the brain loves reading more than fucking or even gogglebox, i am sure of it.
I can't quite remember when was it that I picked a book because i wanted to read it and not because we had to do it at school... I think I was 12 or thereabouts. I got hooked...and I thank my parents for creating encouraging us to love books.
I never stopped reading until the internet came along overloading the world with information. Wasting time on the net has probably overtaken every other human activity. The irony is that it is the opposite of an activity.
Some of the writers that have left impression on me at various degrees (chronologically, rather than me trying to give a botched analysis of who is best or worst.
Homer, Aristophanes, Buddha, St John the Evangelist (vivid descriptions or hallucinations?) St Paul (the self appointed Disciple. Rascal), Marcus Aurelius, Omar Khayyam, Procopius, Anna Kommeno, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, Omar Khyam, Saucy Chaucer (who doesn't like a bit of Medaeval hanky-panky), Edmund Spencer, Marin Barleti, Shakespeare, Marlowe, John Milton (I fear I may have been a dour, smackable Protestant preacher in a previous life), Goethe, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Frank Bardhi, Pjetër Budi, Byron, Dickens, Brontë sisters, William Blake, Dostoevsky (totally love him), Tolstoi, V Hugo, Voltaire, Coleridge, TS Elliot, Alexandre Dumas, Walt Whitman, Berthold Brecht, Naim Frashëri, Theofan Noli, Kafka, G Greene, S Fitzgerald, Joseph Konrad, Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse. Virginia Woolf. James Joyce. Thomas Becket, Ivo Andrić, George Orwel (my hero), Franz Kafka. Jack London, Lajos Zilahi, Alberto Moravia, G Greene, Aldous Huxley, Kundera, Sartre, Kadare, Miroslav Krleža, Ravindranath Tagore, Italo Calvino, Pessoa, Margaret Atwood,. Murakami, Rohinton Mistri, Murakami, Doris Lessing, Martín Amis, (inevitable), Julian Barnes., Arto Pastillinna, Pajtim Statovci, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mohsin Hamid, and many more. there is so much more I need to read. The internet is the great distractor, damn it. 😂 (confession: I did never get into Proust - too slow and too much detail, sorry Mr P)
some of the books worth reading more than once
heart of darkness - Joseph Konrad
meditations - marcus aurelius
gulliver’s travels - jonathan twist
wuthering heights - emily brontë
beyond good and evil - friedrich nietzsche
the republic - plato
symposium - plato
candide - voltaire
samuel pepys diaries
1984 - george orwell
roaches have no king - daniel evan Weiss
the great gatsby - scott fitzgerald
the unbearable lightness of being - milan kundera
the trial -franz kafka
no news in the western front - erich maria remarque
the bible
the quran
gilgamesh
rumis
brothers karamazov - fyodor dostoevsky
silas marner - george elliot
inferno - dante alighieri
decameron - giovanni boccaccio
paradise lost - john milton
war and peace - leo tolstoi
fahrenheit 451 - ray bradbury
brave new world - aldous huxley
I would love to write sequels to Heart of Darkness, 1984 and Brothers Karamazov set in the present and future London, New York and Moscow simultaneously. I don’t think I ever will. I can’t even contemplate of coming near these three great writers.
bolla - pajtim statovci [read in may 22]
An Eagerly anticipated next book by Kosovan-Finnish writer left me a bit deflated and sad. The subject is love between an Albanian and a Serb during a time when everything is falling apart. There are some truly beautiful moments but the theme of cold, detached, cruelty is somehow foreign to a balkanian. There could be more fire, passion and acts that defy reason.. instead pm we get a very cold look from the outside, which I suppose is the case with Statovci, who grew up in Finland.
His portrayal of Kosovo is often u necessarily full of cold cruelty and nastiness, which exists, like anywhere else but there is also a lot of tenderness and quiet pain that every Kosovan shares with every other; this collective pain is definitely at time fetishised but a lot if it is very real. I liked Miloš in the book (the Serb) but didn’t like Arsim (the Albanian) very much… I think this sometimes seeps through his books - I don’t think he likes Kosovans very much, which is quite possible because he looks at it as a Fin. Nothing wrong with being a Fin, of course… it just perhaps takes the right from Pajtim to write about Kosovo somehow.. I’m not sure.
who are we now? - jason cowley (non-fiction)
A very English book about England written for English people. Wistful, well meaning but also incoherent in some ways. Cow,yet, as many others before him and now, tries desperately to understand what England is and what it may become but doesn’t find and answer, because there isn’t one. England will never really know what it is because there is no such thing as England - there are so many Englands that coexist side by side but never talk to each other and, in some cases, despise each other. Perhaps this is the case with most nations, which, as Cowley says (qis am ‘imagined community’ (quoting Benedict Andersen) but perceptual and perplexing conundrum of its own identity is never as present as it is England. The book kind of alludes to it but it desperately tries to find a positive spin of a possibility of a harmonious, community minded England at some point in our post pandemic era.
I admire optimism but I must say I don’t see much of it in the case of England’s future, which will be tearing itself apart for some time to come as it finds itself more and more isolated from both Europe and America - a direct result of Brexit which it has turned it into a strange spectacle that the world neither wants or has time to understand. The book totally avoids to address the seriousness of this bizarre act of self mutilation barely mentioning ‘the forgotten’ who massively voted for Brexit and shocked the ‘cognitive class’, I think it caused more than a shock; it opened a chasm right in the middle of England that will get wider and wider as long as we have shapeshifting Tories in existence and an inadequate Labour that is afraid to have belief.
EXIT WEST - one of those books that make you cry in a crowded train. A story of love that eats itself up in a cruel world.
‘every time we migrate we murder people out of our lives’ is probably the most powerful thing I’ve read.
Wuthering Heights is the strangest ‘love story’ you’ll ever read among the classics, if mot of all time. The frustration of this intense bond between Kathy and Heathcliff is overwhelming. Heathcliff, especially, is difficult to sympathise with; you understand his pain but detest his actions… the Japanese film is much truer to the book than any other western versions, in which Heathcliff is usually portrayed more like a dashing villain than a cruel monster (because it sells more tickets).
we hate therefore we are!
Has 1984 become more relevant than ever, in a world that is in a constant turmoil to find new alliances and enemies, where optimism seems to be drowned by incessant outrage served to us on a daily basis… in a certain path to dystopia or are we batter than that? It is very hard to tell..
books that are best unread:
racism, marxism and the war on the west - douglas murray
DM is a little racist worm who is cashing in on the recent populist sentiments among the disaffected or forgotten swathes of white people by posturing as some kind of white messiah, aiming to totally deflect their attention from the real reasons for their grievances. He or clearly a white supremacist and a racist that chooses his words carefully but mostly expresses himself by rolling his eyes like a character in Eastenders. Utterly odious.