The corrections- Jonathan Franzen

It had been a while I wanted to read this book, it had everything to be liked: the story, the cover, the smell, the print. Then, why I didn't like it???

Let's start with the fact that the book is 653 pages. Now, I surely don't mind reading big books, I actually love them if the story is intriguing and not ending that fast, but in this case after 200 pages I was still trying to understand where the writer wanted to go. At page 300 I was still trying.
The story itself is clear at page 10 I think, it is just that after 300  pages has just not yet developed in an interesting way. So I felt cheated! The other thing is that he uses a weird trick to bring the attention back: while you are almost falling asleep in the story he bring some wild sex inside, at times I was actually so uninterested that I took a couple of lines to understand it was actually sex what he was describing.
Sorry Franzen, I know most people think this book is a masterpiece of psychology, that analyse the modern family, but did you really need all these pages to analyse the personality of characters that was almost clear after 100 pages??
So since the book cheated me, I decided to cheat it back and apply Pennac's rule number 2 (if you don't know the Pennac's rules of reading go here). So I skipped to the last chapter hoping it would be so interesting to make me read the 200 pages in between. It was not, so without regrets: Goodbye Franzen!! I would like to say it was a pleasure but it really wasn't. But don't worry it is not your fault, I am sure I was not in the correct mental stage to understand fully the story behind the book and in between the lines.

To better books and better stories...au revoir!!!

Just arrived...

Just got a couple of books!!!

The growing pains of Adrian Mole

"Took stock of my appearance today. I have only grown a couple of inches in the last year, so I must reconcile myself to the fact that I will be one of those people who never get a good view in the cinema"





I have just discovered Adrian Mole by chance, in the second hand shop in front of my house.
Well, if you want to read something easy and funny, this is the right book. I found myself laughing out loud many times while reading: it is hilarious!
Probably you already knew, but I have just discovered that there is a full range of books and this is the second one from the series. I will have to buy the others also now!! (What a brilliant excuse to buy more books)
It is the story of a British teenager, dealing with growing up and family issues in a dramatic, yet hilarious way. The book is in form of a diary, so very easy to read.
Surfing the internet I found out there is also a TV series, you can find it here on youtube (Although not as funny as the book I'd say).

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez

People often ask me who is my favourite writer. As for music, sometimes it is difficult to answer 'cause I like whatever makes me feel something,  famous or not it makes no difference. But yes, when they ask me this question at the end I always answer: one is for sure Márquez (the other is more recent and you will discover soon I am sure). It is a old love, started many years ago and never weakened. All started by reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was quite young and lots of people thought the book was boring, long: I simply loved it. Since then, once in a while I read another book from him. I don't like to read books of the same authors in a short period of time, I like to take a break from them, sometimes also long, in order to enjoy better the reading. This year was the time for News of a Kidnapping. If you ever read something by Márquez you will know all his writings are magic, they bring you in another world. This one is different 'cause it is a true story. It describe the kidnapping of ten leading people in Colombia by one of the "most important" drug trafficker in the world: Pablo Escobar.  It is a kind of written documentary; but I must say, evendo this book is surely different from the others, you can still catch the touching style of Márquez. The way he brings you into the story making you imagine all the characters, the situations, the emotions, it is typical of him. I always tell everybody that the only way to read him is with all your senses, and this book is no different. You could smell the dirty in the rooms, hear the whispering, see the darkness. Toward the end I felt like I knew a little Pablo Escobar, and I could enter into his mind.

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

Gabriel García Márquez

 p.s. It is a case, but not completely, that I finished the book today in the metro, as today is Márquez's birthday and I am happy I could "celebrate" with him by reading his book.

Lizard

I am not very fond of short stories, they generally leave me with a feeling of incompleteness,  but they are very handy when you travel to go to work as you can finish one in the metro.
This was my first approach to Yoshimoto, and I did enjoy the reading. But somehow all the stories have some weird things happening inside, something supernatural and spiritual. I felt a bit like reading Murakami, and at the end you are not quite sure if you liked it or not. Will have to give Yoshimoto another try to decide if I like the writing.

The Housekeeper + The Professor

The Professor is a man who has been suffering from memory loss after a car accident. His short memory lasts 84 minutes, not one second more; whereas, he has a very clear memory of his past before the accident, when he was a Math professor, deeply in love with numbers, in particular prime numbers.
The Housekeeper, as you can guess, is the woman who takes care of him. Well, maybe it is better to say, the last (in chronological order) woman who tries to take care of him. 'Cause, can you imagine to take care of a person that in less than 2 hours doesn't remember who you are and what you are doing in his house?
In this book there are no names, as it is not necessary to spend time on talking about particulars that would be forgotten in 84 mins. Therefore, also the little son of the housekeeper will just have a nickname in the all story: Root, as the Math symbol √
The relationship among these 3 characters is of course made of numbers, and of the beauty that can be hidden behind a date of birth, or a shoes size. But, despite all, there is a true bond among them that is created during the reading. It is a very sweet book, silent, emotional.
 I highly recommend it!

"The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers."

Maybe in another life....

Do you remember the "red surprise bag"? Well, the bag itself broke filled with my grocery shopping on the road. I won't be here describing how I had to carry all in my hands till I found a shop to buy a provisional bag. I will, instead, tell you about another book that was in the surprise bag. This:

You are not seeing double, they are really two: one is the book, and the other is the CD that comes with the book. How amazing is this? How many of us read while listening to a particular song or how many of us think of a song that describe what is in the book? Well, me for sure. I like to associate books with nice music (and generally a tea), so for me this book was an amazing discovery.

The story in the book is quiet simple, nothing that won't make you sleep. I read it very quickly between the wait at the airport and the flight itself. But it is a nice reading. Of course what makes it good is the fact that  every chapter has his soundtrack, which I found very clever, even if I didn't have the possibility to listen to the songs while reading.

The book and the CD are both from a composer, a musician, that wanted to give "words" to his music. Here you could watch the video of the song that close the CD and give the title to the book Magari in un'altra vita