nomadreader

translated by William Weaver  The backstory: Invisible Cities  is one of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die . It's also Mr. Nomadreader's favorite book of all time and one of the first two selections for The "Darling, but..." Book Club. The basics: Invisible Cities  is mostly a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which Polo describes the cities he's seen on his journey to and from Venice and the Mongol Empire. My thoughts: There's a lot of pressure when you read your favorite person's favorite book. Mr. Nomadreader and I have been discussing this book for years, as it's themes of cities and travel come up so frequently in our lives. Yet when we started watching "Marco Polo" on Netflix this winter, and I kept pausing to ask questions because I didn't know enough about that historical period to be able to follow (my world history pre-1900 is embarrassingly bad), I discovered that the plot of Invisible Cities  i...

narrated by Campbell Scott translated by Carol Brown Janeway The backstory: The Reader  is one of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die . The basics: Narrated by Michael, whom we meet as a fifteen-year-old, The Reader  is the story of his life and the relationship he develops with Hanna, a 36-year-old train director he meets at the beginning of the novel, as well as the reverberating impacts of that relationship on his life. My thoughts: I've known about The Reader  since its release in the United States almost twenty years ago, yet I never realized it was about the love affair of a teenage boy and an adult woman. It's about much more than that too, but the first part of the book surprised me. As I kept reading, I marveled at how many storyline Schlink weaves into this slim novel. I was particularly entertained with Michael. Campbell Scott's narration often had an urgency to it. He read the novel as though Michael was seeking to explain, or perhaps seeking som...

Translated from the Italian by Judith Landry. The backstory: Diego Marani's debut novel, New Finnish Grammar , was originally published in Italian in 2000. The translated edition is on the 2012 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize shortlist . The basics: (from the publisher) "One night at Trieste in September 1943 a seriously wounded soldier is found on the quay. The doctor, of a newly arrived German hospital ship, Pietri Friari gives the unconscious soldier medical assistance. His new patient has no documents or anything that can identifying him. When he regains consciousness he has lost his memory and cannot even remember what language he speaks. From a few things found on the man the doctor, who is originally from Finland, believes him to be a sailor and a fellow countryman, who somehow or other has ended up in Trieste. The doctor dedicates himself to teaching the man Finnish, beginning the reconstruction of the identity of Sampo Karjalainen, leading the missing man to ret...

Translated from Korean by Chi-Young Kim The basics: Kyong-Sook Shin is a famous Korean writer who has won several awards internationally. Please Look After Mom is her first book to be translated into English. It tells the story of a mother who goes missing one afternoon in a crowded Seoul subway station. The story is told in the voices of her children and husband as they search for her, remember her and face their regrets. My thoughts: Please Look After Mom opens in a somewhat bracing way. The reader is addressed as "you," which is jarring, but in a good way. Still, I scrambled for a few pages to get my bearings in the scene, the country, the family, and the character. As the novel moved into different sections, the narrator's language shifted to first-person. It was an interesting narrative tool, and I appreciated the boldness of Shin to force the reader to figure out which characters was now telling his or her story. There was no road map to this novel, just as m...