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I can‘t lie - I didn‘t get it. I started in print and ended in audio. Both formats were a miss for me, but the audio was slightly better.

Interesting book of living a life vicariously after a sibling‘s death. This exploration of feelings & reflections is taken even further when adding thoughts/ideas only related to the color white. Loved it‘s uniqueness.

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This is a very tender, but also very sad book. In different very short texts, Han Kang talks about white things. White being the color of mourning in Korea. We learn about her older sister, who died shortly after birth. We learn how that still hunts Kang, how it affects her life. I was deeply moved by this work, by its calmness, by its insights.

A woman has become mute. She has lost her husband, teaching job, and custody of her 8-yr-old son. Lost herself, she takes a course in Ancient Greek taught by an instructor about her age who is losing his sight. Somehow a gentle warm story comes out of this, layered onto of darker histories and life pains, and terrific interesting prose. This completes my two week run through Han‘s four English-translated novels. (Another is due out in January)

Starting the next book - more from Nobel winner Han Kang

This reads like a collection of prose poetry. A series of white things, with a theme on an older sister who only lived a couple hours. Each topic gets a page or so. A blizzard is characterized by "this oppressive weight of beauty", a handkerchief is falling "like a soul tentatively sounding out the place it might alight". Very interesting, if generally mystifying to me.

My 1st book from this year's #NobelPrize winner. I was impressed by the first half, but disappointed that the narrator's quiet & moving story was pushed aside for almost straight non-fiction, admittedly also moving, and about events in #Korea's history that needed telling. So the fiction ended up being an artificial framing device for near-journalistic work. I was happy to read it all & learned a lot, but with a slight sense of frustration 😊

150 pages with maybe 80 pages of actual text, the rest white space. It reads like a series of prose poems on white things. Although not poetic in rhythm, the feelings they left me with are very similar that of Emily Dickinson‘s poetry that I‘m currently reading. Han writes of about an older sister who lived for 2 hours in Korea, while looking out at snowy Warsaw, Poland.

I've inhaled the 1st 1/3 of this book partly set in the highlands of Jeju Island in 1 sitting. So glad the Nobel Prize spurred me to read Han Kang now rather than at an indefinite point in the future.

I love the pic of mountains in Jeju I got from Wikipedia. It's perfect for the current season where I live (although it's winter AND snowing in the book).