Kevin Dutton, "The Wisdom of Psychopaths"

 -e-book

Read from August 26^th to September 8^th 2021

My rating:

 

The title of Kevin Dutton’s book, The Wisdom of the Psychopaths seems ironically oxymoronic, until you read the preface that’s it, and learn that the essay is built on the idea that there is something good in every bad, even in psychopathy, for some of its attributes, like personal magnetism and a genius for disguise, used in moderation, of course, make it adaptive (not different, in a way, from anxiety, for it is known that anxious people can detect threats better than the rest of us, a very useful quality in an hostile or unknown environment):

Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one’s demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life.

The challenging thesis formulated, the author proceeds to prove it, gathering information from studies, experiments, books and personal observations, to build an image of psychopaths contrary to many stereotypes we have about them.

Julian Barnes, "Nothing to Be Frightened of"

  – ebook

Read from August 4^th to September 1^st 2021

My Rating:  

 

Part family memoir, part essay on death, Julian Barnes’ Nothing to Be Frightened of is a touching, but also an often humorous meditation on the most faithful companion of us all.

The book eclectically gathers different attitudes towards Death (and expectations beyond it), from curiosity and indifference to terror, of his family or of artists, in what he calls a pseudo-therapeutic effort to overcome his own fear.

Oliver Sacks, "The River of Consciousness"

 – e-book

 

Read from May 30^th to June 16^th 2021

My rating: 

 

I must confess The River of Consciousness, despite its Borgesian title, did not captivate me as much as other Oliver Sacks’ books. However, Sacks being Sacks, I learned a lot from this one, too (even slightly irrelevant facts I bet I won’t forget as easily as more important ones, like the fact that there are people with Tourette’s who can catch a fly on the wings because their have a different perception of speed).

One of the most intriguing essays is The Fallibility of Memory, with the doubt it rises about what we remember, that is, what we think we remember. It seems that our memories, especially our earliest ones, are rarely reliable because our mind often mingles stories we were told or read with what really happened to us. Actually, the psychologist and memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus has proved (by experimentally implanting false memories in her subjects’ minds) that the so-called recovered memories of traumatic experiences, memories that ruined lives and families, could have been, in some cases, insinuated or planted by others (perhaps a therapist, a teacher, a social worker, an investigator and so on), in the minds of highly suggestible persons (children, a teenagers, bipolars, etc.).

Jeremy Butterfield, "Damp Squid. The British Language Laid Bare"

Read from June 3^rd to 7^th 2021

My rating : 

 

Jeremy Butterfield’s Damp Squid would be nothing more than a Linguistic 101, if the disinhibited, casual approach did not make the book a funny reading for everyone, not only for would-be linguists.

The main objective of the essay is to convince grammar police and other language nerds that language is not a holy instrument to be carefully approached and used, but a live organism, forever growing and changing. Therefore, the author browses The Oxford Corpus (the 2006 edition, with over two billion words taken from contemporary English all over the world) in search of examples and statistics to illustrate it. If you didn’t know (I didn’t 😊), the Corpus (created in 1961 under the name of The Brown Corpus, which gathered then an impressive million words) is a collection of machine-readable different texts, organised in 40 domains (business, religion, sport, weblog etc.), each with its own subdomains.

Daniel Defoe, „Jurnal din anul ciumei”

  – e-book

 

Perioada lecturii : 6 - 20 aprilie 2021

Votul meu : 

Recunosc că m-a interesat Jurnalul lui Defoe în primul rînd ca să compar reacția de acum a oamenilor în fața COVID-ului cu cea din 1665, în fața ciumei, pentru a vedea dacă s-a schimbat ceva în comportamentul omenesc după patru secole. Ei bine, nici măcar n-am fost prea dezamăgită să aflu că nici pe departe: e reconfortant într-un sens lejer masochist 😊 să te asiguri că omul rămîne înduioșător de consecvent în reacțiile sale, fie bagatelizînd primejdia, fie dînd vina pe alții pentru ceea ce i se întîmplă, fie recurgînd la interpretări care mai de care mai bizare ale evenimentelor.

