Sunday Salon: Catch Up

This week is a catch up post of the books I've been reading over the past few weeks. I've finished up Memoirs of a Geisha, The Lost Slayer and Untangling My Chopsticks. I'm almost done with Phillip Pullman's The Subtle Knife.

This is the movie poster, but the cover of my book looks the same. Typical Hollywood - Chiyo's eyes are grey in the book, not sky blue.

Memoirs of a Geisha is one of the books I'm reading for the Litflicks Challenge. I'll write more about it when I do the Litflicks review post for it. It is a wonderful book, made all the more real to me as I have walked the paths of the Gion district of Kyoto and been to a traditional tea house where Geisha (or Geiko as they prefer to be called in Kyoto) lived and worked. I find the concept fascinating and I enjoyed the book immensely. I think the book would have had even more of an impact if I hadn't seen the movie. As it was, there were few surprises. I enjoyed the detailed beginning and the ending which were different than the movie. I also appreciated the complex relationships that were conveyed much better in the book than in the movie.

I started Memoirs just after finally finishing Untangling My Chopsticks. I had to push through the remainder of Chopsticks and in the end, I was glad that I did. I also had a powerful hunger for Japanese food and ate it practically all week! As a matter of fact, I could eat some right now... Parts of this book were fairly shallow, especially where the relationships of the friends the author made in Kyoto were concerned. I got the feeling Victoria didn't even like some of them, and despite their kindness towards her, she had little compassion or warmth towards them in her descriptions, with the exception of the couple she lived with for a short time. I also thought the ending was odd - [spoiler] Victoria is offered a year long teaching job at the end of the book but declines it because she feels she might end up like her quasi-friends, a gay couple who have lived in Kyoto for 14 years and never quite fitted in. Um...hello? It is a bit different living in a country like Japan for 2 years and living there for 14 years! Basically I think she just wanted to get back to her boyfriend in the US. No shame in that, but at least be honest about your motivations. The food parts were overly detailed and I found myself skimming over ingredients I didn't understand and can't imagine. I much preferred the chapters of the book that detailed living in Kyoto as a foreigner, and I suspect there are better books that explore this theme.

I wrote about The Lost Slayer in my last Sunday Salon post. It continued to be enjoyable right up to the end. I think Christopher Golden did a great job of the four books that make up the Lost Slayer collection and my return to the Buffyverse was fun and unpredictable. Anyone who loves Buffy should seriously read this book.


As I said, I'm almost at the end of Phillip Pullman's second book in The Golden Compasses series. The Subtle Knife is much more interesting to me than the first book, His Dark Materials. It could be the old "seen the movie, book isn't surprising as I know what is going to happen" and it could be that I find the concept of the proud taking on the throne to be compelling. I remember writing when I was reading Materials that I couldn't see what all the fuss was about in regards to the religious implications of Pullman's books and a few Sunday Salon-ers posted "Wait until the second and third novels" and boy were they right. I know there has been some debate as to whether the second book will be made into a movie and I can understand if it isn't. It doesn't lend itself to filmaking in the same way the first one did and to me, it feels very much like a bridge from the beginning to the end, which it undoubtedly is as the middle book in a trilogy. The only downside is my three book omnibus is mighty heavy to carry around and take to work. Also, how awesome is Pullman at giving titles to his books? These are some of the best titles I've ever heard of and I love that he lifted them from other literature.