Category: books

  • Wrong about Japan by Peter Carey

    This is the second of my three summer readings – I have not finished the third and we had to come home. This is a short paperback travelogue based on the author’s travel with his son to Japan to learn more about manga and anime.  He interviewed the authors and publishers of several hit mangas…

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  • Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland

    This is one of the three books that I read over our vacation at Kemer this September.  The choice of leisure books I read these days are mostly governed by availability.  I loaned this book from Lausanne’s municipal library which has a surprisingly decent number of English books.  They also have the French version of…

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  • The Millennium Trilogy: a tribute and more gossips

    The Millennium Trilogy: a tribute and more gossips

    Well, I was not planning to devote another blog post to these three books but there seems to be a lot of interest in them.   This trilogy is kind of the Harry Porter for grown ups and apparently Lisbeth Salander has become a media/culture figure first in Europe and now in the US.  I…

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  • The Millennium Trilogy’s Author: Stieg Larsson

    The Millennium Trilogy’s Author: Stieg Larsson

    These are the book covers for UK’s release of the Millennium Trilogy.  The book covers in yesterday’s post are used in the US editions. I prefer the US covers. The author of the Millennium Trilogy died in 2004 several months after he submitted the trilogy to his publisher and before the first book was published.…

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  • The Millennium Trilogy

    The Millennium Trilogy

    I just finished the third book of the Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson at around 2am Thursday night.  The Millennium Trilogy consist of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo“, “The Girl Who Played With Fire“, and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest“.  The contemporary crime-thrillers originally published in Sweden in 2005-2007 were translated into…

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  • The Geography of Bliss: Happiness Scores

    Continuing from yesterday’s blog on the book “The Geography of Bliss”, the author – Eric Weiner mentioned a World Database of Happiness that is maintained by Ruut Veenhoven at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  It describes itself as a continuous register of scientific research on subjective appreciation of life.  For this research project, happiness…

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