Book Curious ®

The Call of The Wild by Jack London
Pages: 85     First published: 1903

The book: Buck, a St. Bernard and Scots Shepherd dog mix, lives an idyllic and comfortable life as the pet of a prominent local judge in a California town. Thousands of miles away, in Alaska, the gold rush is booming. The men in the inhospitable north need dogs – big dogs – to work for them. This demand for dogs results in Buck being kidnapped. This is the story of his journey and new life in Alaska.

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The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga          Pages: 276           Published: 2008

The book: Set in modern-day India, Balram Halwai, originally a poor, uneducated man from the countryside, tells us his life story in a series of memos written to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiaboa, who happens to be visiting India.
Balram’s story is compelling and, at times, shocking. He is a witty narrator with a dark and sarcastic sense of humor. In telling his own story, we discover the many faces of India and gain an understanding of what goes on beneath what we see on the surface.

You might like it because: It’s incredibly funny and entertaining, as well as a great story. The author created a vivid picture of life in India and his main character Balram is very appealing, even if he is a sociopath. Read more

The Ocean At The End Of The Lane by Neil Gaiman
Pages: 178     Published: 2013

The book: The story’s narrator, a middle-aged man, returns to the area he grew up in to attend a family funeral. Having some time to kill, he goes in search of the house he grew up in, but it is long gone. He does, however, recognize a farmhouse where, when he was a lonely, bookish seven year old, he made friends with Lettie Hempstock, an unusual girl who claimed the pond in her backyard was an ocean. As the narrator sits by the pond, memories hidden away for decades come flooding back and a very strange story begins. Read more

Kafka On the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
Pages: 467     Published: 2005 (English translation)

The book: On his fifteenth birthday, Kafka Tamura, although perhaps that’s not his real name, runs away from his home in Tokyo to a town four hundred and fifty miles away. He leaves behind his father, with whom he has a fraught relationship. He may or may not be searching for his lost mother and sister.
In this novel you will meet an array of unusual characters. Nothing is quite what it seems and what it seems is often strange. There’s Mr. Nakata, a simple, old man, who can converse with talking cats, a character who dresses like the Johnnie Walker figure one finds on whisky bottles, a strange X-Files-type happening in a mystery town, and a magic stone that might have mystical powers. Read more