June Books, er, Book

 *hangs head in shame*

Oh, well. It's not like I didn't try. I just didn't have all that extra time for reading last month, which has been the perennial excuse anyway. Seems like a lame excuse when I see friends' posts and/or monthly updates on the stack of books they've finished for the month, but what can I do. I run a micro-business (homemade brioche and jams, people!), I (still) work from home, I have all those other things that take up a lot of time from reading, you get the picture. 

Anyway, I did manage to finish one book - The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami, which I rated 3/5. 

I kept imagining the setting of The Nakano Thrift Shop as a slice-of-life Japanese TV series, similar to my favorite Netflix series Izakaya Bottakuri or Midnight Diner. I enjoyed reading this because it was straightforward and simple, and I'd love to meet Takeo or Hitomi or any one of the characters if they existed in real life. It was a light read, perfect for short spans of reading time that I was allowed last month. 

The other book that I intended to finish reading last month (and I'm happy to say that I'm halfway through now) is Salman Rushdie's masterpiece and Best of the Booker winner, Midnight's Children. It was also the book club's pick for June. I had long wanted to pick it up but was never inspired to do so. Once I got the hang of reading it (and now I realize that I really needed to find time to read, if I wanted to finish anything) I found that I enjoy it immensely! It's like an epic drama, very reminiscent of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. I will definitely finish it this July so hang on for that!