Top Ten Tuesday | Book Confessions

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Dog ears, Enid Blyton, Library, meme, Reading, Shopping, Top Ten Tuesday

I’ve not written a meme for a LOOONG time, but I came across Shannon’s blog entry Top Ten Tuesday: Book Confessions and liked her responses so much I thought I’d join in. I do have my own queer reading habits that I’ve honed for years – but I think some of you will probably identify with the more common ones that we are all guilty of.

1. I am a consummate library goer – never was to begin with (always liked my books  clean with a sense that they were ‘mine’) but financial circumstances and an awareness for trees/paper have made me one. In fact, I’ve probably bought about 5 books in the last three years. All the rest I have taken out the library or scavenged off friends.

2. I am never without a book. I have them in my bag, on my phone, on my laptop. Everywhere. If I don’t have anything to read I start getting panic-attacks.

3. Sometimes I can get panic attacks/ dizzy spells in book stores just LOOKING at books. Despite being a book lover, I can’t spend more than 15 mins in a library. I start feeling sick. It is strictly ‘go in, give books back/ take books out, quick exit’ with me. It sucks!

4. I read in the toilet, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. So there.

5. I read three books at a time. In fact I usually end up walking away from the library with either 1, 3 or 5 novels. Lately I have realised this comes from my junior school days when I figured out that the only way to progress from the ‘brown’ sticker books to the yellow ones was to read through the entire collection. For those interested I never made it to the yellow section (that’s where the Enid Blyton books lived), but I did get my parents to buy them for me. That’s how readers are born.

6. I don’t use bookmarks. I dog-ear. A terrible habit caught by my mother, another consummate reader who likes to dog-ear from the middle of the page. THE MIDDLE.  Great, big diagonal creases that no amount of folding backwards can erase…

7. Lately I like to read in silence either in the early morning, or late at night. It’s my time to relax/ get ready for whatever is ahead of me.

8. My daily challenge, no matter how many books I have on the go is 50 pages a day. If I have 3 books, then I must read 150 pages. I often dog-ear my daily portions which means I know exactly how many days a book will take to finish.

9. If someone insists that a book is really good, I won’t read it. I am very suspicious of other people’s taste and rarely read what other’s recommend. It’s the only type of snobbery I have.

10. When I’m going through bad/ uncertain times I read to escape and relax. Some books are like my happy zone, I swing by and revisit certain scenes/ chapters to top up on positive thoughts. ‘Anne of Green Gables‘ has had many visits.

So, what are your reading quirks?

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How Fast Can You Read?

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Ayn Rand, Fountainhead, James Fenimore Cooper, John Steinbeck, Lord of the Flies, meme, reading speed, Speed reading, William Golding

Congratulations! You are 58% faster than the average adult reader!

I can be a real slow-poke when it comes to reading, I have to admit that. What it takes some people to read in two days I usually complete in a week! It’s a habit I’m not very happy with, so I was really glad I can across this neat ‘Speed Reading Test’ from Staples that lets you know how quick you are compared to the average reader… and how you square up with the world’s fastest word scanner, a lady with an astonishing 4’700 words per min. record! I may not be as fast as her, but I realise I’m not as bad as I thought either.

If you wish to take the test yourself then click on the image below. You will be prompted to read a short piece and then have to answer three questions to check you’ve actually read it. Simples!

Source: Staples eReader Department

According to the test I can read the following books in so many hours if I keep to my normal reading speed:

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy in 24 hours and 43 minutes

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand in 13 hours and 7 minutes

Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper in 6 hours and 7 minutes

Lord of the Flies by William Golding in 2 hours and 31 minutes

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck in 7 hours and 8 minutes 

Hmm, maybe I should have timed myself with ‘Lord of the Flies’! I’m quite surprised that it says I can complete it in 2 hours. I’m pretty sure I’ve taken over 2 hours to get to chapter 3! Anyways… Maybe this little test will help me pick up speed a little as I feel more confident for tomes like ‘The Fountainhead’!

Take the test and post your results. How fast can you read?? You might be surprised.

