Summer (What Summer?) Reading (A Bookpile Post)

The weather is killing me.

Summer? Seriously?

It's supposed to be summer, but you can see on the picture what it looks like these days. I can't properly wake up, my mind refuses to work, and on Twitter I read that my friends are experiencing similar problems, taking four hours just to wake up and then forgetting stuff at home, saying "Hi" to everyone and then going for a nap at 3 in the afternoon, and we're talking about young, healthy people here.

So, what I do mostly is read. Some time ago i went to the library again, and took seven books. The librarian was new, and didn't ask me whether I'd be able to read it; she seemed not to care one way or the other.

My new bookpile

The books in the pile, from the top to the bottom, are: Hunger by Knut Hamsun, Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Castle by Franz Kafka, A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, Muleum by Erlend Loe, and Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. Hamsun, Svendsen, Loe and Petterson are Scandinavian authors, Kafka is German, Atwood is Canadian, and Adichie African. A wide variety, and so far a good pile of books.

The first one I read from the pile was Hunger, about a talented, but still unrecognized writer. Wait now, where have I seen that one before? Fante and Bukowski come to mind, but, while their protagonists were drinking and doing dumb things, the protagonist of Hunger is starving. Not being really hungry and managing to find something to eat, even if it's same old, same old; no, not eating for days, so he gets thinner and thinner, his hair falls off, he really, truly looks like a ruin. A very well written novel.

Then there was Out Stealing Horses, an old man coming to live in a distant part of Norway, wishing to be alone, to escape... Well, to escape himself, mostly. And there he remembers the summer when he was fifteen, had a friend he used to steal horses with (the "theft" was actually getting on neighbor's horses, riding them while imagining they were in the Wild West, and sending them back to the owner). As the novel progresses, the things become more serious. Something horrible, unforgivable happened to the friend right before they went to the horse theft. And "stealing horses" was a phrase used before, by the protagonist's father, during the resistance to the Nazis. And the protagonist's father and the friend's mother have a sort of a history together (no, not some cheap affair). And the protagonist, in his old days, meets someone he never expected nor wanted to meet again, and discovers it's actually a good thing.

With all this said, this short novel is quite easy to read, and gets you in its world pretty quickly.

After that, there was Muleum by Erlend Loe. The main character is 18-year-old Juliet from Norway who lost her entire family when a plane crashed. While she doesn't have to fight for physical existence - her family was rich, and she has lots of money - she has to find a reason to keep living, and she fails to do it. Juliet tries to kill herself, then travels the world, stays at the airports, hopes that the next plane she gets on will crash (and feels guilty because of all the other people who would die too), meets a Korean athletic star she likes... Although the subject is difficult, there's humor in the novel too, and there's some strength in this young woman as she seeks some sense after the family to whom the word "muleum" meant something is gone (one of the first words little Juliet spoke was "muleum", it was supposed to be "museum", but ever since then her family kept saying "muleum", it was like their family word). While what happened to Juliet is tragic, there's nothing pathetic in this novel, and it's quite an enjoyable read.

Then there was A Philosophy of Boredom. Svendsen writes in a clear, understandable style - you don't have to be a Philosophy major in order to understand his books. In this book, he explores the history of boredom (boredom as we know it today seems to be somewhat new), gives some examples in great literature about the consequences of boredom brought to the extreme, and, while he doesn't give an answer to the problem of boredom, he does give some suggestions.

Right now, I'm reading Surfacing. I'm still at the beginning, so all I can tell you is that it is about a woman who comes to Quebec to look for her father who just disappeared; she comes to an extremely, err, old-fashioned community (for example, a divorce is unimaginable there) she ran away from when she was younger, and isn't happy about it, but hey, her father disappeared, and she wants to know what happened.

Well, that would be it for now. And, for the end, and completely unrelated, here's a cat picture, because every blog needs one.

Every blog needs a cat picture.

Pirates, Zombies, Weird, Dreams and Songs and Castles (A Bookpile Post)

Pirates, Zombies, Voodoo, Secret History, Yay!

Even though I haven't been feeling very well, I kept reading, and I found some quite interesting books.

Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami is the fourth book in the Rat tetralogy, and also the only book in the series translated into Serbian. Still, it wasn't too difficult to follow it, once I just accepted that there was some mysterious stuff happening in the previous books, and then there was some mysterious stuff happening in the Dance Dance Dance. Basically, it was about a one man's attempt to pull himself (and his life) together.

Then there was On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers; you can see the cover of the Serbian edition, done by Zeljko Pahek. The idea behind this book is fun: pirates, zombies, voodoo, loa, Blackbeard, Fountain of Youth, magic, adventures... In his usual manner, Powers writes a secret history, implementing magical events and explanations into things which really happened. The way Powers does it, everything has a logical explanation (involving voodoo and the rules of magic, but still logical), and everything fits. However, I have enjoyed other works by Powers more. One thing which annoyed me in On Stranger Tides were ship parts - yes, there are pirates, and ships, but if I'm going to read half a page about ship parts, and to read it every now and then, I'd like some explanation about those parts, what they do exactly, what's their function on the ship and so on. But no; even when we're told that the protagonist, Jack Shandy. has learned the difference between this and that type of rope, we're never told what the difference is. The other thing that annoyed me were the characters of Jack and Beth; Beth is a damsel in distress throughout the entire novel, she's there to be kidnapped and rescued and so on, she's pretty much helpless, and at the end she's the one saving the day; as for Jack, he used to be an accountant and a puppeteer, then was forced into becoming a pirate, and it turns out he's extremely talented with cannons (one previously undiscovered talent would be fine), and that he's extremely talented with all the sailor's work (we're not really told what sailor's work exactly involves, other than sailing and carrying heavy stuff, we're just told that Jack is talented in all of it).

Too bad, especially since I know that Powers can do so much better than this. The novel is still fun, but it could have been much better.

Then, Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. It's based on a real serial killer, and it's about a dude who fantasizes about having his sex-slave, a lobotomized teenage boy who would adore him and do whatever he wants him to do, so he goes around, kidnaps teenage boys and tries to lobotomize them at home (children, don't lobotomize people at home! And no, he's not a surgeon, he just read about lobotomy in a book). The story is told from this dude's point of view. A quick read, and an interesting one - assuming you can stomach it.

What's left on my bookpile at the moment are the second and the third books of Dreamsongs by George R.R. Martin, a retrospective of his work; it's quite an enjoyable read; and Gormenghast, the second book in the Gormenghast trilogy by Mervin Peak, a fantasy (sort of) trilogy where the main character is actually the Gormenghast Castle.That's about 1600+ pages, and I expect them to be an enjoyable read.