I really got into this book!I recommend it! And the author is super smart, and parachutes refers to students from another country and their parents drop them off in the USA to live with a host family to get an American eductation. This book also follows sexual abuses by men which is so horrible :-(

The first half was interesting, the author tries to live in Berlin and stuff, but then the love story and baby weren't doing it for me. But I would still recommed it! also, the quote are from the Large Print Eidtion!

page 27: "When she asked him once what his last meal would be, he replied instantly and thoughtfully, "Banana. Because I wouldn't want to be full when I die."

page 52: "Jet lag had a habit of turning her into her mother, a high school librarian with a quiet drinking problem. If only my mother had been a college librarian, she thought. THen I would have had a real shot at the right ideas."

page sixty-eight: ""Don't normalize it!!!!!' we shouted at each other. But all we were normalizing was the use of the word normalize, which sounded like the action of a ray gun wielded by a guy named Norm to make everyone around him Norm as well."

page 100: "And he just gazed far off into the distance and said, I don't know how to act. I've been this way so long, I don't know how to be anymore."

page 105: "His two-year-old son, when asked whether he was a boy or a girl, invariably answered that he was a gun."

page 218: ""I am a very advanced life-form," she answered one night, "but soon I must return . . . to the Planet 9/11."

page 105, "... I hate being alone with CHAIR. This is a chair that sits in the middle of my apartment and talks to me -- and only ever to say mean things! It's pretty ridiculous for a piece of furniture to have a personality, but that's just how it is. And it talks just like my mother."

So I read this a long time ago, I think it was good, but I can't remember :\

page 57: "There was no way for me to make my life go away. My thoughts made me want to scream at the top of my lungs..."

page 124: "There's no beautiful world where everyone thinks the same way and they all understand each other perfectly. It doesn't exist. You think it does, but it's not real. When you really look at what's going on, everyone's living in their own world..."

page 167: " But  wasn't crying because I was sad. I guess I was crying because we had nowhere else to go, no choice but to go on living in this world. Crying because we had no other world to choose, and crying at everything before us, everything around us."

page 43: "If you really think about it, "Kojima said, "it's kind of stupid. Human beings are the only ones talking all the time and making problems and everything."

page 15: Thank you, pandemic. Screens have won."

This was a good and intimate read, kind of like reading someone's diary. The author had a lot of obstacles but was able to overcome them.

I liked the part where it talks about sadness, and even your phone is so sad that the battery only lasts a short time because the phone has had enough.

So the part about being an interpreter for an international court was interesting: a glimpse into living in a different country and even be face-to-face with a really bad terrorist. However, the love story part was a bit lacking, and I didn't like that part. 

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami. Murakami creates a certain atmosphere and he is a creative original author. This collection of short stories is good, especially if you're on a train or something.

Page 37: "Loving someone is like having a mental illness that's not covered by health insurance."

Page 69: "It's hard in dreams to do the right thing."

On the back of this book, Guy Debord is mentioned, and he founded the Situationists and was quite a rebel, and on the front it mentions "Nobel Prize Winner in Literature," but this book SUCKS. It's written like some mystery novel about this woman who everyone is looking for. Not worth it!