“I’ve been getting book recommendations from TikTok.”
My childhood best friend said this to me during one of our check-ins, proving once and for all, that as much as you try to resist it, TikTok will eventually consume us all. Come and claim me Gen-Z, I will give the middle part a shot.
My new reading recs friend and I don’t keep in touch as much as both of us would like nowadays. A global pandemic, and her being an emergency room nurse while I am just a lazy texter complicate the matter. One thing we never fail to do when we check in, though, is to ask what new books or authors the other is reading.
Review: Haruki Murakami s First Person Singular stories latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
When real-life accounts about Japan’s earthquakes are so powerful and poignant, it feels wrong, in a way, to read and write fiction about these natural disasters. Fiction involves a certain degree of inauthenticity, and to try animate such intense human suffering that isn’t even real doesn’t it take away from the actual human suffering that occurred?
Jay Rubin’s book about Japan’s historic earthquakes and the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, “Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories,” answers this question. Great disaster fiction doesn’t deal with the horror and the thrill. It deals with the aftershocks: the myriad, impossible-to-explain ways in which an earthquake and everything it entails transforms human lives and hearts.