ABC

Ooh-la-la, leapsha de la Roxa, de cand n-am mai avut una dintr’astea. Rules are as follows:

Pentru această leapşă, înşiruie câte o carte preferată al cărei titlu începe cu câte o literă din alfabet. Dacă nu ai o carte pentru litere mai ciudate, cum ar fi Q, X sau K, o poţi înlocui cu o carte preferată care conţine acea literă în titlu. Ai voie sa pui în lista ta şi cărţi care nu aparţin beletristicii.

A: American Gods, where my (literary) love affair with Neil Gaiman began.

B: Brave New World – Aldous Huxley. Too lazy to look for the notes I made at the time, but dystopia has never been so frighteningly real.

C: Copii miezului noptii – Salman Rushdie. I’m cheating a bit here, this should have been at M – but it’s an already overcrowded letter.

D: Dune – Frank Herbert. The sequels were not up to par, but the first book is absolutely amazing.

E: Eseu despre orbire – Jose Saramago. Back in 2008 I said In “Blindness”, I found not only one of the best books I’ve read recently, but also perhaps one of the best books I’ve ever read.-  and I still stand by that.

F: Fury  -Salman Rushdie. It’s the most atypical of Mr. Rushdie’s novels, and yet it’s what got me into his work in the first place. I’d like to say it only gets better from here, but I have read The Enchantress of Florence, so I’d be deceiving you.

G: Game of Thrones – GRR Martin I’ve been talking about this way too much lately – and I’ll be talking more once I get my hands on Dance with Dragons.

H: (The) Hours – Michael Cunningham. It made me cry and it made me fall in love with books all over again.

I: In Cold Blood – Truman Capote. It goes to show that the objective approach will, eventually, fail, even when faced with such a sensationalist drama.

J:  Jurnalul Fericirii – Nicolae Steinhardt. I cannot do it justice in a sentence, it’s one of those books that stays you foever.

K: Kafka on the shore – Haruki Murakami. So…this was a though one, turns out I can’t really think of books starting with K. Murakami gets repetitive, but if you want to read one of his books – I’d say this should be it.

L: Life and times of Michael K – JM Coetzee. Travelling a war-torn South Africa with a slightly socially-retarded man – it could have been Forrest Gump, but it turned out to build a whole universe of suffering, intolerance, uselessness and pain.

M: Master and Margarita – Mihail Bulgakov

N: (The) New York Trilogy. So far, Paul Auster’s best, battling for this letter with Never let me go – Kazuo Ishiguro’s dive in dystopia. I simply cannot choose.

O: One hundred years of solitude – GG Marquez. Some may say it’s overrated (and maybe it is), but I’ve read it 10 years ago and I’ve loved it eversince.

P: Pride and Prejudice – without Jane Austen, romantic comedies would not be the same. Blessing or curse – I don’t know, because you can’t deny that some of them are actually fun – but Elizabeth and Darcy are probably one of the best literary couples. Ever.

Q: Can’t believe I’ve got nothing.

R: (The) Road – Cormac McCarthy. ‘Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it’ – I’ve used this quote when I first wrote about the book because I believed then, as now, that if you don’t see the magic and the potential behind those words this really isn’t the book for you.

S: Sandman – Neil Gaiman. I’m not an avid comic book reader, but if anything were to make me one, this is it. And if there’s anything out there that comes close to Sandman’s brilliant combination of myths, legends, pop-culture and original plots and characters – I really want to get my hands on it. 😀

T: The Amazing adventures of Kavalier & Clay – Michael Chabon. It’s worth the cheat – read it and you’ll be 15 again.

U: Unaccustomed Earth – Jhumpa Lahiri. Of her 2 short story books I slightly prefer The Interpreter of Maladies, but both books deal with the bittersweet world of immigration that I find endlessly fascinating.

V: V – Alan Moore.

W: Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel, a very cool descent in Henry VIII’s England. It was a tough choice over Waiting for the Barbarians – and it gets this spot only because JM Coetzee is up there in the L section.

X:  Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides, my M runner up, nonetheless, a book that captivated me completely, with its intricate family histories and its unique outlook on one character’s journey from Callie to Cal.

Y: (The) Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Michael Chabon. A modern noir, set in an alternative universe in which, in 2008, Alaska, a temporary Jewish settlement, is about to be returned to the US – agitating most of the population, since there is no other Jewish land they can head to.

Z: Herzog – Saul Bellow. I actually didn’t like this one, but it’s easy being the first in a group of one. And I’ll voice here a very unpopular opinion – the obvious choice of Z would have been Zorba the Greek, which absolutely  and profoundly hated.

Cristi deja a scris, si i-a si pasat leapsa lui Alin (caruia ii trimiteam eu lepsele deobicei) so…what to do? Dragos?  Ionuca? Capricornk?  And whoever else.

~ by ameer on July 9, 2011.