Boxwalla Book Subscription Box Review – August 2016

Subscription: Boxwalla Book Box

Cost: $49.99 billed bi-monthly

What to Expect: “We have four interests to choose from. And two ways to explore them. You can either subscribe to multiple interests. OR you can subscribe to one interest and hop between interests.”

---

 

“Housed in a beautiful, cream colored handmade box made from tree-free handmade paper.”

Let me just say that Mailbox Junkie is not lying when she talks about the amazingness of this box! It’s made from cotton fibers I believe. I’ve decided to use them as craft storage until I can buy a cube cabinet for under my desk.

August Box: South Korea, Spain, & Somalia

The first series of book boxes this year, will focus on great, living writers from all over the world. All of them are must-read but not as widely read as they deserve to be. All of them are also prospective Nobel Laureates. But we don’t want to wait till they win. We want to (and want you to) read them now!

The card is eloquently written. I like descriptions like “hilarious & profound”, but also I need some cliffnotes for the profound part…

Or I’ll just go on Goodreads and find someone who explained the book in layman’s terms ;’D

 

This Side of Time by Ko Un, a South Korean writer

“Ko Un’s poems evoke the open creativity and fluidity of nature, and funny turns and twists of mind. Mind is sometimes registered in Buddhist terms—Buddhist practice being part of Ko Un’s background. Ko Un writes spare, short-line lyrics direct to the point, but often intricate in both wit and meaning. Ko Un has now traveled worldwide and is not only a major spokesman for all Korean culture, but a voice for Planet Earth Watershed as well.” —Gary Snyder

Ko Un is one of the most respected poets in Korea and has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Let me say that I was a horrible English major, and didn’t like classical literature or poetry. BUT I flipped through this book, and they’re very short, amusing poems!

Which is awesome because I can read like 20 poems and feel super accomplished!

In honor of Ko Un’s poetry, and the fact that it’s spider season, I decided to share some of my spur-of-the-moment poetry with you! #lucky

Spider

Spider

SPIDER! 

I’ve found your solemate

Shoe, meet spider.

Because She Never Asked, Enrique Vila-Matas, a Spanish novelist

Because She Never Asked is a story reminiscent of that reached by the travelers in Patricia Highsmith’s Stranger on a Train. The author first writes a piece for the artist Sophie Calle to live out: a young, aspiring, French artist travels to Lisbon and the Azores in pursuit of an older artist whose work she’s in love with. The second part of the story tells what happens between the author and Calle. She eludes, him; he becomes blocked, and suffers physical collapse.

Never Any End to Paris, Enrique Vila-Matas, a Spanish novelist

A splendid ironic portrayal of literary Paris and of a young writer’s struggles by one of Spain’s most eminent authors. This brilliantly ironic novel about literature and writing, in Vila-Matas’s trademark witty and erudite style, is told in the form of a lecture delivered by a novelist clearly a version of the author himself. The “lecturer” tells of his two-year stint living in Marguerite Duras’s garret during the seventies, spending time with writers, intellectuals, and eccentrics, and trying to make it as a creator of literature: “I went to Paris and was very poor and very unhappy.” Encountering such luminaries as Duras, Roland Barthes, Georges Perec, Sergio Pitol, Samuel Beckett, and Juan Marsé, our narrator embarks on a novel whose text will “kill” its readers and put him on a footing with his beloved Hemingway. (Never Any End to Paris takes its title from a refrain in A Moveable Feast.) What emerges is a fabulous portrait of intellectual life in Paris that, with humor and penetrating insight, investigates the role of literature in our lives.

I just love the words and phrases used to describe these books!!

I hope my erudite commentary penetrates you with splendid irony. 

Sweet and Sour Milk, by Nuruddin Farah, an African novelist from Somalia

Winner of the 1980 English-Speaking Union Literary Award

The first novel in Farah’s universally acclaimed Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy, Sweet and Sour Milk chronicles one man’s search for the reasons behind his twin brother’s violent death during the 1970s. The atmosphere of political tyranny and repression reduces our hero’s quest to a passive and fatalistic level; his search for reasons and answers ultimately becomes a search for meaning. The often detective-story-like narrative of this novel thus moves on a primarily interior plane as “Farah takes us deep into territory he has charted and mapped and made uniquely his own” (Chinua Achebe).

Blackwing 602 pencil and an “I dwell in possibility” pencil by CW Pencil Enterprise

Bookish Goodish! These are always fun in book boxes. I love the flat pencil! I’m glad I actually need to use pencils at my job now because I would be sad to give these away to my boyfriend.

BTW, found a #1 pencil for ya! The number refers to the hardness, and #1 is too soft for those hard standardized tests.

Hah. Wood you agree that I am write? Or do you think I’ve lead you on and should erase my comments? Heh… totally laughing at my own drawn out jokes!

 

The day after my Boxwalla box came, I got two Owl Crate books from a swap!

My new books on my shelf! Also, there’s a little PSMH candle there as well. Sub box shelf, basically. Books make me sooo happy <3

 

---

Verdict: I don’t know how to elicit a happy groan via text… “yaagghhhh!”? [complete with a smile, eyes closed, and fists shaking up in the air] I love this box! It makes me feel like my cool, intellectual friend is sending me books that I actually want to read! My boss was super impressed by this box as well, and she thought they would be great additions to the school library for the high schoolers to do their junior year lit crit projects on (buuuttt I’m keeping my copies).

Fun side note: my boss introduced me to the faculty and staff today and told them all I was a PokemonGo expert… I’ve never played it ever, and have no clue where she got that idea! 

The June box was awesome, and I just finished Lost Paradise… so look for the review on that some… time… I might have a small backlog of reviews because life.

 

 

Which book would you snuggle up on the beach or in your bed with?

Click here to see other Boxwalla reviews!

Disclosure: This box was sent to me for review purposes. Opinions are all my own.