My English padlet by https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m The Sky's Not the Limit en-us 2017-04-28 08:17:01 UTC 2025-10-22 19:28:21 UTC hello@padlet.com READING lluiscollvinent https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168822904 "A book is a device to ignite the imagination"
Alan Bennett
Book: Kafka on the Shore
Author: Haruki Murakami
nº of pages:  600

I chose this book because last Summer I read another novel of the same author in Spanish (Baila, Baila, Baila ) and I enjoyed very much.
Summary:
Kafka on the Shore describes the journeys of two different characters who seem not to be related at all, but as the plot moves towards the end , we can establish the relation between them.
One is the journey of a fifteen year-old boy, Kafka Kamura, who runs away from his home in Tokyo to the shores of Takamatsu. Kafka flees home because his father, a famous sculptor, cursed him with the Oedipus Prophecy: "He will kill his father and sleep with his mother and sister".
Kafka arrives to a small private library outside Takamatsu where he befriends Oshima, a transgender young gay man who works as the library assistant an who becomes some kind of a mentor to him. He also meets the mysterious director of the Kamura Memorial Library, Miss Saeki. As the story goes on, Kafka begins to see her as his mother.
At the same time, Nakata, a simple man around his seventies, who lost most of his mental faculties when he was nine in a weird incident during the World War II, also flees Tokyo. As a result of the incident, he has no memories of the past. He cannot read or write. But he has the ability to talk to cats.
Nakata kills  the cat-killer Johnnie Walker and curiously, the time of his death concurs with the murder of Kafka's father. After this killing, Nakata follows Kafka to Takamatsu, where he is guided by intuition.
(...)
Opinion:
I found it an amazing read. Tough it was sometimes difficult for me to understand all the meanings and nuances of the story because of the language, Kafka on the Shore engaged me, it opened my imagination. You read it, you feel it, you try to understand and you try to make sense, because the book presses the boundaries of what exists around the characters and what exists only in their minds. 
I would certainly recommend this book to anyone!]]> 2017-04-28 08:29:21 UTC https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168822904 SPEAKING lluiscollvinent https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168922392

During all year round I've got less opportunities to talk in English than I had wished.
Nevertheless I've tried to make the most of them:
November: I went for a weekend to Dublin fair city, where the girls are so pretty ...
I strongly recomend to take the Dublin Literary Pub Crawl. In little more than two hours you make a walking tour of Dublin's historic pubs in the company of two actors who introduce the most famous Irish writers (Yeats, Beckett, Joyce, Oscar Wilde...) and perform scenes from their works.

Since then I had few oportunities to speak in English. 
A pair of Facetime calls with the American family where my second daughter spent last year doing "1er de batxillerat"  (11th grade in USA). 

Fortunately on February I started weekly telephone English classes at work with Vaughan.
It consists in a 25 minutes conversation class with a native English spoken teacher. I prepare a topic during the week and we talk about it by phone.
These are the topics we've talked since then:
  • Generation Gap
  • Changing Careers
  • Women Executives
  • Mindfulness
  • Advertising
  • Slow Food 
  • Market Segmentation
  • Dress Code  

]]> 2017-04-28 16:19:42 UTC https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168922392 LISTENING lluiscollvinent https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168959536

Luckily there are so many opportunities to listen English speaking, and all of them, I like.
TV
I've discovered Netflix!
Series:
House of Cards
I like Frank Undrwood, he's deeply cynical about politics and also about human being.
sense 8 
Documentaries:
Chef's Table
Oh, I love this documentary, but I recomend to watch it after eating!

Films:
All kind of films
MOVIES
Moonlight (2016)

I liked it, an excellent, powerful and awesome acted film.


]]> 2017-04-28 18:36:06 UTC https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168959536 MUSIC lluiscollvinent https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168981222

I love music and so does Haruki Murakami. That's why he always talks about music in his novels.
In Kafka on the Shore I came across this lovely passage which is too good not to share.
He listens to the music, humming the melody, then continues.
“That’s why I like to listen to Schubert while I’m driving.  Like I said, it’s because all the performances are imperfect.  A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert.  If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there.  But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of – that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.  And personally, I find that encouraging…”

But we can also find references to modern music. Two of them I specially like:
Crossroads - Cream
Dock of the Bay - Otis Redding

]]> 2017-04-28 21:16:06 UTC https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168981222 MUSIC lluiscollvinent https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168985865 Dock of the Bay - Otis Reding]]> 2017-04-28 22:18:05 UTC https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168985865 MUSIC lluiscollvinent https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168986083 And finally, tough it's not related with Kafka on the Shore, I will like to share a song of someone who has passed away this 2017. 
Chuck Berry, a founding father of Rock 'n' Roll.

Ladies and Gentlemen, "The Greatest of the Rock and Rollers"!!!

]]> 2017-04-28 22:23:31 UTC https://padlet.com/lluiscollvinent/5wylnf7mxw6m/wish/168986083