveau riche, and the New York nightlife, as well as the ruinous effects of wild ambition, The Beautiful and the Damnedachieved stature as one of Fitzgerald’s most accomplished novels. Its distinction as a classic endures to this day. Pocket Book’s Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. Special features include critical perspectives, suggestions for further read, and a unique visual essay composed of period photographs that help bring every word to life. (Source: Goodreads)”
Title: The Satanic Verses
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 1989
No. of Pages: 547
Synopsis: “Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked jumbo jet blows apart high above the English Channel. Through the debris of limbs, drinks trolleys, memories, blankets, and oxygen masks, two figures fall toward the sea: Gibreel Farishta, India’s legendary movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, the man of a thousand voices, self-made self and Anglophile supreme. Clinging to each other, singing rival songs, they plunge downward, and are finally washed up, alive, on the snow-covered sands of an English beach.
Their survival is a miracle, but an ambiguous one, as Gibreel acquires a halo, while, to Saladin’s dismay, his own legs grow hairier, his feet turn into hooves, and hornlike appendages appear at his temples.
Gibreel and Saladin have been chosen (by whom?) as opponents in the eternal wrestling match between Good and Evil. But which is which? Can demons be angelic? Can angels be devils in disguise? As the two men tumble through time and space toward their final confrontation, we are witness to a cycle of tales of love and passion, of betrayal and faith: the story of Ayesha, the butterfly-shrouded visionary who leads an Indian village on an impossible pilgrimage; of Allelluia Cone, the mountain climber haunted by a ghost who urges her to attempt the ultimate feat – a solo ascent of Everest; and, centrally, the story of Mahounds, the Prophet of Jahilia, the city of sand – Mahound, the recipient of the revelation in which satanic verses mingle with the divine.
In this great wheel of a book, where the past and the future chase each other furiously, Salman Rushdie takes us on an epic journey of tears and laughter, of bewitching stories and astonishing flights of the imagination, a journey toward the evil and good that lie entwined within the hearts of women and men.”
Title: A Wild Sheep Chase
Author: Haruki Murakami
Translator: Alfred Birnbaum
Publisher: Vintage International
Publishing Date: April 2002
No. of Pages: 353
Synopsis: “Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best.
An advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend and casually appropriates the image for an advertisement. What he doesn’t realize is that included in the scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes readers from Tokyo to the remote mountains of northern Japan, where the unnamed protagonist has a surprising confrontation with his demons.”
Title: The Travelling Cat Chronicles
Author: Hiro Arikawa
Translator: Philip Gabriel
Publisher: Berkley
Publishing Date: 2017
No. of Pages: 277
Synopsis: “An instant international bestseller, The Travelling Cat Chronicles has charmed readers around the world. With simple yet descriptive prose, this novel gives voice to Nana the cat and his owner, Satoru, as they take to the road on a journey with no other purpose than to visit three of Satoru’s longtime friends. Or so Nana is led to believe…
With his crooked tail – a sign of good fortune – and adventurous spirit, Nana is the perfect companion for the man who took him in as a stray. And as they travel in a silver van across Japan, with its ever changing scenery and seasons, they will learn the true meaning of courage and gratitude, of loyalty and love.
For my June book wrap up, click here:
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 
I stress shop in bookstores too.
What an eclectic pick. Happy reading! 😊
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