Reading Two

My last post told you what I just finished reading, and now I’ll answer the question of what I’m reading currently. Actually, I’m reading two books at the moment. That’s not always the best way to do it, but they’re such wildly different stories that it’s no problem at all to keep the stories and characters straight. The first is Sayonara, a James Michener novel about an Air Force pilot transferred to Japan during the Korean War. I bought this one at a discount for the eBook from a BookBub ad I saw. See, I’m not just an advertiser, I’m also a customer! I’ve read a lot of Michener books over the years, and this might be the shortest. IYKYK. The narrator of the story falls in love with a Japanese woman and the story tells of the incredible racial and cultural prejudice directed at the Japanese. After all, the narrator is told, we defeated them in the war, so why would we want to fall in love with their women? There’s a lot of the culture on both sides that seems dated, which is a good thing to know how far we’ve progressed in seven decades, and I see it as a moment in history, a tale of humanity against the backdrop of a war that changed the world and ultimately the imperial culture of Japan. It’s different from Michener’s other epic tomes, an intensely personal story. The other story I’m reading I picked up at the bookstore on Friday. I was going to get another historical tale, but when I saw American Gods by Neil Gaiman I figured I’d go for it. I know it became a TV show, but beyond that I’m really not familiar with what it’s about. I mean, I can read the ad copy on the back cover just like everyone else, but I suppose I’ll learn more about it and what the book means in the larger scale of our culture at some point. Fow now, I’m coming into this one as a blank slate. It’s not often that happens.