A list of ten books

Inspired by John Barnett on Facebook.

A list of ten books that have stayed with me/meant the most to me/ books I keep coming back to.
Of course, I couldn't limit myself to ten so there are twelve of them... or more.  It could have easily  been twenty.

In no particular order.

James Joyce: Dubliners
The fist James Joyce I read. Troubling and sad. An unflinching vision of Dublin that made me love the city nonetheless.

John Ashbery: Some Trees
I can recite from memory most of the poems in it. I could have chosen "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror". It shaped my taste for modern poetry and led me for no special reason to Allan Ginsberg.

Carson McCullers: Reflections in a Golden Eye
I started reading her with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and Ballad of the Sad Café but this story of self deception and sexual frustrations is the one that stays with me. Can't help having visions of Marlon Brando applying makeup to his face...

Evelyn Waugh: A Handful of Dust
Clever and mean. Funny and sad. I sometimes dream I'm trapped in a jungle, forced to read Dickens aloud forever.

Virginia Wolf: Mrs Dalloway
Of course I was a little intimidated the first time I read Virginia Woolf. But once I had started, it felt familiar I spoke directly to my heart.

John Cheever: Falconer
A chance discovery. I read it in one sitting, fascinated.

Jonathan Franzen: Freedom
Yes it is a best-seller. But beautifully written and complex. I couldn't put it down despite its 500 plus pages. On the other hand, I couldn't finish The Corrections. I hated so much all the characters it made it painful to read.

Ian McEwan: Sweet Tooth
A recent book, maybe not his best but I can't resist a doomed love story that ends well...

Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
I could have been any of the twelve or more Murakami books I've read (I'm thinking of Kafka on the Shore) but this one brings back haunting images of the horrors of the Manchuria war including the description of a man skinned alive by a very muscular Mongol shepherd...

Kate Atkinson: One Good Turn
My first Kate Atkinson. I remember laughing out loud on the beach reading it and the worried looks of my fellow sun bathers... Never read a bad book by Kate Atkinson.

Michael Chabon: The Yiddish Policemen's Union
A retro science fiction book. Partly written in invented Yiddish so challenging to read for some. I just loved it. The redemption of the policeman through love made me cry.

Edmund White: A Boy's Own Story
I was young and impressionable when I read it. The frank description of gay sex left me mesmerized...

Peter Høeg: Smilla's sense of Snow
A story like none other I had read before. The 100 words for snow, Copenhagen's frozen harbour, the death of the little boy on the roof.  The end is a little lame but I don't care, one of my favorite book forever.

I hated it when they changed the title to Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow!

But I like the original title a lot...

"Under The Skin" a short review.

Contains spoiler! (and nudity...)

Well, well, well. Very dark, very disturbing movie. Almost no dialogue.  Scarlet is exceptionally credible again even if I'm not sure what the story is about. Unsexy very frank sex scenes. Violence bouts at unexpected moments. But a physicality in the description of working class Glasgow which I liked a lot even if I was painfully reminded how difficult Scottish accent can be for an outsider. After all this rain and snow and darkness, I feel cold suddenly... Still want to visit Glasgow though.

Stills from the movie.

Glasgow.

Anatomy of a sex scene

In the countryside

The end

The last image evokes a reference of course.

Optimism, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and the meanness of the world

Recently, I've been filled with a renewed sense of optimism, for no reason at all, just "natural as the weather in this moody sky today" as sang Joni Mitchell about melancholy. I was wondering: should I worry? Didn't need to. This fragile feeling of lightness has been drowned by "the news". Ukraine, Gaza, day after day more horrors piling up. Not that I've been personally affected, no one I know has been killed or blown to bits in the recent events. It's just that I almost feel in my bones the pain and despair of all those people, like waves of negative energy travelling through space. I am not a Jedi, not even a very powerless one but it makes me think of Obi-Wan Kenobi experiencing the destruction of the planet Alderaan by the DeathStar.

"I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."


On Earth, again and again.