A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea

Born in 1947 in Kawasaki, Japan, Masaji Ishikawa moved with his parents and three sisters to North Korea in 1960 at the age of thirteen, where he lived until his escape in 1996. He currently resides in Japan.

Mr. Ishikawa engagingly told his story.  I kept wanting his circumstances to improve as the book went on even though I knew they would not.  The life that he and his family had to live in the DPRK and the way that was fooled by numerous governments at the time to move to the DPRK is disgusting.  The cruel way that his family was treated in the DPRK is disgusting.  What is even more horrific to me is that Mr. Ishikawa's story is not unique.

Bohemians of the Latin Quarter

A classic novel, by Henry Murger, of Bohemian life. The story is a collection of loosely united chapters beginning with the first meeting of the four main characters and ending with their departure from Bohemia in favor of bourgeois life, published in 1851. Although it is commonly called a novel, it does not follow standard novel form. It is a collection of loosely related stories, all set in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1840s, romanticizing bohemian life in a playful way. Most of the stories were originally published individually in a local literary magazine, Le Corsaire. Many of them were semi-autobiographical, featuring characters based on actual individuals who would have been familiar to some of the magazine's readers.  The version I read was provided by Project Gutenberg.  

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La bohème is an opera in four acts, composed by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on this book.  The world premiere performance of La bohème was in Turin on 1 February 1896 at the Teatro Regio, conducted by the young Arturo Toscanini; its U.S. premiere took place the following year, 1897, in Los Angeles. Since then, La bohème has become part of the standard Italian opera repertory and is one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide.  The current musical Rent is based heavily on this opera.

I am a huge fan of the musical and movie Rent.  Given that, I felt compelled to read the original basis story.  It was fun to read and rather than attempt the correct pronunciations of the names, I just used the rent character's names in my head.  Of course, not all the characters crossed the stories, but it still worked for most.  Mimi was one that didn't change.  What I found interesting in the stories is the leaving of the bohemian life by all the living characters.  It was very much a coming of age story in that way.  The book really showed the bohemian life as a young life that cannot last.