Itaewon Book Club

Itaewon Book Club is back in business! Everyone who enjoys great world literature is welcome!

One of the supreme masterpieces of world literature, Crime and Punishment catapulted Fyodor Dostoyevsky to the forefront of Russian writers and into the ranks of the world's greatest novelists.

Raskolnikov, an impoverished student tormented by his own nihilism, and the struggle between good and evil, believes he is above the law. Convinced that humanitarian ends justify vile means, he brutally murders an old woman—a pawnbroker whom he regards as "stupid, ailing, greedy…good for nothing." Overwhelmed afterward by feelings of guilt and terror, Raskolnikov confesses to the crime and goes to prison. There he realizes that happiness and redemption can only be achieved through suffering.

Drawing upon experiences from his own prison days, Dostoyevsky recounts in feverish, compelling tones a psychological thriller infused with forceful religious, social, and philosophical elements.

The two years before he wrote Crime and Punishment (1866) had been bad ones for Dostoyevsky. His wife and brother had died; the magazine he and his brother had started, Epoch, collapsed under its load of debt; and he was threatened with debtor's prison. With an advance that he managed to wangle for an unwritten novel, he fled to Wiesbaden, hoping to win enough at the roulette table to get himself out of debt. Instead, he lost all his money; he had to pawn his clothes and beg friends for loans to pay his hotel bill and get back to Russia. One of his begging letters went to a magazine editor, asking for an advance on yet another unwritten novel — which he described as Crime and Punishment. This extraordinary, vintage Russian classic, is reprinted here in the authoritative Constance Garnett translation
We will discuss the entire book

special note- . . This book can be ordered and bought at Gyobo Bookstore. If you have problems finding the book, let me know.

If you have any questions or need help trying find the place please give me a call. 010- 7224-7803. Call or text. I will be available. My email is chrisjteacher@gmail.com

Itaewon Book Club is back in business! Everyone who enjoys great world literature is welcome!

Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, is one of the most beloved classics of our time. Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies.

The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that are philosophical, spiritual, and, above all, inspirational. Gibran’s musings are divided into twenty-eight chapters covering such sprawling topics as love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death
We will discuss the entire book

special note- . . This book can be ordered and bought at Gyobo Bookstore. If you have problems finding the book, let me know.

If you have any questions or need help trying find the place please give me a call. 010- 7224-7803. Call or text. I will be available. My email is chrisjteacher@gmail.com

Itaewon Book Club is back in business! Everyone who enjoys great world literature is welcome!

A lovely debut from a gifted young author. Violet Moller brings to life the ways in which knowledge reached us from antiquity to the present day in a book that is as delightful as it is readable.' Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads

In The Map of Knowledge Violet Moller traces the journey taken by the ideas of three of the greatest scientists of antiquity – Euclid, Galen and Ptolemy – through seven cities and over a thousand years. In it, we follow them from sixth-century Alexandria to ninth-century Baghdad, from Muslim Cordoba to Catholic Toledo, from Salerno’s medieval medical school to Palermo, capital of Sicily’s vibrant mix of cultures, and – finally – to Venice, where that great merchant city’s printing presses would enable Euclid’s geometry, Ptolemy’s system of the stars and Galen’s vast body of writings on medicine to spread even more widely.

In tracing these fragile strands of knowledge from century to century, from east to west and north to south, Moller also reveals the web of connections between the Islamic world and Christendom, connections that would both preserve and transform astronomy, mathematics and medicine from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

Vividly told and with a dazzling cast of characters, The Map of Knowledge is an evocative, nuanced and vibrant account of our common intellectual heritage.

'An endlessly fascinating book, rich in detail, capacious and humane in vision.' Stephen Greenblatt, author of The How the World Became Modern.

"The reader is invited to marvel at how multicultural the ancient world was, and to conder how the foundational knowledge of the Western world did not simly leap from the anciet Greeks to the modern times but was unmistakingly preserved, analyzed, and innovated upon for almost 1,000 years"
-The Washington Post

"A sumptuous, glittering, endlessly fascinating book, written with passion, verve and humor."
-Catherine Nixey, author of "The Darkening Age"

special note- . . This book can be ordered and bought at Gyobo Bookstore. If you have problems finding the book, let me know.

If you have any questions or need help trying find the place please give me a call. 010- 7224-7803. Call or text. I will be available. My email is chrisjteacher@gmail.com

Itaewon Book Club is back in business! Everyone who enjoys great world literature is welcome!

# Things Fall Apart

A simple story of a "strong man" whose life is dominated by fear and anger, Things Fall Apart is written with remarkable economy and subtle irony. Uniquely and richly African, at the same time it reveals Achebe's keen awareness of the human qualities common to men of all times and places

# No Longer at Ease

Obi Okonkwo is an idealistic young man who has now returned to Nigeria for a job in the civil service. However in his new role he finds that the way of government seems to be corruption. Obi manages to resist the bribes offered to him, but when he falls in love with an unsuitable girl, he sinks further into emotional and financial turmoil.

# Arrow of God

### Set in the Igbo heartland of eastern Nigeria, one of Africa's best-known writers describes the conflict between old and new in its most poignant aspect: the personal struggle between father and son.

Ezeulu, the headstrong chief priest of the god Ulu, is worshipped by the six villages of Umuaro. But his authority is increasingly under threat—from rivals within his tribe, from functionaries of the colonial government, and even from his own family members. Yet he believes himself to be untouchable: surely he is an arrow in the bow of his God? Armed with this belief, he is prepared to lead his people, even if it is towards their own destruction. But his people will not be dominated so easily.

Spare and powerful, Arrow of God is an unforgettable portrayal of the loss of faith, and the downfall of a man in a society forever altered by colonialism

"T.S. Eliot said he doubted 'whether a poet or artist can be universal without being local too.'" I can think of no literary work that more persuasively confirms this judgement better than Achebe's trilogy, which evokes for us the local world of Igboland while exploring themes that are recognizable to us all. Achebe, by inviting us into his world, expands our own."
-Kwame Anthony Appiah, from the FOREWORD

"African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Achebe. For passion, intellect and crystalline prose, he is unsurpassed."
-Toni Morrison

special note- . . This book can be ordered and bought at Gyobo Bookstore. If you have problems finding the book, let me know.

If you have any questions or need help trying find the place please give me a call. 010- 7224-7803. Call or text. I will be available. My email is chrisjteacher@gmail.com