What are you reading the week of Sunday, June 21, 2015?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. Bedside book: "Naoko" by Higashino Keigo

translated by my Facebook friend Kerim Yasar. A bus accident occurs, and a woman and her 11-year-old daughter are critically injured. Visiting them in the hospital, the father sees his wife "die," only to find out later that her soul has entered the body of the daughter. Faced with this bizarre situation, the father goes home with the person who looks like his young daughter and acts like his wife.

Purse book: "Ghost Month" by Ed Lin
A Taiwanese man, Jing-nan, who dreamed of going to America is forced to give up his dreams and work in his family's food stall in Taipei's Night Market in order to pay off debts to organized criminals that his grandfather incurred. He finds out that a childhood friend, who goes by the name "Julia," has been murdered while working in a job that most Taiwanese consider not very respectable. Since the two of them had dreamed of going to America together, and Jing-nan thought that she was, in fact, in America, he becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her.

I visited Taiwan in 1985, but this is the first time I have read a book set there.