 Hello everyone! Today it is time for another book review, book summary, book something. So I've been calling these book hauls so far and apparently I was completely wrong. A book haul is not when you talk about the books you've been reading but you talk about like books you bought and say about all these books but I'm going to talk to you about the books I've been reading. It's August and I know the last time I did this was July so I figured I might as well give an update on what I've been reading so let's start doing that. First of all I'm not sure if I mentioned this in the last video but either way I figured I should just in case. I read Harukimura Kami, Kafka on the Shore which is probably the most famous one I've read by him. I've just recently kind of discovered him and I've read a couple books of his and I know I mentioned at least one other one in one of my other videos and I can safely say after reading this that he is one of my top three favorite authors. There's Umberto Eco, there's Robertson Davies and now there's also Harukimura Kami. Anyway, this book is very weird in comparison to some of the other ones I read like South of the Border West of the Sun but I mean it still has that same weird feel that I get from all his novels and I kind of get it from Banana Yoshimoto. I know I mentioned that before too but the symbolism that I'm sure half of it's over my head it's still really good. I really enjoy Harukimura Kami. I enjoy any one of his books if you want something a bit different and you want to kind of escape into an odd sort of world. Look him up, Harukimura Kami. I'm not going to get too much more into specifics about this A because as I mentioned a lot of it I'm sure was over my head but also because it is very unique said in a different way. What I can say is that the chapters are alternating and these are two different stories that are being told with each chapter. One has an even chapter, one has the odd chapters and obviously you know after a while they kind of converge and but there's a whole lot of stuff going on. Anyway it's a wonderful book. Great book. Definitely recommend it. Let's move right along. There's another book that I listened to recently and I didn't read so I'm going to show a picture of the book right now. As you can see it's called Sapiens and this book is, they're Sapiens, a Brief History of Humankind and this book is by Yuval Noah Harari. This was a wonderful book. It's just a history of of of Homo Sapiens. It's a history of everything human. It has analyses, extremely good, thorough analyses of a whole lot of things. So one thing I really liked was his analysis on how much of our world is in our collective imaginations right? Like countries, organizations, legal systems, financial systems, religions, politics, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These are not some these are not things that are biological or you know that occur in nature let's say but they're in our heads, only in our heads and they work nonetheless. So like say a financial system or currencies you know they exist because we've all collectively decided okay this currency exists and it will trade against this other currency and problems happen all the time but we still keep following. Anyway it's very interesting how it goes into all of this and how we keep following all these things that we kind of made up. Anyway I also enjoyed how he describes what a fraud the agricultural revolution was for humans and how actually it really made our lives worse. The only thing it allowed for was to have more and more humans and so more of us could be born but otherwise are so many things in our life got a lot worse due to the agricultural revolution. The one section I was a bit if you about was the economic section. I thought that he would you know the way he mentioned it he's like oh for economics to work you have capitalists and they don't want the rule of law but if you don't have the rule of law people could just all become monopolies and do whatever they want that's against the law and then it'll backfire and the capitalist system won't work. Most capitalists quote unquote perfectly understand this. I don't know of anyone who's you know pro-capitalism and doesn't want a rule of law. Anyway that just might be a bit nitpicky of me because my background is in economics and it's what I studied but still an excellent book an excellent compendium of everything human sapiens I highly recommend it as well definitely look it up or listen to it like I did. So now let's jump right back into actually yeah let's jump right back into the Japanese books so every country every culture has its own classic every you know in the states well the states they're going to be more modern but say English language has Shakespeare right Italian has Dante or maybe Boccaccio you know from the from from the Middle Ages and in France it'll be Molière or Rabelais or someone like that and when you get when you get into Asia you also obviously have the same thing and they tend even to be older and one such example is for Japan probably the main piece of literature is The Tale of Genji by the lady we call now Lady Murasaki and this was written a thousand years ago I think 1008 was the year it was written it's called also the first novel ever and Tale is the novel about this guy called Genji and by the way this is just this is not the whole book hold up just one second so this is The Tale of Genji as you can see it's two volumes I have read through the first one and I have yet to read the second one I'm kind of taking a break before I get to the second one obviously it's a translation this tale about Genji so far I can tell Genji is a pretty he's pretty much a bastard I mean all he does is go around and hook up with women here and there there's a lot of terminology that I mean obviously it shows a lot of how they used to live back then and including the fact that he can go around and hook up with all these girls and basically not suffer any consequences at one point he's sent into exile because the emperor is sort of forced to by his mother but otherwise he can do whatever he wants with no problem and anyway it it's kind of annoying I like it bothers me like I get really mad at him however it's also really interesting though so far I'm halfway through it but I thought I'd mention it so anyway that's what I think of The Tale of Genji so far again this version I have has a lot of footnotes and you know they took care to help you along in understanding because there are