Book Review: The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

Loved reading this book. Quite an unexpected thriller. My first Japanese fiction.

Quick summary - a single mother kills her exploitative ex-husband and gets the unexpected help from her infatuated neighbor (who is a math teacher). All of this happens in the first few chapters of the book. What happens next is how they try and cover the murder leading the police on a wild goose chase.
While on the surface, the book is a thriller with an excellent plot, it loses out on narrative because of shoddy translation. The book reads like a teen novel and the characters lose their depth and appear much amateurish than the author may have intended it to be.

All in all, a 7/10 and a must read for all thriller fans! Have already bought Keigo Higoshino's Salvation of Saint, which is next on my reading list

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,


and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you


all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,


the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

             - Derek Walcott

Levis Go Forth Legacy Commercial

Your life is your life

don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.

Be on the watch

There are ways out.

There is a light somewhere.

It may not be much light but

it beats the darkness

Be on the watch.

The gods will offer you chances.

Know them.

Take them.

You can’t beat death but

you can beat death in life, sometimes.

And the more often you learn to do it,

the more light there will be.

Your life is your life.

Know it while you have it.

You are marvelous

the gods wait to delight

in you.

Inspiration

Where do you go looking for inspiration?

Inside a book? At a mall? The lyrics of your favorite song? In your dysfunctional relationships? Alcohol? Random drunken conversation with strangers? Your past successes? Failures? A facebook status update or a twitter feed? Gazing into the dark night? Or walking aimlessly on a busy street? The internet? Google? Observing people or ignoring their existence? Questioning your motives? Or letting things be? God? Religion? Going back in the past? Or trying to control the future? Staying up in a sleepless night? Listening to deafening music? Inside a movie hall? Amidst a crisis? By being spontaneous? Or planning your whole life? Doing what others are busy imitating?

There is no real answer, is there?

A Little Piece of Heaven

In search of perfection and happy endings, how often do we look past the seemingly meaningless yet short abrupt run-ups to exhilarating highs?

I wonder how we survive then, if we keep giving these unknown alleys a miss? We’re so scared of what we will lose that we don’t stop to think of what we will probably experience if we did have the courage to walk into the dark and twisted side of the world.

Caught up in living, we forget about letting go. Being real and feeling, for once, what we really want to feel. It’s not that simple, but then, it wouldn’t be half as fun if it were.

We deserve that piece of heaven. Even if it lasts for a moment.

What my To-Read list looks like

re

The Curious Case of The Ladies Compartment

Dear Ladies-travelling-in-the-ladies-compartment-in-the-metro,

I’m confused. Would you mind answering this for me?

1.First you want reservation (which you obviously get) and then won’t open your mouth when a man enters and very comfortably travels in a reserved coach? What is it exactly are you afraid of? You are about a 100 against that one guy. Alteast stand up with the one who objects.

2. When one of your own does object to it, all the rest of you do is watch mutely or better still, turn your head away to the other side.Why?

3. Do you realise that when you sit in a seat specifically reserved for senior citizens, you have to vacate it when an older person boards the train? And by vacating, i mean getting up and not “slightly” moving your shapely behind to “adjust” someone to whom the seat rightfully belongs to?

4. When you ask me to make some room for you in an already overflowing seat, you realise that its ME who is doing YOU a favor and not the other way round? Should you not stop pushing me further and further into an immovable position that almost breaks ALL my bones ?

5. I understand that as women, we have this insatiable need to pack everything in our bags, hence often making it heavy to carry and hold onto for a long time. But before you place *that* heavy bag on me, shouldn't you ask me first? I am a person after all, not a random shelf inside the metro (which btw, they are yet to build!)

In name of sisterhood, motherhood or even Robin Hood (if you find him cute!), please help me understand your unnecessarily rude and strange behavior.

A frustrated fellow lady traveller.