Another week of the lockdown passed. I’m sure all of us are getting a bit antsy by now. Hopefully, all of you and your loved ones are healthy and safe. Last week we looked at happy and funny books. This week we’ll take another tack – going down the dystopian and apocalyptic route. If you …
Continue reading Books for the Lockdown – Dystopian and Depressing
I read this book a while ago, during my summer vacation in Portugal. It is a short book, you could consider it a long essay, but in just over a 100 pages it packs a punch. It unapologetically goes after our emotions, hitting exactly where it hurts the most, or where we're scared it would …
I know you all have been flooded by this type of posts in the last few days, but it's that time of the year. We all just have to bear it with dignity and write our own post on the best books and our plans 😉 As always I just could not decide on a …
I cannot pretend anymore that it's still summer. The time has come when I wake up before sunrise and that makes it official for me - autumn is upon us! Being in Spain for the last two weeks of September helped to sustain the illusion that summer is not over, but the UK kindly welcomed …
Below are two more quotes I picked from England, England by Julian Barnes I want to post them separately because for me they directly relate to the current situation in UK and EU even though they were published in 1998, when the world was a happier place...or was it? After various attempts at rescue, Europe declined to …
I only read two books by Barnes: The Sense of an Ending, which I liked, but not loved and Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, which I loved at the beginning, but it became a bit repetitive by the end (it's a collection of essays, so probably better suited to read over a longer period of time than …
And there was another reason for mistrust. If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering …
May is gone, no idea how that happened, because my mind still firmly believes we're somewhere in March. It got warmer and it got sunnier and I appreciate it, but my brain is clearly in denial, maybe because I really do feel I should start exercising again and cannot use short days as an excuse …
One of the things Barnes mentioned in his book was whether there is any point in describing and discussing art (the old words vs pictures as a method of communicating emotions). I already used words in my review, so now I decided to share with you one picture of each artist mentioned by Barnes. What pictures …
Continue reading Keeping an Eye Open – Julian Barnes – Visual Quotes
It does what it says on the tin, the book is a collection of essays on art. Most of them have been published before and they were written over several years, which makes it surprising that this book feels as coherent as it does. I started reading this book when all the bad news was …
Continue reading Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art – Julian Barnes
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