Mary Beard, "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome"

  – kindle

 

Read from December 24^th to March 4^th 2021

My Rating: 

 

 

In the Epilogue of her SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard confesses that the book is the result of about fifty years of history researching, archaeological sites visiting, Latin language learning, Latin literature reading and books with Roman subject studying, because for her “the Romans are a subject not just of history and inquiry but also of imagination and fantasy, horror and fun.”

Ancient civilizations, she says, do not teach direct lessons, either military or political, and are not necessarily models to follow. However, we are supposed to learn a lot by simply engaging with their history, which is our own:

We do not want to follow Cicero’s example, but his clash with the bankrupt aristocrat, or popular revolutionary, with which I started this book still underlies our views of the rights of the citizen and still provides a language for political dissent: ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ The idea of ‘desolation’ masquerading as ‘peace’, as Tacitus put into the mouths of Rome’s British enemies, still echoes in modern critiques of imperialism. And the lurid vices that are attributed to the most memorable Roman emperors have always raised the question of where autocratic excess ends and a reign of terror begins.

Oliver Sacks, "Hallucinations"

  – e-book

 

Read from January 4^th to 13^th 2021

My rating:

 

 In the Introduction of his Hallucinations, Oliver Sacks says that he conceived this book as “a sort of natural history or anthology of hallucinations”, and this is exactly what it is, a collection of first-hand testimonies from people whose common ground are hallucinations, either because of some medical condition (macular degeneration, migraine, epilepsy, narcolepsy, Parkinsonism etc.), or because of nightmares, shocks, use of some substances, or a combination of the two categories.

The author also hopes that the stories in this book “will help defuse the often cruel misunderstandings which surround the whole subject”, for although in many cultures hallucinations are a part of spiritual practices tried to be induced by meditation, drugs, or solitude, in modern Western culture, they are often stigmatized, considered either a sign of madness or of a grave illness of the brain.

Julian Barnes, „Zgomotul timpului”

 – The Noise of Time, traducere de Virgil Stanciu. Nemira 2016. ISBN 978 606 758 622 0. 206 p.

Perioada lecturii: 20 – 30 iunie 2020

Votul meu: 4/5 stele

Spunea Miron Costin cîndva, „...nu suntu vremile supt cârma omului, ci bietul om supt vremi” și nu există poate cuvinte mai potrivite pentru a ilustra destinul lui Dmitri Dmitrievici Șostakovici, marele compozitor rus care a inspirat biografia ficțională a Julian Barnes, Zgomotul timpului. Chiar dacă nu a avut destinul lui Osip Mandelstam, poetul care a plătit cu viața epigrama pe care a compus-o împotriva lui Stalin (sintagma titlului e preluată de altfel din memoriile acestuia, fiind un citat în citat, dat fiind că reprezintă definiția pe care poetul Alexander Blok a dat-o istoriei), soarta sa a fost la fel de tragică, pentru că, în anii Marii terori dar și după aceea, a fost forțat permanent să-și redefinească atît condiția umană cît și cea artistică. 

Cele trei părți ale romanului consemnează trei momente de cotitură în viața compozitorului, tot la doisprezece ani (1936, 1948, 1960), fiecare dintre ele începînd cu afirmația devenită leitmotiv că acela era „timpul cel mai rău” (dar nu spunea Shakespeare că „cel mai rău nu este/ Cît încă putem spune: Acum e cel mai rău”?)  

Julian Barnes, „Papagalul lui Flaubert”

 – e-book

Perioada lecturii: 27 februarie – 28 martie 2020

Votul meu : 

Noaptea trecută abia ce ațipisem cînd am tresărit bacovian din somn, nu de grija bărcii de la mal de data asta, ci de vinovată ce mă simțeam pentru că mă ospătam cu poftă din litera n, pe care o rupsesem din cuvîntul pîine și care era la fel de bună și de dăunătoare sănătății ca orice junkfood care se respectă. 

