August 2024 Archive

"Sometimes all you need to do is speak a thing's name out loud to give it shape and invite it straight into the real world." Every so often you stumble on a novel that completely breaks from the usual publishing mold. This is one of those times. Mongin delivers something different here.

"Marriage is far too serious a thing to leave in the hands of young people." The story kicks off in 1958 during an unlikely trip to the USSR, jointly sponsored by the French Communist Party and Paris-Match magazine to document the Soviet paradise. Edgar is a young journalist caught up in something bigger than himself.

"Picture yourself having the most incredible dream while perched on tree branches. But you have to wake up every minute because you can't fall, and also because you want your dream to become reality. That's what it's like." Melandri writes about dreams and reality colliding in contemporary Italy.

"Always be very reckless, my boy. It's the only way to get any pleasure from living in our age of factories." Been ages since I last read Giono. A conversation with a friend sparked the urge to revisit this classic. Sometimes you need to go back to see what you missed the first time around.

"Nothing matters except surrendering yourself to contemplating the world." "Are we masters of our destinies, slaves to our egos? Masters of our dreams, slaves to what makes them real?" In 1949, Mao Zedong establishes the People's Republic of China. This novel explores what happened next.

"To feel something deeply creates a chasm between yourself and others who might also feel deeply, but differently. Better to play piano and forget everything else." This summer, France Culture devoted one of their series to Woolf. Got me thinking about this early novel again.

"History is a science that belongs to everyone—objective, infinite. Memory is subjective, selective, finite, fragile. It decomposes. It secretes an intimate mythology. While history persists, memory crumbles, ephemeral." Ouillon explores the tension between what we remember and what actually happened.

"It was a golden age, though. Compared to what's coming. Golden ages are always in the past." This is the third and final installment of Smiley's family saga spanning a hundred years of American history. We're following multiple generations as they navigate the changing landscape of the nation.