Book Reflections of 2013

Sorry, my dear blog readers! After promising I would continue to regularly post book reviews after October I failed in this task. I have read many books the past few months, but these books dealt more with  self-improvement techniques. This year has been hard for me looking for a job, losing my father, and maintaining a long distance relationship, but there were novels I read that helped me through it all. There were a few stories that seemed to reach inside my soul and take out the pieces of my heart. If was as if I could lay them out and look at them and how they were shaped, sharpened and even broken. How did they fit together? Where had I left some of the pieces? Were some of the pieces going to be found along the way?

To honor these books, I have decided to write a list their titles and only say they helped me on many levels. There is something about stories and writing that has always helped me through the hardest times in my life. I suspect, it's because every time I read a novel my soul learns something new about human truths and the human condition. Humans are always changing as their circumstances change and as they have new experiences. After all, are you not different now than you were last year, last month, last week, yesterday or even an hour ago? Have you not grown and changed in ways you never thought possible?

1. Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
2. A Song of Fire and Ice by George R. R. Martin
3. Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice
4. The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman
5. Catch Rider by Jennifer H. Lyne
6. Dark World by Zak Bagans
7. Letters from Skye by Jessica Brockmole
8. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki 
9. Essay in Idleness by Kenko
10. The Secret Circle #1-3 by J.L. Smith
11. Wabi sabi: The Japanese Art to Impermanence by Andrew Juniper
12. Spirit Princess by Esther Friesner
13. Walking in the Dust by Trent Reedy
14. Ink by Amanda Sun

Thank you for reading my blog! I will be posting more regularly again from now on. As for a reading goal for 2014 I have chosen a simple one: read all of Haruki Murakami's novels. This gives me an excuse to read Norwegian Wood again!

Purchased in Japan and waiting to be read  in 2014!