Blog 5 - Free Topic

 

Hello, dear students. Last semester I wrote about the books I had read so far, so in today’s blog, I will tell you about the books that I have read so far in this second semester.

In the book Honjok, The Art of Living Alone, the lifestyles of several South Koreans are depicted here, giving a “fresher” perspective of how to handle living in a society where everything must be done in pairs and how businesses are shifting towards this new type of customer, the “individual customer”. Honestly, I was biased due to the cover of this book and, unfortunately for me, many of the ideas about flying solo were things that I have already read before, so I was truly disappointed about this purchase. 

 

 

If you are interested in learning how people from other countries live a long, satisfied life (and I mean, living up to 100 years), Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life is a very friendly and trustworthy approach to these lifestyles, where the writers explain this interesting phenomenon of how certain factors (community, diet, lifestyle, exercise, etc) allow Japanese citizens to live differently regarding our Western perception of elderly people. If I’m not mistaken, it also includes hardcore data and scientific references for their comments regarding this reality.

 

 

At first, I thought that The Housekeeper and the Professor was going to be a Korean drama-like love story between the two main characters, but it was something quite different: from the housekeeper’s perspective, she tells us about her new employer, a previously brilliant math professor who, due to an accident, has lost his memory and can only “connect” with reality through numbers. 

 

 If by any chance you have read or seen the manga named “The Promised Neverland” (I think it is still on Netflix), Never let me go, by Kazuo Ishiguro, provides another perspective to the same issue: how children deal with their purpose of their lives as livestock for the country’s population. At first, I didn’t like it at all. I could even say that I just started to read this book on a whim; however, after some very long descriptions and a lot of flashbacks and flashforwards, the ending left me feeling empty and helpless, there were moments where I, as a teacher, got to understand certain actions from certain characters and how useless teachers sometimes feel when they cannot fight against the status quo.

 

 

Finally, nowadays I am reading Harry Potter and the Globet of Fire. Funny enough, I am reading it in Spanish and, truthfully, I have never laughed so hard while reading a book; the interactions between Ron’s parents and Harry’s uncle and aunt left me speechless. Although this is a very well-known franchise, reading the books gives me a deeper perception of the character’s personality and objectives and, obviously, there are details that are omitted in the movies because of time limits but, despite this, I believe these details would have given a different feeling to these books.

 

 

Right now, I’m looking forward to read a romance novel. Any suggestions, dear students?