Nakamo

About two years ago my brother stumbled across a Japanese horror author named Junji Ito and a story he had created called "Uzumaki." That was just the start of our journey through Junji Ito's horror repertoire, which is extensive, far-reaching, and to this point we've caught up on everything he has put out with his next releases already pre-ordered. His stories are genuinely creepy, with body horror unlike anything I've seen in other media, and art images that still creep into my mind when I'm trying to fall asleep at night. Many of his stories also carry deeper meanings and ideas to think about afterwards, with many being extremely thought provoking, and overall these next five stories I'm going to talk about have been the tales that stuck with me the most! Honorable mention: Deserter What really got me about this story was the ending, the final image of the tale, in which the titular Deserter appears after the truth about his death has come out. The rest...

Racism and race are the prime points set up in New York Times bestseller, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Throughout the book’s pages he talks about his own upbringing and the acts of racism he witnessed which fortified his view on life and the way that he looks at everyone around him; the book is also told through first person narration as a message to his son. Out of the themes and ideas presented in the book, racism, disembodiment, and the idea of blinding oneself to the atrocities one may impose are the forefront of the topics as the author discusses things that he observed and experienced over the span of his life, his constant position on the black person’s body in regards to how fragile it truly is in the world and how it governs the life of African Americans, as well as his interpretation and explanation of the white people’s “Dream,” which he mentions several times throughout the book as the driving force for many white people’s actions which are forgotten in or...

The final book of Ernest Hemingway’s writing career was the short novel The Old Man and The Sea . In it he tells the painfully simple story of an elderly man, Santiago, who is pulled out to sea while fighting to catch a huge marlin. It proved to his critics that he was still capable of writing a fully successful story after the critical letdown of his previous novels; however, this novel proved different from those that came before it. The realistic presentation of facts typical of Hemingway’s other works is nearly thrown out the window in this novel as things happen that should not be physically or humanly possible. The central character himself is a stark contrast to many of Hemingway’s other heroes of earlier novels, right down to the ending that Santiago eventually settles into by the conclusion of the novel. Hemingway wrote a number of well-known novels throughout his career, but he abandons many of his characteristic writing conventions in The Old Man and the Sea , and it prov...