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Mailbox Monday & It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? (25/ 7)

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benjamin zephaniah, carlos ruiz zafon, cats cradle, charlotte perkins gilman, civil war, emila zola, herman hesse, ian fleming, irvine welsh, Its monday what are you reading?, jm barrie, kurt busiek, kurt vonnegut, margaret atwood, mark millar, marvels, matt moylan, meme, mohsin hamid, patricia melo, Paul Auster, Paul Gallico, paul jenkins, peter pan, raymond carver, roberto bolano, siddhartha, stephen galloway, streetfighter world warrior encyclopedia, the angel's game, the cellist of sarajevo, the dream, the guernsey literary and potato peel pie society, the skating rink, the spy who loved me, the year of the flood, the yellow wallpaper, trainspotting, violette leduc, wolverine origins

Welcome to Monday Meme’s! (‘Mailbox Monday’ by Marcia at The Printed Page and ‘It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?’ by Sheila at The Book Journey are fun weekly meme’s that allow book-bloggers to share their reading progress and the books they have yet to read.

July has been a hectic month, but also fruitful in terms of books. Since I haven’t had time to post that often (due to my novel-writing) I’m taking this opportunity to pick up from where I left off in March. Here’s a review of the titles that have either wowed me, or left me a little disappointed:

Books Read | March/ April
(click for reviews)
Lost World by Patricia Melo (1/5)
Man in the Dark by Paul Auster (5/5)
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano (4/5) – review pending
Kung Fu Trip by Benjamin Zephaniah (3/5)
The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico (5/5)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (3/5) – review pending
The Informers by Brett Easton Ellis (3/5) – review pending
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1/5) – review pending
The Paper House: A Novel by Carlos Maria Dominguez (4/5) – review pending

Books Read | May/ June
(click for reviews)
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (4/5) – review pending
2BR02B by Kurt Vonnegut (5/5)
The Lady and the Little Fox Fur by Violette LeDuc (1/5)
Peter Pan by JM Barrie (5/5)
The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories by Charlotte Gilman (4/5)
Beginners by Raymond Carver (5/5)
Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (4/5)
The Dream by Emile Zola (5/5) – review pending
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Stephen Galloway (5/5)

 Other reviews:
The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (4.5/5)

Books Read | July
Streetfighter: World Warrior Encyclopedia by Matt Moylan (4/5)
Marvels by Kurt Busiek (5/5)
Wolverine: Origins by Paul Jenkins (3/5)
Civil War by Mark Millar (3/5)
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (5/5)

Currently Reading/ August Outlook

 

What a pick-n-mix! As someone who never just reads one book at a time, I’ve started off first with Bolano’s “The Skating Rink”, which is a strange mix of romance, political scamming, figure-skating and cold-blooded murder. This is my second Bolano book (gearing myself up for ‘2666’) and the story seems to be chugging along quite well, despite the weird elements he’s thrown together to make it. Meanwhile I’m also poking around in “Trainspotting”, which unbeknownst to me is written in a very thick Scottish accent! I’m slowly getting used to it (fitba = football, hame = home, jaykits = jackets). It would be useful to have a glossary, but on second thought might spoil all the fun. After all, the best thing about ‘The Clockwork Orange’ was the strange Russian street lingo.

The one I can’t let go of at the moment is “The Spy Who Loved Me”. It is quite cheesy (as most Fleming books are) and it does feel a lot like one of those guilty comfort reads. The Bond of the movies and the Bond of the novels are so very different! However if there is one book I class as top-grade reading material, it is the Atwood. I practically have to ration her out for fear of guzzling through her entire works. She is so AMAZING! “The Year of the Flood” is the second in the MaddAddam trilogy, the first being ‘Oryx and Crake’, and loosely follows on from it. I can’t wait to lose myself in the plot. Can’t imagine what Atwood has dreamed up for us dystopian fiction lovers. Oh bliss…

What are you planning to read this week?

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Literary Blog Hop (2/3) | Can Literary Fiction be ‘Funny’?

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joseph heller, literary blog hop, meme

Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:

Can literature be funny? What is your favourite humorous 
literary book?

This is a hard question. Literary novels often deal with intellectual issues, but there is one book that stands out as quite a funny read despite its’ subject matter: ‘Catch-22’.

War isn’t something to be joked about, but Heller’s approach to the whole thing is refreshing. Unlike Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ or Faulks’ ‘Birdsong’, it is not always filled with gore and gloom. Instead, the terrors of war are explored through a narrative that bounces back and forth from hilarity to horror. 

