Book Review: ‘Before Your Memory Fades’ by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

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Updated 27 June 2024
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Book Review: ‘Before Your Memory Fades’ by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

  • This 2023 novel explores the delicate balance between the desire to change the course of events and the acceptance of the inevitable

Written by Toshikazu Kawaguchi and published in 2023, “Before Your Memory Fades” explores the fragility of memory and the enduring power of human connection.

The third book in the international bestselling “Before the Coffee Gets Cold” series — translated to English by Geoffrey Trousselot — is set in a small cafe in Tokyo and it follows the intertwined lives of four individuals who all want to travel back in time for various reasons.

The first character is the daughter who wants to meet her parents before they died. 

The second character is a comedian who wants to go back in time to speak with his wife who passed away. 

The third character is a woman who is in denial about her sister’s death. 

And finally, the fourth character in the story is a young man who is a student and works at the cafe at the same time.

In the story, the café’s owner can transport his guests back in time to pivotal moments in their lives.

As characters are given the chance to revisit their pasts, the novel explores the delicate balance between the desire to change the course of events and the acceptance of the inevitable.


Book Review: ‘A Shining’ by Jon Fosse

Updated 28 May 2025
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Book Review: ‘A Shining’ by Jon Fosse

Jon Fosse, the 2023 Nobel laureate, delivers a masterclass in existential minimalism with “A Shining,” a novella that glimmers with metaphysical unease.

Translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls, this brief but resonant work lingers like a half-remembered dream, inviting readers to grapple with its haunting ambiguity.   

An unnamed man drives into a remote forest, seeking isolation. When his car stalls, he abandons it, lured deeper into the trees by an enigmatic light. What begins as a quest for solitude spirals into a disorienting confrontation with the unknown.

Strange encounters — a flickering figure, disembodied voices, a persistent glow — blur the boundaries of reality. Is the “shining” a divine sign, a mental rupture, or something beyond comprehension? Fosse offers no easy answers.

Fosse’s sparse, rhythmic prose mirrors the protagonist’s fractured psyche. Sentences loop and stutter, mimicking the repetitive chatter of a mind unraveling (“I walked, I walked, I walked”).

Yet, within this austerity lies startling beauty: Descriptions of moss, shadows and cold air ground the surreal in the realm of the sensory.   

The novella probes humanity’s existential contradictions, particularly the tension between our desire for solitude and our terror of abandonment.

It lays bare the futility of seeking meaning in a universe indifferent to human struggles, while questioning how much we can trust our perceptions.

Are the protagonist’s encounters real, or projections of a mind teetering on the brink of collapse? Fosse leaves readers suspended in that uncertainty.  

Fosse refuses to cater to conventional narrative appetites. There are no villains or heroic arcs, only a man wrestling with the void within.

Fans of Franz Kafka’s existential labyrinths or Samuel Beckett’s bleak humor will find kinship here. 

“A Shining” is not for readers craving action or closure. It is a quiet storm of a book, best absorbed in one sitting under dim light.

Perfect for lovers of philosophical fiction, poetry devotees, and anyone who has ever stared into darkness and wondered what stared back.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elephants and Their Fossil Relatives’

Updated 27 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Elephants and Their Fossil Relatives’

Authors: Asier Larramendi and Marco P. Ferretti

Today, only three species of elephants survive — the African savanna elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant. However, these modern giants represent just a fraction of the vast and diverse order of Proboscidea, which includes not only living elephants but also their many extinct relatives.

Over the past 60 million years, proboscideans have evolved and adapted across five continents, giving rise to an astonishing variety of forms, from the massive, woolly-coated mammoths of the Ice Age to the diminutive, island-dwelling dwarf elephants.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Kenya’ by Charles Hornsby

Updated 26 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Kenya’ by Charles Hornsby

Since independence in 1963, Kenya has survived decades as a functioning nation-state, with regular elections, its borders intact, and without experiencing war or military rule. 

However, the country failed to transcend its colonial past. The political elite’s endless struggle for access to state resources has damaged Kenya’s economy.

In this definitive new history, Charles Hornsby demonstrates how independent Kenya’s politics have been dominated by a struggle to deliver security, impartiality, efficiency and growth, but how the legacies of the past have undermined their achievement, making the long-term future of Kenya far from certain.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Intraterrestrials’ by Karen G. Lloyd

Updated 25 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Intraterrestrials’ by Karen G. Lloyd

Life thrives in the deepest, darkest recesses of Earth’s crust—from methane seeps in the ocean floor to the highest reaches of Arctic permafrost—and it is unlike anything seen on the surface.

“Intraterrestrials” shares what scientists are learning about these strange types of microbial life—and how research expeditions to some of the most extreme locales on the planet are broadening our understanding of what life is and how its earliest forms may have evolved.

Karen Lloyd takes readers on an adventure from the bottom of the ocean through the jungles of Central America to the high-altitude volcanoes of the Andes.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Designing San Francisco’ by Alison Isenberg

Updated 24 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Designing San Francisco’ by Alison Isenberg

“Designing San Francisco” is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when US cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future.

In this pathbreaking and richly illustrated book, Alison Isenberg shifts the focus from architects and city planners—those most often hailed in histories of urban development and design—to the unsung artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding San Francisco between the 1940s and the 1970s.