Explicația acestui vis bizar nu e chiar greu de aflat. Se prea poate ca, așa cum sugera cineva, să aibă oarece legătură cu faptul că azi, 31 martie, este ziua lui Nichita, de care cam uitasem, dar cred mai degrabă că a fost provocat ultima mea lectură, Papagalul lui Flaubert, de Julian Barnes, la care mă tot gîndesc de vreo cîteva zile, recapitulîndu-mi cu această ocazie cunoștințele despre limbaj și funcțiile acestuia, despre ipostazele auctoriale, despre vocile narative și despre alte obsesii filologice. Am să mă abțin însă să dezvolt paralela cu junkfood-ul, deși mă tentează.

Catherine Nixey, “The Darkening Age”

 – e-book

Read from May 26^th to June 26^th 2019

My rating: 

I don’t know whether the beautiful province of Quebec, which has been my home for about fifteen years, now, has got the most places with saints’ names in North America, but it is sure you will see them on almost any plate on the road. Yet, Québec is also one of the less religious places I know of, despite (or because of) the fact that, until just some fifty years ago, the Catholic Church was maybe the most powerful instance in the country. And if you ask the Quebecers about that period, their smile fade and they reluctantly acknowledge some of the rules they had to obey were positively medieval. 

Was it this constraint they experienced that have made them so adamant that religion have not part in their lives anymore? Probably, and I would like to believe they closed, thus, the long period of abuse and persecutions Christianity is guilty of, but I know it is only wishful thinking. At the end of the day, this is a period that few have dared to denounce, and at their own risk, from Celsus in the second century, who was the first Greek intellectual to contest the new religion and whose work was afterwards destroyed (and whom we know only because Origen, a Christian apologist, wrote Contra Celsum, in which he polemically quoted from his On the True Doctrine some 80 years later) to the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon who, in his Decline and Fall, will blame the Christians’ indolence and disregard for the public welfare for the fall of the Roman Empire, and who will see his study banned by The Catholic Church and himself becoming a pariah in the English society.

Adam Kay, “This Is Going to Hurt. Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor”

 – e-book

Read from January 17^th to 30^th 2019

My rating: 

Written by an author who was not meant to be a doctor or who was defeated by the system (the jury is still out on this one), This Is Going to Hurt is, despite its somehow menacing title, generally a funny book. In fact, Adam Kay is nowadays, according to his own disclosure, “only doctoring… other people’s words”, writing and editing tv comedy scripts, that is. 

The book takes, for the most part, the form of a diary covering the narrator’s experiences as a young doctor in the British public system for six years (from August 3^rd 2004 to December 2^nd 2010, to be more precise). Its light tone is captured just from the beginning for it is dedicated “To James – for his wavering support And to me – without whom this book would not have been possible.” 

In the “Introduction” he explains how the idea of the book came to him: five years after he resigned, he received a letter from the General Medical Council announcing him that his name had been erased from the medical register. Consequently, he went through his old papers and shredded all the documents except for his training portfolio, a log of the clinical experiences all doctors are supposed to keep as a sort of ‘reflective practice’:

Lewis Carroll, "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland"

-  Djvu Editions, Copyright 2002 by Global Language Resources, Inc. Illustrations by John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham. Tenniel illustrations scanned by Michael Richter.

Read from June 5^th to 20^th 2018

My Rating: 

‘I make you a present of everything I’ve said as yet.’

When my daughter asked me about the role of the Cheshire cat in the narrative and all I could remember was (you bet) her smile lingering long after she was gone, I suddenly realized how long a time ago (pleonastically speaking) I had read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Therefore, I decided it was time for a re-acquaintance with the famous book, and here I am, even more mesmerized than the first time – because I had read Alice then as in Romanian, so it is only now that I can truly and delightedly savour every single pun and other linguistic joke the best of translators could not transpose from one language to another, for it is only in English you can say a lesson is called a lesson because it will lessen in time, or tell a sad tale in the form of a tail (here goes, Apollinaire, the originality of your Calligrammes J), or draw treacle from a treacle-well even though you are in the well – that is, well-in.

