As one who has been reading constantly for most of my life, I don't often encounter new words anymore. Except, that is, when I read something by Cormac McCarthy. I decided I should start keeping track of my favorites when I, today, encountered two new beauties in the same sentence. Here they are: Coomb (also …
The Pastor by Hanne Orstavik
Hello wordpress my old friend, it's time to write blog posts again... By the end of this novel I felt that it was a perfect, pristine picture of a depressed and empty person. And I loved it. My first impression of the book was how appealing the physical design was. It is not your normal …
Trieste, by Daša Drndić
I read this book back in May, and I have had to get some distance from it before I could write about it. It was very affecting, upsetting, and disturbing, as one might expect a book with such subject matter to be. The book follows the life story of Haya Tedeschi, whose son was taken …
Blinding, by Mircea Cărtărescu
It will be hard to describe this book in words that do it justice, but I will try. In short, this is the most dazzlingly hallucinatory, horribly beautiful, stunning, weird, surreal, and searingly memorable book I've read in years. It has vaulted it's way easily to land among my top ten, possibly top five favorite …
The Blind Owl, by Sadegh Hedayat
Certain stories really stick in my head and haunt/influence me for years. This could be one of them. The story of how this book was translated, told in the preface to the book, was an interesting read in itself. Apparently the story was banned in Iran for many years, and there were several censored and …
Jonas David 