When we are introduced to the cast, we realise that everyone is a little bit crazy. Yossarian (a bombardier) has decided to live forever, if only those anonymous people called ‘the enemy’ would stop trying to kil him all the time. His friend Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder has an entrepreneurial streak that is brought out when the German’s offer him a 6% profit if he bombs his own camp. Major de Cloverly (no one know his first name, no one dares ask out of fear), a Henry Fonda look-alike called ‘Major, Major, Major’ and other characters such as Nately’s whore’s kid sister are among the oddballs that make up this superb cast.

When reading ‘Catch-22’ I realised that Heller wasn’t trying to ‘make sense’ of war, but rather display the senselessness of it. The characters are all a bit loopy, riddled with insecurities and peculiarities that made me giggle; and this reflects how people are often forced to act irrationally in times of extreme hostility But despite the comic relief there are moments where the horror of war shows through, and has more of a shock value thanks to the humour that is present.The style is reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon, but nowhere near as convoluted. If you haven’t read it yet, I really recommend it. Writing doesn’t get better than this.

What’s your funniest literary read of all time?

Teaser Tuesday | Borgian Gothic Meets Godwinian Enlightenment

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carlos ruiz zafon, enlightenment period, Jorge Luis Borges, latin american, mary hays, mary wollstoncraft, meme, teaser tuesday, william godwin

 

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

I have teasers from two books this week, one from the acclaimed ‘The Angel’s Game’ by Carlos Ruiz Zafon and the other from Mary Hays ‘Memoirs of Emma Courtney’.  Some of you may know Zafon from his most popular novel ‘The Shadow of the Wind’, an excellent detective story involving the labyinthine world of books and the dark secrets of those who write them. Well, I’m glad to report that ‘The Angel’s Game’ takes place in the same setting with pretty much the same premise and includes the famous Sempere and Sons bookshop and the Borgian Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Reading it was like revisiting dear old friends. Here’s a small taster of the gothic goodness on page 75:  

“In the last rays of daylight falling on the city his eyes glowed like embers. I saw him disappear through the door to the staircase. Only then did I realise that during the entire conversation I had not once seen him blink.”

 

‘Memoirs of Emma Courtney’ on the other hand is a short but well-written epistolary novel. What drew me to it wasn’t the story per se, but Mary Hays relationship with the Enlightenment circle, especially William Godwin and Mary Wollstoncraft. Being a lady who never married, but felt married to her craft, I felt compelled to read something by her. This slim volume shows that she was heavily influenced by Godwinian theories, as ‘Memoirs’ looks at the position of women during the 1800’s and the frustrations caused by social confinements. It reads a little like Austen, tempered with feminist overtones of Wollstoncraft. On page 17, we discover how poor Emma Courtney’s idyllic life ends, as her adoptive father dies leaving her in the care of dubious relatives who are strangers to her. 

“This period, which I had anticipated with rapture, was soon clouded over by the graudual decay, and premature death, of my revered and excellent guardian. He sustained a painful and tedious sickness with unshaken fortitude;- with more, with chearfulness.”

Mailbox Monday & It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? | February Round-Up of Reads, Reviews and What’s Ahead

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Its monday what are you reading?, meme

Welcome to Monday Meme’s! This week I’ve decided to also join ‘Mailbox Monday’ which was created by Marcia at The Printed Page. It is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week. ‘It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?’ is a also a fun meme by Sheila at The Book Journey that allows book-bloggers to share their reading progress. 

This week I have a lot of ‘finishing off’ to do. As if that isn’t enough, I’ve gone and picked up MORE books. 2011 was supposed to be a year of clearing the TBR pile. I’m just adding more and more onto what I already accumulated! Here’s the lowdown on my February reads, reviews I’ve written, and stuff I have lined up for March:

Books Read | February
(click for reviews)

White Oleander by Janet Fitch (5/5)
Tales of Freedom by Ben Okri (3/5)
The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope (4/5) 
Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (2/5) 
The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (4.5/5)

January/ February Reviews

In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
A Man’s Head by Georges Simenon
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch by Solzhenitsyn
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Octopussy and the Living Daylights by Ian Fleming
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Currently Reading/ March Outlook

Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas
Lost World by Particia Melo
Memoirs of Emma Courtney by Mary Hays
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
Illywhacker by Peter Carey
Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolano

I’m really looking forward to getting to know more of Bolano’s work and Peter Carey, which was recommended to me by fellow reader Heather on Goodreads. I picked up the Kingsley Amis after watching Sebastian Faulk’s ‘On Fiction’ that was aired on the BBC. It’s was all about tracing the role of ‘Hero’ through literature and ‘Lucky Jim’ was mentioned as being the dysfunctional and funny type of hero. I miss the great humour of Stella Gibbon’s ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, so I’m half hoping it will resemble it in some ways.

