Happy Wednesday, everyone! Wednesdays also mean WWW Wednesday updates. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme hosted originally by SAM@TAKING ON A WORLD OF WORDS. 

The mechanics for WWW Wednesday are quite simple: you just have to answer three questions:

  1. What are you currently reading?
  2. What have you finished reading?
  3. What will you read next?
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What are you currently reading?

It is already the middle of the week. How has your week been? I hope it’s going well and going in your desired direction. Woah. Time flies! We are already down a week in the fifth month of the year. How has the week and the year been so far? I hope that it is going well for everyone. I hope it is going your way, and that you are being showered with blessings and good news. I hope the rest of the year will be prosperous, brimming with wealth, but more importantly, good health. I also hope everyone is making progress on their goals and is on the way to achieving them. Reading-wise, I have several goals I want to achieve, primarily to complete 100 books for the fourth year in a row. Barring any major obstacles, I know I can end the year with at least 100 books. After a full quarter of reading exclusively works of East Asian writers, I am now venturing into the even more extensive world of Asian literature; this started in April but I have extended it to May.

My current read takes me to a territory that is supposed to be familiar but is not. I admit, my venture into Philippine literature is quite limited although I have been redressing this in the past few years. With this in mind, I am already reading my third novel by a Filipino writer this year. Although I have been encountering Samantha Sotto Yambao’s Water Moon, I mostly ignored the book but I eventually relented, curious about what it has in store. Interestingly, Water Moon is her fifth novel but it is not set in the Philippines. It is set in Japan. This makes it even more interesting. The story starts in an unnamed pawnshop behind a ramen restaurant. The shop is run by Toshio Ishikawa. I just started reading the book so I haven’t formed much of an impression on it except perhaps for the basic. It is about a dysfunctional family although I detect hints of magic or fantasy, at least as I can surmise from the cover and title. I will be sharing more of my impressions of the book in this week’s First Impression Friday update.

What have you finished reading?

While I managed to pick up pace toward the end of April, I suffered a bit of a slump to start May. I was able to complete only two books but it is still a good number considering that this is my weekly average. This also underscores how my foray into Asian literature is still in full swing. Like my venture into Philippine literature, my foray into Southeast Asian literature is also limited. I have since been exploring it more since the pandemic. This brings me to Yeoh Jo-Ann’s Deplorable Conversations With Cats and Other Distractions. Interestingly, I thought the Malaysian writer was Korean, hence, my purchase of her book to include to my East Asian literary adventure. Imagine my surprise when I learned about her provenance. Thankfully, I can repurpose her book.

Deplorable Conversations With Cats and Other Distractions is Yeoh’s sophomore novel. I guess this is another addition to my growing collection of feline fiction. At the heart of the story is Lucky Lee, a man in his late thirties. Born to an affluent family whose fortune was built on coffee, Lucky was made fun of by his peers because of his name. Nevertheless, his family’s affluence allowed him to live a charmed life although he was not much use in any respect. His degree in architecture, for instance, was never practiced. He currently lives rent-free in the family home and has also started multiple business ventures; most ended as a failure. The only business that flourished is Caffiend, an independent cafe located in his late father’s Joo Chiat shophouse. Lucky was the antithesis of his sister, Pearl Lee, a renowned TV chef and food critic. Nevertheless, the siblings grew up close. When Pearl perished in a horrific plane accident, Lucky’s life went tail-spinning. To her brother, Pearl left her cat, Coconut, who bore witness to Lucky’s spiral into a slump. Lucky was locked in grief, lost in a wave of nostalgia, and swept by memories of childhood. Then out of the blue, Coconut started to speak, breaking Lucky out of his prolonged lethargy. Deplorable Conversations With Cats and Other Distractions takes the readers on a journey that courses through subjects such as grief, self-discovery, mental health, and meaningful connections. Despite some flaws, Yeoh’s sophomore novel is a riveting read.

From Southeast Asia, my next read took me to a territory that is also a little unfamiliar, at least in terms of my literary ventures. While I have some knowledge about Israel and glimpses into Israeli history, I can’t say the same for Israeli literature. I guess I can say the same for West Asia, a stark dichotomy to my venture into East Asian literature. In fact, I know very few Israeli writers. Among those I know – and I just learned of him because his work was nominated for the International Booker Prize – is David Grossman. I learned that he is quite an influential figure in Israeli literary circles and has even won several accolades across the world for his works. His name also comes up during the Nobel Prize in Literature discourses. Last year, I read my first Grossman novel, A Horse Walks into a Bar.

As part of my ongoing foray into Asian literature, I decided to obtain a copy of More Than I Love My Life. Originally published in 2019 in Hebrew as אתי החיים משחק הרבה (Eti Hachi’im Mischak Harva), the novel was translated into English in 2021. The story charts the fortunes of three generations of women. It starts in the contemporary, with the novel’s primary narrator, Gili. When she was young, she was abandoned by her mother Nina. She was then raised by her grandmother Vera Novak. The story then flashes back to the 1960s. Gili’s grandfather, Tuvia, lives with his sickly wife and their son, Rafael, on an unnamed kibbutz. When his wife passed away, Tuvia remarried, to Vera who was, by then, a recent Yugoslavian immigrant, bringing along with her her daughter. Rafael inevitably falls in love with his stepsister. In an act of rebellion, Nina sleeps with Rafael. The story then moves forward once again – time is a relative concept – to 2008 on Vera’s 90th birthday. The family, including Nina, has converged to celebrate. Soon Nina confesses that she has a degenerative illness, her memory slowly erasing itself. With time running out, she asked her estranged daughter and former lover, both filmmakers, to create a film about her life. To do so, the filmmakers, and the readers, had to travel all the way back to war-time Serbia and Croatia. More Than I Love My Life is a revelation, quite different from A Horse Walks into a Bar. It is also based on a true story and I can’t help but be pained by the torture Vera had to go through when she was forcefully incarcerated in Goli Otok, a prison island called the Croatian Alcatraz. The novel is brimming with history but, at its heart, it is the story of resiliency and the indomitable human spirit.

What will you read next?