Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time
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A perfect little novel

The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

October 20, 2024 by ingres77 Leave a Comment

Growing up in the 1980s and 90s, the son of Boomer parents, I collected baseball cards. It was a hobby my father and I enjoyed together. Like many of his generation, my father amassed a collection of cards that, today, would be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, like many of his generation, they were all thrown away when he joined the military and moved away from home. Trying to rekindle that magic, as many parents do, he started buying them again when he […]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: Japan, the housekeeper and the professor, yoko ogawa

ingres77's CBR16 Review No:14 · Genres: Fiction · Tags: Japan, the housekeeper and the professor, yoko ogawa ·
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A nice anthology of mildly gruesome stories

Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

October 19, 2024 by ingres77 Leave a Comment

This is an anthology of interconnected short stories that takes place in Tokyo in an indeterminate time, but presumably sometime in the 1990s. Each of the stories (of which there are eleven) is from the perspective of a different character, and shares some commonality to the story that immediately precedes it. In “Afternoon at the Bakery”, for instance, the narrator enters a bakery for some strawberry shortcake. It’s her son’s birthday who (it is revealed) is now dead. That is what his last birthday cake […]

Filed Under: Fiction, Horror, Short Stories Tagged With: Japan, revenge, short stories, yoko ogawa

ingres77's CBR16 Review No:13 · Genres: Fiction, Horror, Short Stories · Tags: Japan, revenge, short stories, yoko ogawa ·
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What If Anything Could Just Disappear?

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

June 2, 2024 by ASKReviews Leave a Comment

Best for: Those who enjoy contemplative stories. In a nutshell: The main character of this book is a novelist whose name we never learn. She lives alone in a world where anything can disappear. But not for everyone. Worth quoting: The writing is the book is lovely, but I didn’t find myself underlining anything specific. Why I chose it: This was a birthday gift from friends. Review: I’m feeling a bit melancholy after reading this book, but I’m not sad, and I’m not disappointed that […]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: yoko ogawa

ASKReviews's CBR16 Review No:17 · Genres: Fiction · Tags: yoko ogawa ·
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Will You Remember Me?

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

April 1, 2024 by jeverett15 Leave a Comment

An unnamed narrator lives on an unnamed island, alone since the deaths of her mother and father some years before. A novelist, her only friends are her editor and an old man who used to be her family’s handyman. When she isn’t writing, she spends most of her time ruminating on the curious nature of life on this island. At unpredictable intervals, things disappear from the island, even from each inhabitant’s memory. On the morning of a disappearance, they all wake up knowing that something […]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: yoko ogawa

jeverett15's CBR16 Review No:19 · Genres: Fiction · Tags: yoko ogawa ·
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Memories of forgetting disappear

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

December 5, 2020 by Merryn Leave a Comment

“People – and I’m no exception – seem capable of forgetting almost anything, much as if our island were unable to float in anything but an expanse of totally empty sea.” The Memory Police enforce the forgetting of the things that are disappeared from an unnamed island inhabited by an unnamed author.  From time to time, the people of the island wake up with the restless knowledge that something else is gone and banish any contrary evidence from their homes, towns and minds.  Things disappear, […]

Filed Under: Fiction Tagged With: cbr12, dystopia, japanese, yoko ogawa

Merryn's CBR12 Review No:15 · Genres: Fiction · Tags: cbr12, dystopia, japanese, yoko ogawa ·
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My mother was her most lively when she talked about this small bottle.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

December 20, 2019 by vel veeter Leave a Comment

By the author of The Housekeeper and the Professor, Hotel Iris, Revenge, The Diving Pool, etc, this is a 1994 dystopian novel which is compared to Nineteen Eighty Four all over the cover, but is more clearly similar to Fahrenheit 451 for me. The method of control in this island society is the disappearing of words and memories associated with objects, concepts, people, and even professions. Our narrator is a novelist living on the island who is positioned uniquely because her father, an ornithologist, was one of the society’s first […]

Filed Under: Fantasy, Fiction Tagged With: The Memory Police, yoko ogawa

vel veeter's CBR11 Review No:706 · Genres: Fantasy, Fiction · Tags: The Memory Police, yoko ogawa ·
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