April 2016

Nice to come home and find your messages waiting. I'm beat but completely unplugged... Quick recap: Luberon in April means no cicadas, no lavender yet, but plenty of heat. We hiked every day, sometimes hitting 20km. Legs are wrecked. Brain feels reset.

Feeling flat. Sick of concrete and asphalt. Need to bail. One solution: week of hiking in the Luberon. Bring on the cicadas, the lavender, the dusty trails. Back in a week.

This book exhausted me. Not the 522 pages in tiny print—the emotional intensity. After reading several Japanese novelists who showed me elegant aesthetics and refined melancholy, Murakami slammed me with something completely different. Raw. Violent. Uncompromising.

Read this on InColdBlog's recommendation. Reminded me of a game of pétanque. You aim for the target ball. But sometimes—consciously or not—you miss and hit another ball instead, sending everything in unexpected directions.

First time diving into Danish writer Jorn Riel. Turns out he's not the young guy I imagined but a sharp seventy-something who spent two decades in polar territories before settling in Malaysia. Talk about range.

This novel is essential. Don't skip it. It does something rare: makes your heart, mind, and soul feel better. The story unfolds in a small Alabama town. Atticus Finch is a lawyer defending a Black man falsely accused. His kids watch everything unfold.

"First time I heard about Finn Prescott was the day before his funeral. My mother called with the sad news that hit us all at an unexpected moment." This opening could suggest a traditional story. It doesn't go that way at all.

The cloister at Moissac. Heading southwest for fresh air, family time, nature. Wishing you all a sunny, chocolate-filled Easter weekend. Back next week.

Alexandre Griboyedov (1790-1829) wrote only one play. Never saw it performed—censorship. Yet from 1860 onward, Woe from Wit became a cult classic in Russian theater. Strange figure, this guy.

This novel shares nothing with the previous one except "Mongolia" in the title—that's what caught my eye. First paragraph sealed it: "That year, year of the iron dragon..." This is going somewhere weird and I'm here for it.