What are you planning to read this week?  

Literary Blog Hop | What’s Your Ultimate Book in Times of War?

Tags

carl jung, communism, george orwell, jk huysmann, meme, oscar wilde, salman rushdie, sigmund freud, spinoza, voltaire, william godwin

Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:

 

If you were going off to war (or some other similarly horrific situation) and could only take one book with you, which literary book would you take and why?

 

This is a very, very interesting question. It has never occurred to me to think what book I’d take if I were ever caught in the middle of a war.

 

Imagine this: you are living in a country that is known for its’ political unrest. Two opposing parties are constantly trying to overthrow each other, and civilians are the ones getting caught in the cross-fire for victory. It has come to a point where you are not allowed to sit on the fence as far as your beliefs go. You are either the fundamentalist, the religious fanatic, the nationalist or you are a member of the democratic camp who believes in liberty and freedom of speech. No one meets anyone halfway anymore; it’s all or nothing. One morning, you are violently awoken to the sound of sirens blaring through empty streets. You stumble out of bed and rush downstairs to discover that there has been a coup d’état. Faced with the very real threat of a bloody civil division which would bring the entire country to its’ knees, the army has decided to take drastic steps and overthrown the current corrupt government. You and the entire population are now at the mercy of a military regime, that will swiftly and surely weed out all troublemakers from every level of society, including you.

 

What does a military coup mean? What does it entail? You know full well. Someone calls for everyone to calm down and listen, that there is still time. The soldiers haven’t reached your neighbourhood yet, but they are close, and they will be ransacking every house for evidence of conspiracy against the state or clues that point to affiliations with terrorist organisations. The person in charge is now shouting orders left and right. People rush to try to hide their personal belongings the best they can. You run to your room trying to remember everything that might offend or cause suspicion. 
Foreign DVDs, personal journals, posters of Che Guevara; all get torn down, shoved in a box. You hear the shuck-shuck of someone digging a hole in the backyard. It’s already knee-deep, but not deep enough to hold everything. You look out the window and see black smoke billowing from other houses. Some prefer burning to digging.

 

There is one thing you left to last: the books. Hundreds of them are lined up behind the glass cabinet doors. Voltaire, Spinoza, Freud, Jung, Godwin; all free-thinking, dangerous men that sow seeds in your head and watch it grow from their graves. You have the Marxist Manifesto, but not because you are a Communist. There’s also Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’, not because you are a nefarious sex-freak. Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ gleams like a conspiratorial dagger as does Wilde’s ‘Dorian Grey’. Huysmann’s ‘Against Nature’ is ready to play Russian roulette with your life if it’s ever discovered, and Orwell’s ‘1984’ mocks your hopelessness by merely existing: a mirror to everything that is happening around you. You smash the cabinet and throw all the books out the window, where people are shoving them into the ever-deepening hole. Once buried, the soldiers finally storm the house. They find nothing. Oddly enough, they are content to overlook the ungainly dirt-mound at the back.

 

You are commanded into single-file, and searched. As the last one, you look around the house one final time. The soldiers pat down your pyjamas and the greatcoat you have on. You get the urge to say a prayer for all the books buried in the dirt, breathless, cold and dead. The soldier suddenly shouts, and cocks his gun at your face. He kicks you in the stomach and makes you kneel with your hands behind you back.

 

You venture to look up. He waves a bit of tatty paper at the others. Something he found in your pocket. Something he found. What was it? Think. On the way to the market, the guy in the fatigues, the one that handed you that stupid propaganda leaflet. The one with ‘death to the president’ written on it in big, bold red font. You knew you should have thrown it away.   

