I never had any particular beef with Richard & Judy book club. Mostly because I don't own a TV, and I didn't go out of my way to find out. So I had no exposure to it. Now things have changed. Now we do have a problem. After this book I will actively avoid the …
I have mentioned of few other occasions that I do tend to fall back on John Grisham when in need of dependable but not to challenging read. He is just reliable, has his ups and downs, but never goes below a certain standard. So as I started my two weeks laziness finally (after 6 months …
Another book that has been lingering on my shelves for a few years. I read Alice Munro right after she received the Nobel Prize in 2013 and I enjoyed her dreamy, but at he same time matter of fact style immensely. This one is touted as a novel. Which is very unusual for Alice Munro, …
Another one bought from a second-hand bookshop at AbeBooks. With a hideous cover basically consisting of a still from the movie. I've actually seen the movie years ago and liked it a lot. Even if I don't remember much of it now. So I was naturally curious about the book. The story is quite simple …
I enjoy Jacek Dehnel's writing immensely, both his prose (Balzakiana, Krivoklat) and his reactions to events in Poland that he posts on his FB account (some of them later translated and published in the likes fo Guardian). And I've had Lala on my shelf for a few years now, in a beautiful Polish edition. Yet I was …
What do you do when you're well into your fourth month of lockdown, your country had just held presidential election won by minuscule majority by a homophobic nationalist, the country you live in is run by a man who blatantly admits that decisions to reopen the economy are made against scientific advice by 'elected politicians' …
Yet another treasure found in the used books section on AbeBooks. And yet again I missed while buying it to register that I'm buying a collection of short stories. Those of you who have been visiting this blog for a while know that it's not my favorite thing. Still since it's just five stories and …
It's a short story, or a novella, that I bought already during the lockdown, after reading the brilliant Girl, Woman, Other. I read it in just over an hour because once you pick it up it's hard to put down. The book is a letter, written by Jerome, a black teenager, to his mother. It may …
Now, just thinking about it, I felt like whipping the air of the pinewood harder and harder, like a child, to evoke the spirits, perhaps to chase them away, and the more energy I put into it, the sharper the whistle became. I burst into laughter, alone, seeing myself like that, a thirty-eight-yar-old woman in …
Continue reading The Days of Abandonment – Elena Ferrante – Quotes
It's been four years since I read the Neapolitan Novels, and I felt like reading some more of Ferrante's dense prose. So as I was doing my monthly online gift shopping at Amazon (one of the things I amuse myself with during lockdown, buying gifts for people) I decided to treat myself too. It is …
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