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Showing posts from April, 2016

book review: A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding

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narrated by Nancy Wu The backstory: A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding was longlisted for the 2016 Baileys Prize . The basics:  "When Amaterasu Takahashi opens the door of her Philadelphia home to a badly scarred man claiming to be her grandson, she doesn’t believe him. Her grandson and her daughter, Yuko, perished nearly forty years ago during the bombing of Nagasaki. But the man carries with him a collection of sealed private letters that open a Pandora’s Box of family secrets Ama had sworn to leave behind when she fled Japan."--publisher My thoughts: I started this book on audio but switched to print about half way through.The reader, Nancy Wu, was good, and I appreciated her pronunciations of the Japanese names and words, but she read relatively slowly. The book is less than 300 pages, but the audio is over 11 hours. I reached a point where I wanted to finish more quickly than the audio would allow. It's rare for me to listen to half of a book and read the o