 

HAHA! Talk about a fantasy man! That was intense. But yeah, if you put yourself in the shoes of someone in the middle of war, you’ll quickly realise it’s not so easy to carry books with you. Books are always deemed dangerous during times like that. Some could even get you into a whole load of trouble. Even execution. Luckily for me, I’ve never had to witness anything as devastating as that in my lifetime, but I have read books that describe the terrors of war; especially the effects it had on children. If I were ever caught up in a battle and had the opportunity to have ONE book and get away with it, I’d probably choose Anne Frank’s Diary, or do as Anne did and get my hands on a blank journal and a pencil. I’d see it as my duty to record everything that went on around me.  

 

When I think about all the things that one would face in wartime, I’d have to make sure that my chosen book serves my emotional and spiritual needs in times of distress. Great hefty classics like ‘War and Peace’, and ‘Les Miserables’ come to mind, but since they are written from a third-person perspective, I don’t think I’d necessarily connect with them. I’d imagine war to be the kind of thing that is too big and complex to look at from an omniscient place. Everybody would be living their own nightmares, their own problems. Your world would be tightly coiled around you. The circumference of your existence extending only into the next few seconds ahead, maybe not even that. So that’s why I choose Anne Frank, because it’s honest and from a girls perspective (closer to me) and has equal moments of hope and despair.

 

What would your choice be?

Top Ten Tuesday | Characters (and Literary Figures) That I’d Name My Children After

Tags

Bleda, Book, Deathnote, Forsyte Saga, Harry Potter, meme, The Count of Monte Cristo, Top Ten Tuesday

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because of a fondness for lists. We’d love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists! Each week a new Top Ten list is posted complete with one of our bloggers’ answers. Everyone is welcome to join.

This weeks question is: What Are Your Top Ten Characters (and Literary Figures) That You’d Name Your Children After?

Wow, this is a good one! I guess I haven’t really thought about it much, but there are a few nice names out there that I like. Here goes.

1. Sumire (Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami) I like the name Violet. I like its Japanese counterpart even more. In fact I fell in love with the name long before I read Murakami’s excellent novel, with Enya’s beautiful song ‘Sumiregusa’. It sounds so elegant and dainty. Perfect for a little girl!

2. Matilda (Matilda – Roald Dahl) I would dearly love my child to be as book-mad as me. If that doesn’t happen, at least I can give her a name that has become synonymous with the bookworm. I loved reading Matilda as a little girl. She (along with Anne of Green Gables) were some of the only characters I could identify with.

3. Nimue (In folklore, Merlin’s lover) I can’t remember the exact title of the book, but it was in a trilogy by a fairly famous author that I came across this enigmatic figure. I love Gaelic names.

4. Irene (The Forsyte Saga) I fell in love with the BBC televised version, and decided to read it at once. Irene is a wonderful female literary figure. She is strong-willed, decent, has a mind of her own. Many people try to bend her and break her, but she just keeps going. Also, I love the way the name is pronounced in this instance, with a stress of the ‘e’.

5. Mercedes (Count of Monte Cristo) Another great female character, but one who would be rather suited to the name ‘Dolores’ than ‘Mercedes’ what with all the despair she has to endure. Great name though.

6. Bleda (Atilla’s Treasure – Stephen Grundy) You can’t find these books that readily anymore, which is a shame as I managed to get my hands on this copy and absolutely loved it. Bleda is not a fictional character, he was the brother of Attila the Hun. If I have a boy, I’d like him to have a strong name, evocative of warriors of yore.

7. Asena (name of a legendary she-wolf – Mongolian mythology) as you have gathered, I like my Eastern tales. This one comes from a very little-known myth of the people of the Steppes, when they were hunted down to the brink of extinction, until one lame man from the tribe escaped, was taken in by a she-wolf, who went onto bear his bloodline once more.

8. Rem (Deathnote) … ok it’s not literary, it’s manga, but I love this series so MUCH! Rem is a shinigami (demon-spirit), and I think the name sounds too cool to pass it by. This is believe it or not a female character, but looking at her always made me think ‘you’re a guy’. So Rem would be for a boy.

9. Minerva (Harry Potter) I’ve always like this name. Minerva was a goddess of chastity, the hunt and other things. She comes second in line after Diana or Artemis.

10. Edmund (Count of Monte Cristo) Great character, great name, great plot. Though a little out of date for today’s times.

