billion dollar whale - wright & hope (2018)

Jho Low is one smart boy without a conscience. what i cannot understand is how his dad and mom and extended relatives do not appear to be troubled by too many scruples either. i mean, would not your heart just break? 

Najib comes across as a greedy bugger who made an unfortunate marital choice. and not a very smart one either, compared to the gentleman above. but vicious in a corner.

as for Goldman Sachs, they are pretty much the scum of the earth. one can hardly believe the unfettered avarice.

i do wish that michael lewis had written this though.

rudolph the red-nosed whatever

i venture to the stores today in a trip determinedly dedicated to commerce. as opposed to a walk that serendipitously ends up in the neighborhood, so to speak, sans planning sans energy and sans wallet.

here are my observations:

• they've started on the great christmas carol massacre. right on time just off of halloween
• there is a concurrent black friday sale. that's cultural appropriation for you
• some people even have an autumn sale! 

in any case, like i report to HOM, i spend two-odd hours browsing and successfully buy yong tau foo for lunch. vive la on-line shopping!

still alice - lisa genova (2007)

fresh from the other book i imagine another lisa genova cannot be wrong so i launch into this one. and wow.

she's a bit too high functioning for me i guess. all that working into the night and lecturing and traveling and researching and supervising and stuff make the fulness of her family life a bit difficult to believe. also the family relationships are all too potentially messy to fall so neatly pat as the book progresses. her children are too conveniently angst-free even though i know we are looking at them through Alice's cognitively distorted lens. i think her husband's actions have the truest ring about them - reflecting as they do fear and resentment and shattered hopes and self-preservation and love.

HOWEVER. this book is a engrossing account of how bits of memory go, and confidence, and then agency, and finally self-awareness. and yet delicate exquisite bits of humanity remain, as i have seen it remain in real patients with Alzheimer's.

i love best that Alice is a linguist. Alzheimer's strikes at her explicit memory, that language-based scaffold by which she chronicles her life. it is cruel to her where she is strongest, and her perspective is compelling as she becomes horribly aware of this and as she reaches past denial to resourceful but ultimately futile compensation.

left neglected - lisa genova (2011)

this is a glorious book that opens my eyes to a patient's tortuous  tortured path through rehab following traumatic brain injury.

she writes like she knows. 

i also like her way of quietly sneaking asides into the descriptions. because of this i am going to look for her other book.

the tattoo murder case - akimitsu takagi (1948), translated 1998

rip-roaringly satisfying whodunit with devious turns and a most salaciously evil twist at the end. dem good story, is all i can say. and when Kamizu explains all over a meal of sushi i feel like eating too. 

the fact that it comes from 1948 also means there is hardly any irritating officialese that peppers so many modern stories. here, the hoi polloi collaborates quite refreshingly with the police.

also, because i read this in e-book form, it doesn't feel like a 1948 or 1998 book. which goes to show that so much of our impressions are contextual.

the wife - meg wolitzer (2003)

part of the ebook stash, which i acquire from deep within the bowels of sedentary solitude when HOM is traveling.

this be not the dry brit wit, nor the earnest long sentences of the new yorker, and not the lyrical prose of my last book by ursula le guin. yet she has a fresh turn of phrase, this lady, and i turn the pages because i want to read more.

the main problem is that the anatomy of an unsatisfactory marriage to an obligate partner is not an easy topic to plow through. although the story does end pretty decently and the main characters are left with a semblance of dignity. 

the earthsea cycle - ursula le guin (1968-1990s)

rediscovering word-magic, le guin's and earthsea's, and  getting hopelessly distracted by the hold that chivalry and restrained power ever had on my poor heart.

for the record, there are six books in all, and i am three down.

also for the record, the national library's e-borrowing platform has transformed my life. although it would be more transformative yet if they had all six books, which they do not.