First Love and other stories

An excellent collection of three short stories:

2. First Love
1. Spring Torrents
3. A Fire at Sea

  In order of appearance, and indexed in my personal order of preference. This book should have really been called "Spring Torrents and other stories". Not only because Spring Torrents was the main short story, but also because it was my favourite. Although, I was happy to read First Love. It reminded me of my younger self and the way I used to think about love and of the behaviour that I thought that being in love implied. It will not come as a surprise when I say that I was too childish, and that I am somewhat embarrassed by my past behaviour. I am less embarrassed by my way of experiencing love in my twenties, perhaps because I am much closer to those years.
  I wonder if we should be taught in school what love is. By that I mean that maybe we should have a class dedicated to thinking about what our feelings mean to us and how they are perceived by others in society, and maybe our teachers could give us some friendly advice.
  Maybe I should read more about the theory of our emotions and how to deal with them. I would really recommend this book to anyone who might want to spend some time thinking about being in love.

Moby Dick

 What a beautifully written book. I really like when you can tell that someone has put their heart into creating something they love, and this novel is one such piece of art. One can learn so much about whaling! And I really never thought I could be interested in whaling.
  Now that I am done reading it I am reminded of two thoughts that my friend Michael Young shared with me some time ago, and that somehow seem to apply to this book. The first one is about suspense. He mentioned how great the movie Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) was in creating suspense by having so few scenes where you can actually see the alien. Indeed, we see so little of Moby Dick but when we do it is so worth the wait. The second has to do with a certain type of anime. There are some anime that are so focused on one topic, say playing the violin, that it may not be an exaggeration to say that entire episodes are dedicated solely to a character putting all their heart on a single violin execution. That may also be the case with Moby Dick. Yes, it is so nice when someone is unapologetically enthusiastic about one topic. I am happy that Herman Melville was a whaling geek. Yet I wonder if having a more complex plot would have been beneficial for the book, instead of having just one extraordinarily epic moment at the very end.
  I highly recommend this book. It does live up to its reputation, and people who love art for art's sake will particularly enjoy this read.