Every day I relive the lesson learned from Spyros: give up efficiency to enjoy beauty. Don't rush around the ship trying to know every corner. Just sit on deck and watch the sea dance in the flickering light. This book taught me what it means to slow down and actually see what's in front of you.

We each carry our inevitable share of solitude, and we shouldn't let the desperate urge to escape it destroy us. This is the book that introduced me to the massive American writer Jim Harrison. Christian Bourgois published it in France back in 1989, and it still hits hard.

Doing the right thing and surviving to be proud of it? Those two goals rarely line up. Everyone in Trickum County knows you don't mess with old Leonard Moye, the former bootlegger living in a cabin deep in the woods. Some lessons you learn the hard way.

Find your talent. Hunt it down, lock it in a cage, hand the key to whoever's got the cash, and congratulate yourself on your bravery. Four people from Lewisham in South-East London, all under thirty, all trying to figure out what the hell they're doing with their lives.

The unexpected interaction of multiple failures in a complex system. Has there ever been a better definition of human life? Bakerton is a small Pennsylvania town dying slowly. It wasn't always this way. The town had its glory days.

We're not just the sum of everything that happened to us. We're also living proof of how we chose to interpret those events. Without Nicole's enthusiastic recommendation and the fact this book was sitting at the library, I might've skipped it. Glad I didn't.

The rich got richer. It helped the poor stay patient. The value of cunning started replacing the value of work. Pierre Lemaître decided to write a sequel to his excellent "See You Up There" which won him the Prix Goncourt. Smart move.

America itself is an illusion, the greatest one of all. The white race believes with all its heart that it has the right to seize the land. Kill the Indians. Make war. Enslave its brothers. If there was any justice in this world, none of this would stand.

An unreal world is way bigger than a real one. It offers enough space to be yourself and not yourself at the same time. I'd kind of given up on Paul Auster these past few years. The last novel I read from him didn't land. This one? Different story.

There's something strange in me, Mevlut said. No matter what I do, I feel terribly alone in the world. Nothing beats walking for hours through a city to understand it and tame it. Young Mevlut is about to learn this firsthand.