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:

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

Blurb from Goodreads

I thought about being too small for so much, but that no one told you when you were big enough … and I asked God if he please couldn’t take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. ‘Amen.’

Jas lives with her devout farming family in the rural Netherlands. One winter’s day, her older brother joins an ice skating trip; resentful at being left alone, she makes a perverse plea to God; he never returns. As grief overwhelms the farm, Jas succumbs to a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies, watching her family disintegrate into a darkness that threatens to derail them all.

A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands by a prize-winning young poet, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s debut novel lays everything bare. It is a world of language unlike any other, which Michele Hutchison’s striking translation captures in all its wild, violent beauty. Studded with unforgettable images – visceral, raw, surreal – The Discomfort of the Evening is a radical reading experience that will leave you changed forever.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday everyone! I know that Monday is the least favorite day of the week of many. If only we can extend the weekends, HAHA. Nonetheless, I hope that you had a great start to the week. We still got a long way to go before we meet with the weekend again. For now, I guess, let us focus on the job on hand. Moreover, I hope that everyone is doing well, in body, mind, and spirit. Thankfully, COVID19 cases across the world are starting to decline. It is my fervent prayer that we are finally on the last stretch of this dark period that has enveloped us in the past two years. I hope that we sustain this decline, especially since several parts of the world, including the Philippines, are starting to resume normal activities. 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. For June, I have decided to extend my foray into Europe literature which I commenced back in May. This is not my first time dedicating a reading month to European literature but it is the first time I am doing it in two consecutive months. I have been too absorbed by the books I read in May that I felt an extension was in line; plus the fact that I still have several unread books gathering dust on my bookshelf. I have so many that I have decided to separate books written by Nobel Laureates in Literature. I am currently reading my fourth book by David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. For this Goodreads Monday update, I am featuring an unfamiliar name, at least to me, Dutch writer Marieke Lucas Rijneveld with her novel The Discomfort of Evening.

I admit, one of my motivations in featuring the novel was because my exploration of Dutch literature, I have realized, is very limited. I am not even sure if I have previously read a book written by a Dutch writer. It seems that there is a lot of ground that I still have to cover as a writer. With this in mind, I resolved to feature a book written by a Dutch writer for this Goodreads Monday update. The first title that came to mind was Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening. The book first caught my attention back in 2020 when it was announced the winner of the International Booker Prize; it was batchmates with Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police.

This is going to be quite a step out of my comfort zone, to be honest. I am not that really keen on reading books that involve religion and the book seems to be brimming with that. I understand that such themes involve philosophical themes and it is on this that I am hinging my hopes. Anyway, I am quite open-minded and the book might provide me deep and thought-provoking passages. For now, I must obtain a copy of the book. I have been trying to obtain a copy of the book as soon as it was adjudged the winner of the International Booker Prize but it was all for naught. Many readers also wanted to dip their fingers into the book. Maybe I might get lucky soon.

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!

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