Gail Honeyman, "Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine"

 – e-book

Read from May 5^thto June 1^st2018

My vote: 

I understand that Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fineis the first novel Gail Honeyman has published. As a debut, it is a very interesting novel indeed, with its fresh and lively voice that leaves the readers with a smile on their lips after closing the book. 

I must confess I have had some trouble in establishing its genre, though. To label it chicklit seemed to me a little unfair, since this label carries a soupcon of superficiality, of light reading. The author of the Kirkus review appears to have encountered the same problem, calling it “part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story” – a little too many parts, in my opinion, from which at least one an exaggeration and/ or wishful thinking. Nevertheless, it could be all three (and a few others), if you encompass them in a satirical approach, with a touch of neo-modernist psychological (melo)drama (hum, more and more confusing, told you, not so easy to classify). 

Jasper Fforde, "The Eyre Affair"

 –e-book

Read from April 20^th to May 3^rd 2018

My rating:

I’ve often told, to whoever wanted to listen to, the story of a lawyer friend of mine who, in the process of redecorating his apartment, put all his books in three or four huge plastic bags and left them in the (not quite secure) hall of the building. When I asked him how come he was not afraid someone would be tempted to take them, he answered: “Whenever have you heard about book theft? I, in my ten years or so of law practice, I have never encountered such a case.” And this happened almost twenty years ago, when e-books were still a dream of the future and folks like me were spending long hours in old bookstores in search of cheaper paperbacks, so the obvious moral of the tale is that for most people books are not valuable objects; even those who occasionally read don’t have the urge to be surrounded by books, nor to invest in them.

But how do you imagine life in a world in which not having books would be inconceivable, where they are the most coveted items, so that all human beings cherish, fight, steal and often die for them? What a dream world would that be, don’t you agree with me? Well, this is the world that generously opens for you in Jasper Fforde’s novel, The Eyre Affair. It may not be Borges’s paradise (it is not, for sure!) but man, how I would like to live there, if only for a while! In the circumstances, following the Literary Detective Thursday’s adventures it’s the best next, pun intended, of course.

Charles Robert Maturin, « Melmoth ou l’homme errant »

 – e-book

Lu du 3 avril au 7 mai 2018

Mon vote :

Ceux qui connaissent l’habitude que je me suis faite depuis longtemps de lire un livre dans la langue dans laquelle il a été écrit (à condition que je la connaisse, bien-sûr), ou, sinon, dans la traduction roumaine, seront peut-être étonnés de voir ma critique du roman de Charles Robert Maturin en français. Mais (et c’est la deuxième fois que cela m’arrive, après Le prophète de Khalil Gibran ) quand je l’ai commencé, j’étais convaincue que je lisais dans la bonne langue, je ne sais pas pourquoi (peut-être parce que j’avais déjà le e-book comme ça et de plus je me souvenais que Balzac avait écrit une suite à ce roman). 

En tout cas, même si je me suis rendu compte après les premières pages de mon erreur, j’ai continué la lecture parce que la traduction m’a paru vraiment bonne et j’ai considéré qu’il ne valait pas la peine de chercher l’original anglais – que j’aurais probablement trouvé sans trop de difficultés, étant donné qu’il s’agit d’une œuvre du début du XIXe siècle. 

Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, „Conspirația Stargate”

(The Stargate Conspiracy) – ebook.

Perioada lecturii 6 – 17 ianuarie 2018

Votul meu:

Demne de admirație eforturile autorilor Lynn Picknett și Clive Prince de a unifica teoriile referitoare la noua ordine bazată pe conștiința de grup și sinergie care au creat o întreagă subcultură sub numele de New Age, și despre care cu toții am auzit cîte ceva dar o tratăm de obicei superficial, punînd-o repede în categoriile oarecum disprețuite ale paranormalui și/ sau ale conspirației, și considerînd-o așadar nedemnă de o abordare mai serioasă. Se pare însă că teoriile ei sînt studiate și monitorizate atent de instituții serioase ca NASA sau CIA, cu toate că scopul acestor studii și observații rămîne oarecum obscur.

