Here a link to the last 2021 challenge where you can see how bad I did.
You can find the challenge with all the rules here.
I’ll try to reach Pike’s Peak: Read 12 books from your TBR pile/s.
I did a decent job in 2021 remembering to use the tag #MountTBR2022 so let’s write it again so I can keep up and to log in my advancement.
Titles of the books from this challenge will be listed below once the review is published, that’s why this page and the challenge bar in the sidebar aren’t equals (the challenge bar is updated to the day, this page to the review date which can be weeks after I’ve finished the book):
Nobel Prize recipient Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country is widely considered to be the writer's masterpiece, a powerful tale of wasted love set amid the desolate beauty of western Japan.
At an isolated mountain hot spring, with snow blanketing every surface, Shimamura, a wealthy dilettante meets Komako, a lowly geisha. She gives herself to him fully and without remorse, despite knowing that their passion cannot last and that the affair can have only one outcome. In chronicling the course of this doomed romance, Kawabata has created a story for the ages, a stunning novel dense in implication and exalting in its sadness.
About the book
Snow Country is a novel set in Japan in 1930. The plot is not complicated, it is almost absent but what stands out in this story is the setting. We are in fact in the north of the largest island of Japan where it snows a lot during the winter and the style of the book, is a bit aseptic, like the environment.
One of the greatest Japanese authors, never published before in Italy, relives the bombing of Nagasaki in August 1945. A memory that continues to burn in the bodies and minds of survivors and is renewed with fear of modern nuclear accidents. "The darkness vanished, making room for a light between blue and red, the color of hydrangea when it begins to bloom. It wasn't hot, it wasn't cold. It looked like a ghostly light as solid as a wall "
Translated here for the first time in Italian, Kyoko Hayashi is an absolute reference point for the memory of the atomic bomb and the elaboration of that event of absolute destruction. She the author has always considered herself a "witness of August 9" and as such she has taken on the narrative of the nuclear holocaust so that she does not sink into oblivion and maintain her value as a warning for future generations. In the short story "The Two Tomb Signs" the facts of Nagasaki are seen through the story of two teenage girls, Yòko and Wakako. "The place of the rite" retraces the days following the bombing to cover a span of thirty years. "Il jarattolo" tells of the survivors living with the terror of the consequences of the atomic bomb, while "II crop" expresses fears for the contamination generated by the civil use of nuclear power.
About the book
The book is a collection of four short stories, plus a note from the author (please read the note) and a note from the curator of the book. The stories are: Two Grave Markers, The Empty Can, Ritual of Death and “The Harvest” not translated into English. The first is a heartbreaking tale of two friends struck by the atomic bomb, the second is the story of a group of friends who years later find themselves at their old school and remember one of their friends who always kept a tin can with her after the atomic bomb, the third is a first-person story of a survivor and the fourth differs a lot from the common thread of the atomic bomb because it speaks of the Tokaimura disaster of ’99 (or rather it is inspired, because I don’t remember reading this name in the story but most likely if there were the name, I didn’t connect it since I didn’t know what happened).
Now, where do I start? I have so much to say that my mind is full of confusion.
Here a link to the last 2021 challenge where you can see how bad I did.
