Archive: December 2013

Last day of the year means it's time to look back. I read 78 books this year - 28 French titles versus 44 in English. Only bought 16 from actual bookstores. The rest came from libraries, gifts, and my ever-growing pile of shame. Here's what stuck with me...

This December was weirdly gorgeous. Almost offensive how beautiful it was. The one terrible day? The exact day I had to fly out for Christmas. Flight cancelled, naturally. Spent the month walking around the city instead of being productive. No regrets.

"He demanded memories, too young to know that memories were only memories of memories." Who was Cecil Valance really? A young aristocratic poet killed in WWI. Everyone has a version of him. Nobody knows the truth. Hollinghurst tears apart biography itself.

Laura keeps dreaming about the same house. Fog everywhere. Terrifying and magnetic at once. Part gothic romance, part literary puzzle. Frappat channels Tennyson's Lady of Shalott through modern Paris. It shouldn't work but it does.

The Raven is trapped in a cheap pulp serial. He's tired of it. Wants to be capital-E Evil. A proper literary myth. So he escapes from the "world of the imagined" and hunts down his creator. Meta-fiction that actually earns its cleverness.

Joe lives on a North Dakota reservation. His dad's a judge, his mom works civil records. They're stable, happy, comfortable. Then one Sunday in spring everything shatters. His mother is attacked. The law can't help. Joe has to figure it out himself.