October 2006

When you start putting toothpaste in the fridge and watering plants with Vouvray, it's damn time for a vacation. Destination: Naples. Duration: one week. Plan: hiking, sightseeing, swimming (optimistic version). I'm out.

I dig novels that talk about books, readers, libraries. Here's a quick list. But I know I'm forgetting tons. So help me expand this thing, yeah? The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and more...

This one let me down. I wanted a real Nureyev biography - instead got something else entirely: a novel around the figure of Nureyev. Part one (1941-1961) plays with multiple viewpoints: a railway worker, colleagues, witnesses. Interesting structure but not what I needed.

Marjane Satrapi writes graphic novels rooted in her Iranian life. In Embroideries, she remembers afternoons when her grandmother hosted neighbors, cousins, friends around tea. Women talking. Raw, funny, honest.

Any decent reader with basic culture spots references, quotes, allusions to other literary worlds in their books. Same thing happens in cinema, apparently. That's what this is about.

You've always wondered how those first days of creation went down, right? Especially the whole Adam and Eve living situation. Now you'll know everything thanks to this excellent dual diary where creation gets the Twain treatment.

This text: short, dense, loaded. Starts like childhood memoir, shifts to historical account, ends as political and humanist manifesto. Written for Klaus Barbie's trial. Packs a punch.

If I was jumping around like a lovesick goat leaving the theater last night, it's because I just witnessed something magnificent and enchanting. Truth is, I really love Shakespeare. Of all playwrights, he hits different.

Karen Blixen left Denmark for Africa in 1914 to marry some vague cousin. He gave her a baroness title, she brought a fat dowry they used to buy a plantation in Kenya. She was twenty-eight, ready to live.

This book is a wonder. Full of sensitivity, humanity, intelligence. So wonderful I'm not sure I can even talk about it properly. It's built like a circle with a book called "The History of Love" spinning at its center.