Book Finds and Good Reads

  I have always gravitated toward Asian literature, drawn to its focus to interior lives and its ability to connect the personal with the political. That pull becomes even stronger when the setting is India, a place I’ve visited four times in the past and where history, inequality, and survival often appears more powerful on the page. Megha Majumdar’s A Guardian and a Thief arrives squarely within that scope, offering a speculative yet unsettlingly portrait of a near-future Kolkata reshaped by climate catastrophe and moral compromise.

  Reading Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Before the Coffee Gets Cold reminded me of those early days of discovering Haruki Murakami when Japanese fiction first revealed its different style for building atmosphere rather than relying on surprising plot-twists. Like Murakami, Kawaguchi crafts a world where the characters exists alongside the mundane, where emotional truth matters more than logic, and where the real journey is found on each character's realization. Where Murakami leans toward surrealism, existential drift, and metaphysical loneliness, Kawaguchi threads the simpler ground. He creates a world that is smaller, almost domestic – in the case for this book. The café replaces the dreamscape; regret replaces alienation. Both writers, however, share a focus for mood, memory, and the unspoken weight of human relationships. Set in a small Tokyo café rumored to offer a chance to travel through time, Before the Coffee Gets Cold explores what happens when people are briefly allowed to re...