Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners but is now currently being hosted by Emily @ Budget Tales Book Blog. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.
This week’s book:
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Blurb from Goodreads
The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon three hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal–an experience that shocks him to his core.
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.
When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.
A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
Why I Want To Read It
Happy Monday everyone! While today is the first day of the week, today is also the last day of the second month of the year. Wow. Time does fly fast. I hope that the first two months of the year were kind to everyone. Else, I hope that things will start looking up and that the rest of the year will be a blast. COVID19 situation in the Philippines is starting to look up after that Omicron surge. These are small rays of light but they still provide hope in these dark times. I hope that the upward trajectory will continue in the coming months. Hope, after all, springs eternal. With this, I pray that you are all doing well, in body, mind, and spirit. It is my fervent prayer that the pandemic will end soon.
With Mondays comes a new Goodreads Monday update. I know, most of us don’t have a love affair with Mondays but it has been an opportunity for me to share books that are part or have become part of my perpetually growing reading list. As of date, my Goodreads Want To Read list is at 433 books, nearly half of the total number of books. But hey, there are just too many good books out there and I will take it one step at a time. For the past Goodreads Monday updates, I have been featuring 2022 books that I have recently added to my reading list. For this week’s update, I am featuring Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility.
Unlike most of the authors I have been featuring in these Goodreads Monday updates, Emily St. John Mandel is not a new name. Her 2020 novel, The Glass Hotel, was part of my 2020 Books I Look Forward To List. I managed to read the book before 2020 ended but I was less than impressed by her prose. However, many book readers have asked me to check out her works of speculative fiction, the genre in which her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, belongs. Station Eleven was also a popular recommendation. Perhaps in the future but for now, my focus will be on Sea of Tranquility. After all, I am one the type of reader to give writers chances to redeem themselves. Moreover, 2022 has been shaping up to be a year of redemption. At least reading-wise.
Sea of Tranquility will be released in April and I am crossing my fingers that I will be able to obtain a copy of the book without much trouble. How about you fellow reader? What 2022 books are you looking forward to? I hope you could share it in the comment box. For now, happy Monday, and as always, happy reading!
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 