Aicha Amano

The feeling of losing sleep, choosing to read despite it all, engrossed and brain all disheveled with so much thoughts about different things that all circle around one topic. This book by Yamaaki Doton, though in Manga (Japanese comics) form, is not your average light novel. This is a very dark book. As dark as its own book cover. I'd like to offer the warning that this post contains a lot of spoilers as well as personal ideas about the central message of the book and what it forced me to think about. The main topic is death, the treatment of death, trauma, coping and loss. Note:   If you do read the images that I uploaded for you, make sure that you remember it is read from RIGHT TO LEFT , like traditional Japanese books. Breathe Deeply by Yamaaki Doton A battle ensues over life and death, belief and science, ethics and progress. Two boys, Sei and Oishi, fall madly in love with Yuko. Her loss wreaks havoc in their young lives, bitter memories cease to fade, and...

As promised, here is a review of my previous January Book Read post! Light-hearted and one of the easiest to read books I've had for a long time, " It's It's Like This, Cat " by Emily Neville is a YA novel, so it's has a chipper flow of story, unlike most of the downer, heavy novels I've been reading lately. I couldn't have read it at an appropriate time where I wanted something nice and fresh: It's like opening a small window and getting a gentle breeze of cool air with a heavy rain-and-wet-grass smell. Very fresh indeed! Review: The story is about Dave Mitchell, a young boy in Brooklyn, New York, and living in the busy city with his parents, who are mildly dysfunctional like all other parents are. He loves listening to music, going around the neighborhood with his friends and his sense of curiosity often leads him to a good amount of discoveries. At home, he is mostly annoyed by his father from time to time, so he drops by to th...

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is set in the early 1970's at the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Universities have closed down, scholars were exiled or thrown in jail, and books, deemed dangerous, were confiscated and burned in city squares. Anti-intellectual ideas were at an all-time high and the regime had managed to overthrow modern thinking. Online history classes at online universities should be able to teach you more about the Chinese Cultural Revolution. This novel by Dai Sijie is a story about two city-bred and educated teenage boys, 18-year-old Luo and the 17-year-old unnamed narrator of the story. Both were sent to be "re-educated" in an extremely remote mountain village called Phoenix of the Sky. The rural community is made up of peasants, lowly farmers and merchants who were given the authority to teach and guide the boys away from bourgeois thinking. The two young men have noticed that the villager's ideas primarily based on the...