a lot of characters and they'll come back to a character 30 chapters later or they'll refer to characters by their title but obviously their titles also change in the meantime so they'll say and the High Commissioner saw the the lieutenant of the left wing and the lieutenant of the left wing son came to him and I was like wasn't lieutenant of the left wing son the High Commissioner before something and it can get quite confusing the footnotes definitely help getting through it slowly but surely oh yeah I picked this up just because this is another book from the same time period actually it's written I think 20 years later by a lady's just her journal her diary and in it she talks about she's trying to get through that whole book and you know it's very hard to get through the whole thing and so you know I feel her pain moving right along another book I read is Cardinal Richelieu and The Making of France this is a book about the Cardinal Richelieu of France so and he was a Cardinal in the 1600s in France he had immense power he's one of the few so out of the you know these people that were wheeling and dealing in the background of politics and statesmanship and everything going on in France the names that come up are Richelieu and Tallyran later on I'd love to read a biography of Tallyran but it's extremely thorough about his life unfortunately the one thing missing was his network of contacts and informers and that that was pretty much the main thing I knew him for that he had this vast network of contacts and informers all over the country and beyond and these were like maids chamber maids like servants and everything who would inform of all this stuff going on among his enemies among his friends like all this stuff he is very well known for this and I really wish I'd gone more into detail about how he got this how he maintained it how he was able to keep all these contacts and you know have them be loyal to him rather than the people they were serving but they just mentioned them in passing but in general it was a very good companion of his life I do wish though it had more about his contacts and network because that would have been totally cool and I feel like they missed a huge opportunity to talk about that but anyway moving right along I have this the stone diaries by carol shields not really sure why I got it I think I was looking into family histories and diaries I saw that it won the Pulitzer prize in 1995 and so I bought it thinking it was a family history and diary it turns out it's not it's fiction but it's it's a fictional account of a family in Canada which is odd because I just read whatever was called a Robertson Davies book that was the same thing but it was a lot more odd and the main thing I found interesting about this was it's interesting to read how someone can be so many different people during the course of a pretty like normal lifetime because it follows one lady throughout her life from birth until death basically and all the things that happen it's very interesting to see how different she can be while still being the same person during these different periods of her life and you realize that it's not a particularly crazy life or abnormal life and you realize how this applies to all of us we are very different people now from the person we were 10 years ago or you know even five years ago or something like that or sometimes where we stay the same sometimes we change a lot and you and you see that a lot with here in this book you also see in relation to her family members how they the same for them sometimes they sort of sort of stay the same other times they change completely and so their relationship between each other changes because of this and at a certain point you get different points of view from the different family members as if it's written by them so that's refreshing in a way so all in all it was sort of depressing but it was a good book I enjoy family biographies like I said this is fiction but it was still interesting last but not least was a book I'd picked up and I know we'd have for a while called Via Delleo okay I know I knew nothing about this going into it I won't talk too much about it because this is an Italian book I don't even know if it's available in English it's a short giallo poliziesco it's what do you call them like a murder mystery basically a mystery book it takes place right after the war in Italy 1948 I think and with all the stuff going on if you were I mean you learned this about this in Italian history but it was a mess I mean the governments were going popping up people didn't know if the things were going to swing back to fascism or to communism or somewhere in between or not and basically had these two sides fighting each other and killing each other and anyway a whole lot of stuff going on and in the meantime there is a murder in a brothel and this policeman is trying to solve it it's short it's a very quick read I enjoyed it a lot if you are Italian you can look it up Via Delleo okay the Carlo Luccarelli it is the third actually in a series I didn't read the first two I kind of want to now and but you can you definitely don't have to read the first two to get through it so you should look it up if it exists in English by all means read it as well it might be a bit confusing like I said it talks about post war Italy and so it has a lot of stuff going on there but short read and short and fun so I recommend that that is pretty much it for the books that I've been reading this month and so I hope you found it fun and as you can see there weren't that many that dealt with language per se but I've been kind of exploring a bit around you know from France to Japan and whatnot yeah and I hope you enjoyed it definitely let me know if you've read any of these books and if you have any thoughts about them because I'd be curious about it otherwise I will talk to you in the next video usually videos will have to do with freelance translation and freelancing as I mentioned don't forget to subscribe if you want more videos like that and like this and let me know if you like these videos or if you don't and I'm not sure if they really tie in I just enjoy making them so I probably will still make them anyway also yeah if you want to be notified about my videos next to the subscribe button you can click that little bell so you get notified right away so you don't have to check whenever there's a new video I wonder if there's a new video or not and that's it I'll see you in the next video thanks bye