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:

Ghostwritten by David Mitchell

Blurb from Goodreads

A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia. What is the common thread of coincidence or destiny that connects the lives of these nine souls in nine far-flung countries, stretching across the globe from east to west? What pattern do their linked fates form through time and space?

A writer of pyrotechnic virtuosity and profound compassion, a mind to which nothing human is alien, David Mitchell spins genres, cultures, and ideas like gossamer threads around and through these nine linked stories. Many forces bind these lives, but at root all involve the same universal longing for connection and transcendence, an axis of commonality that leads in two directions—to creation and to destruction. In the end, as lives converge with a fearful symmetry, Ghostwritten comes full circle, to a point at which a familiar idea—that whether the planet is vast or small is merely a matter of perspective—strikes home with the force of a new revelation. It marks the debut novel of a writer with astonishing gifts.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you had a great start to the week; we still have four more workdays to look forward to! HAHA. Anyway, I hope you had fun during the weekend. I also hope that you were able to rest and recover for the long week ahead. More importantly, I hope that you are all doing well, in body, mind, and spirit. With each passing day, it is starting to look like the world is recovering from the pandemic that has caught us all off guard. Several parts of the world, including the Philippines, are slowly returning to normal and are opening up. During the weekend, I attended my first KPop concert; it was the first KPop concert in the Philippines since February 2020. Malls and public places are starting to get more human traffic. While I understand that protocols are in place, I hope that everyone still observes minimum health protocols. I just hope that the pandemic, with all its variants, will soon come to an end.

To kickstart the blogging week, I am posting a new Goodreads Monday update. I just realized today is the last Monday of May, hence, this is my last Goodreads Monday update for the month. In May, I embarked on a journey across Europe; not physically, of course, but through literature, although traveling to Europe is part of my bucket list. This literary journey provided me with deeper insights into the history, people, and culture of the different parts of the continent, from Sweden to Italy to Spain to Albania to Norway. Earlier today, I completed Norwegian literary titan Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace while my current read is French writer Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised. For this Goodreads Monday update, I am featuring David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten.

David Mitchell, by now, is a familiar name, at least to me. Not only is he familiar but he is a writer that has reeled me into his complex body of art. The first Mitchell novel I read, Cloud Atlas, while complex and challenging, pushed the limits of my imagination. The genre-bending masterpiece was out-of-this-world but captivated me so much that I ended up reading two more of Mitchell’s works, The Bone Clocks and his latest novel, Utopia Avenue. I also have two unread Mitchell novels on my bookshelf, one of which, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I just might read in the extension of my foray into European literature in June. However, one book that I have been looking forward to is his debut novel, Ghostwritten.

One of the primary reasons why I wanted to read Ghostwritten was because I was curious about the beginnings of Mitchell’s prose. Recently, I have resolved to read the debut novels of popular novelists, from Haruki Murakami (Hear the Wind Sing) to Salman Rushdie (Grimus) to Margaret Atwood (The Edible Woman). Earlier works tend to set the tone for a writer’s career, at least in the case of Murakami. I couldn’t say the same for Rushdie who has basically condemned his debut novel. Mitchell is no exception, especially considering how his works have made me jump into his bandwagon. Like Murakami, he tends to connect his works through similar elements, like characters. This made me wonder what Ghostwritten has in store.

But first of all, I must obtain a copy of the book. How about you fellow reader? Are there works of Baltic literature you can recommend to me? I hope you can share it in the comment box. I hope the rest of the week will be great for everyone. For now, happy reading!