So, that’s my list. I wonder what you think of it, or if you have any of your own that you would like to share.

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Literary Blog Hop | J. L. Borges and the Quintessential Latin America

Tags

Borges, Eudora Welty, Jorge Luis Borges, Latin America, meme, United States

Welcome to the ‘Literary Blog Hop’, a meme hosted by The Blue Bookcase for book bloggers who focus on reviewing literary fiction. This weeks’ hop comes with the question:

 

What setting (time or place) from a book or story would you most like to visit? Eudora Welty said that, “Being shown how to locate, to place, any account is what does most toward making us believe it…,” so in what location would you most like to hang out?

 

First of all, I’d like to thank Robyn for this weeks brilliant question. With some books I’ve often wished I could just dive into the setting and live there forever. The ones that made me feel this way are mostly set in or are by South American authors. Maybe it’s something to do with the way these writers write, but Latin America certainly does have a unique charm that blends the essence of two continents rather than one; the totemic mysteries of its indigenous tribes and the etiquette of colonial Europe. And it is on these two opposing axis’ that most Latin American literature is often played out. My first proper foray into it was seven years ago, when I came across ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ by Jorge Luis Borges. At the time I was studying the finer points of short story writing and among the collection we had to read, this one stood out as a masterpiece. It sent shivers through me, and put me on the path to discovery, even though the others in the class weren’t particularly moved by the mind-boggling possibilities of what Borges conveyed.

Even though the story wasn’t about Latin America, I had my first ever taste of ‘magical realism’, been introduced to the concept of ‘hypertext fiction’ and one of Borges’ more permanent ‘personal myths’; the book as labyrinth. In fact, Borges seldom wrote about Latin America. So strong and clear was his grasp of ‘fiction’; the quality of its parts both isolated and as a whole that his stories sit on the very precipice of reality and are just as challenging today as they were 80 years ago. It was this feeling of walking around inside his Daliesque world when I realised I had probably stumbled upon Latin America at its most quintessential. Ultimately, Borges brought around the idea that a country, its people, its violent histories, its death as a nameless land and rebirth as the ‘New World’ is somehow genetically encoded in all who have come to live there. The writer merely heats this monstrous history in the crucible of his mind, reduces it down to its essence and pours it into a vessel of fiction.

Since then I have become enamoured with Argentine authors. With Borges I discovered a rare path into the avant-garde, Ultraist Literary movement of the 1900’s that I thought had ended with Anais Nin and Djuna Barnes. With Gabriel Garcia-Marquez and Isabel Allende, I discovered the complexities of family lore and political turmoil and how this lay at the heart of all South American culture. Later, Roberto Bolano taught me about the kaleidoscopic ‘voices’ of the past that echo throughout the land and the way colonialism had all but destroyed the indigenous spirit of this great continent. Last year, Ernesto Guevara, another Argentine writer (and freedom fighter) showed me how all modern Latin Americans doom themselves to capitalism (the new colonialism) if they do not embrace and reconcile with that very spirit they once tried to cage and tame.

There is such a mixture of ideas, customs and cultures, that to understand Latin America, one would best remember that it does not actually belong to ‘a set’ of people, but like the elusive Jaguar, moves in the shadows of history and the wilderness of a past that refuses to die. One where the quetzalcoatl and many other gods who were considered extinct still live on, attached to Christianity and by burying themselves deeply in everyday folklore and myth.

Teaser Tuesday | ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch’ by Solzhenitsyn

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aleksandr solzhenitsyn, meme, teaser tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Last week it was Fleming, this week I have Solzhenitsyn. ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ is a brief but startingly glimpse of daily survival in a Soviet Gulag. The striking thing about this novel is how Solzhenitsyn finds ways to describe the bitter cold the prisoners had to face during their back-breaking labour. This teaser comes from page 65:

“Two buckets of water were carried in, but they had frozen on the way. Pavlo decided that there was no sense in doing it like this. Quicker to melt snow. They stood the buckets on the stove.”

What attracted me to the book was the fact that Solzhenitsyn actually spent time in a Gulagin 1945 after making derogatory remarks about Stalin in a letter. In the book, Ivan has already done eight of his ten year sentence, but in reality Solzhenitsyn spent a total of eight years, followed by internal exile. I never cease to be amazed by what people will endure for freedom of speech.