The brass skull simply must pose for all pile-of-books still lifes, here with the last few books I read, except the library specimens...I read myself silly from the beginning. I read Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad), Joe Speedboot (Tommy Wieringa), the politics of international crisis escalation - decision making under pressure (Stuart Robinson), Shalimar the Clown (Salman Rushdie), the House of Borgia (Christopher Hibbert), Atomised (Michel Houellebecq), and I'm reading War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy).
I'm a bit of a self-centred xenophobe, and I tend to not be overly interested in warm, distant cultures, but Shalimar the Clown grabbed me. I can recommend it to anyone! Houellebecq I had to read as he, sort of, is the Michael Haneke of literature. The Borgia book left not much intact of the general myth of the poisoning murderous Lucrezia Borgia, but it was interesting too. But the book revealed that the author had also written about the English: I should get my hands on some of that! Maybe then I may start to understand the people that surround me. And then my attack of reading addiction would really pay off!
PS I realised later I had also read Ray Mears' Bushcraft Survival, but that book has so many pictures you read it in no time at all...
3 comments:
I must protest against your qualification of Houellebecq! Houellebecq is rough, uncontrolled, nihilistic; Haneke works with clinical precision and distance, and he is more of a humanist. With a strong sense of morality (as opposed to Houellebecq's Nietzschean sense of the emptiness of values). I think they could not be more different (aside from the fact that both can depress).
I stand corrected dear Roelof! You are right. Maybe I should rephrase it such: Houellebecq has the reputation of being a profound misanthropist, something of which Haneke can be accused as well, and therefore I really wanted to read some of his books... and, actually, because you had recommended this one. Anyway. Both gentlemen leave one cold and gloomy!
Ah, there are even 2 books in your list I've read as well... (The pervert story and the russian soap). I feel more intellectual already! ;-)
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