venta

Book #12 (as recommended by

pm215):

David Mitchell no, not that David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Given that I've really enjoyed every David Mitchell book I've read to date, it's a bit of a mystery why I haven't made more effort to seek out the outstanding ones. Anyway, this is one more off the list, and I loved it.

Mr de Zoet lives, throughout the book, on Dejima - an artificial island built off Nagasaki in the seventeenth century. Dejima was intended to allow foreigners to trade with Japan whilst remaining safely coralled outside the (deliberately isolated) Japanese empire. The whole book is an amazingly detailed description of life on Dejima, with warts-and-all descriptions of the Dutch traders, the Japanese officials and interpreters, and a few passing Britons.

It's loosely based on fact, though the characters are mostly fictional. It seems amazing now that people left Europe for five year trade postings to Japan, a land they didn't know and were not allowed to know, and where their only contact with their families would be a yearly delivery of letters - if they were lucky, and if the boat arrived.

I can't say my knowledge of seventeenth-century Japan is very good, but I'm given to understand it's a very well-researched book. It's worth reading for the historical detail alone, never mind the intricate story.

Book #13 (as recommended by

snow_leopard):

Erin Morgenstern - The Night Circus

For some reason, I was expecting this (rather lovely-looking, black and white) book to be some kind of feminist polemic. I'm not sure why, because Snow_Leopard isn't in the habit of recommending such books (or not to me). Instead I got a rather beautiful fairy story, about an actual circus.

(I did get a little cross with it, because Ms Morgenstern stole several ideas from my writing and wrote them first, and even stole the name of my damn circus. But that's a separate issue.)

The book is filled with fantastical characters - but they do also remember to have actual characters. They are real people; not especially good, or especially bad, just people who are sometimes noble and sometimes selfish. The imagery in the book is delightful. It's exactly the sort of thing someone will probably try to make into a film, an really shouldn't.