Yeah, I'm kidding myself with this one. This is clearly not the book I should be reading right now.
Not a DNF! Just... on hiatus!
I will rejoin the narrative when I feel more inclined to take a philosophical journey up my own 🍑
This book isn't bad, but it is sombre, creepy, scratchy, parasitic, windy, and dense.
If you're after some existential dread, this will be your jam!
Spiralling this week. Full of regret and confusion and sadness.
Going to submerge myself in the surreal, experimental narrative that Cărtărescu has created here.
pickA lovely and sad book about a young man - Lorenzo - who travels to Romania after the death of his mother who abandoned him years prior to chase her dreams (and lover) there. It‘s a quiet story of loss and memory and sorrow, and also a story of modern Romania and the impact of foreigners. Archipelago Press never disappoints.
I wanted some sort of skillety thing for my birthday breakfast and the fancy place I planned to order from wouldn‘t let me ask them to leave out the red onions. Boo. I stopped off at Tim Horton‘s instead for a resoundingly adequate scramble box alongside my daily short story.
This collection is HEAVY. Manea‘s fiction draws on his experiences in a concentration camp; an important subject that many people obviously need a refresher on.
pickPhew. My 5th book from the International #Booker longlist took some time, and some perseverance. It flows, it‘s just keep going. A schoolteacher learns of the layout of electrical solenoids connecting through Bucharest, becomes a mite messiah, floats two feet over his bed loses his way in every building, and turns into something like a sperm. Dear reader, you're left to decide what to make of this.
#IB2025
pickI love this book. It was my most reread during middle school and rereading it now, 17 years on, hasn't changed it all that much. I'll hopefully be meeting Juliet at a convention soon, so the revisit was comforting. I've not yet read any of her other work so aiming to read some more before then.
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