Whenever I come home from university I can always count on one thing happening: a book discussion with my brother, Anton (from Book Nerds Unite).

The Recent Reads

One book he finished some time ago is so bizarre that I MUST share the ending. The ending paraphrased:

A normal-ish troublemaker guy is invited by the mad doctor who lives on the castle on the hill to help him with his final experiment to stop the end of the world. The ritual doesn’t work and the earth cracks open and produces a gargantuan snake that’s supposed to swallow the planet – but then an equally gargantuan hawk swoops in from space, grabs the snake and flies away. After a stunned silence, the mad doctor shrugs, weirdly pleased and says something like, “Eh, makes sense even the cosmos has check and balances.” So the ritual failed but the world doesn’t end anyway. 

(Anton told me this and I’d just stared at him: “That’s seriously how it ended?” He’d grinned and said, “Yeah.”) [Book: Dr. Sax by Jack Kerouac]

Recommendations

Mine for him (from my collection):

• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (I do love my classics.)

His for me (from his collection):

• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• After Dark by Haruki Murakami (this author likes to begin with 2 discrete characters/story lines and have then converge by the end; I like the idea. I wanna see it in action.)

From the List of Greats

You know what book list I hadn’t considered (and have no idea why not)? The list if winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. That’s an awesome idea (my bro’s idea, not mine).

Example: Anton just got his hands on Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oe (1994 Nobel Prize winner).

His Other Recent Acquisitions 

• Botchan by Soseki Natsume
• In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
• The Sound of the Mountain by Yasunari Kawabata
• Sailing Alone around the World by Joshua Slocum (it’s about a guy in 1895 who sailed around the world to incur storms, mutiny, pirates and rebuilding a ship from scratch after a shipwreck – and then he disappeared. Sounds like an adventure.)