În orice caz, credem sau nu în existența civilizațiilor extraterestre, în parapsihologie și paranormal, cartea Conspirația Stargate este utilă în măsura în care oferă o imagine de ansamblu a ideologiei grupurilor care și-au făcut din lumile de dincolo de curcubeu o nouă religie, legînd de ele viitorul umanității.

Kingsley Amis, "Jake’s Thing"

 – Penguin Books 1980, ISBN 0140050965/ 9780140050967 ; 288 p.

Read from August 15^th to September 9^th 2016

My rating: 

During the twenty-minute waiting between the two buses I have to take to go to work every day I – read of course, what else? Usually slim books that don’t weigh a lot in my purse, like Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who bought it in a second-hand bookstore without looking inside, as I realized when I grabbed it one morning and opened it happily and impatiently (for Lucky Jim is one of my favourites and I was looking forward to something in the same tonality) in the bus station to suddenly realize that the first chapter was missing. Since the second one began at page 5, I decided that whatever events were presented in the first three (coz I excluded the title page, of course) could be read afterwards and thus, following a Cortazar recipe, I read the novel as it was and went in search of the first chapter afterwards. Lucky me, I found it on Amazon, which was offering it as a sample of its kindle edition.

I don’t want to suggest, with this long introduction, that the story of the reading was more interesting than the story itself; it was just that it made me able to recapture a long-lost memory from my childhood holidays at my grandparents’ house in a mesmerizing countryside (though, alas, not in Combray!), with long sunny days during which I used to climb dusty attics looking for old, dilapidated books I devoured despite missing covers or pages or both. I did not care much then about the indestructibility of the text, nor did I bother with the idea that even a single missing word can leave a gaping hole in a narrative. On the contrary, I loved to fill in the blanks with my own words, to guess and even re-write the missing parts.

Samuel Beckett, "The Unnamable"

 – e-book

Read from: September 25^th to October 3^rd 2013

My rating:

Imagine the creative impulse is a black hole from which rises a bewildered narrative voice, which tries to make sense only of itself, not of the world. Which tries to become a character, or a body, or a feeling, or a story, and struggles to accept both sides of every coin. Like a picture made only of colours, colours that burst, that flow, that spring from the canvas in no apparent order and coherence – The Unnamable is made only of words, whirlwinding round and round the reader in an endless monologue, questioning, negating and accepting, forever defining the unity of opposites:

I'm there already: I'll start looking for me now, I'm there somewhere. It won't be I - no matter, I'll say it's I. Perhaps it will be I.

Agatha Christie, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"

 – e-book

Read from May 5^th to 10^th 2016

My rating :

Umberto’s Agatha

If you are looking disconcertedly at the title of my review, don’t worry, I have got ready my explanation: while reading Umberto Eco’s Lector in Fabula, I came across an Agatha Christie’s title that, because of the Italian translation (Dalle nove alle dieci – that is, From nine to ten o’clock) I thought it referred to one book of her I had never read. So I looked for it, only to discover it was actually The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Then I thought: how about re-reading it to practice a little, just for fun, what Eco taught me about the Model Reader?

But before beginning my somehow empirical semiotic analysis, I will only add that this lecture was also a good opportunity to learn some interesting information that I am naturally happy to share with you. First, that this early novel, written in 1926, was voted in 2013, according to The Independent, as the best crime novel ever. Then, that one of its best-developed characters, Caroline Sheppard, will be the model for Miss Marple. Finally, and rather off-topic, given that it concerns another character of the book but not the book itself, I learned that Curtain, the novel in which Hercule Poirot dies, was written during War World II by a frightened Agatha Christie who willed it to be published if she died during the London bombing. Of course she did not die then, so the novel was published only in 1975, and as Gradesaver  informs us, “Hercule Poirot was the first ever fictional character to get a front page obituary in the New York Times. On August 6, 1975, a headline ran announcing, ‘Poirot is Dead; Famed Belgian Detective; Hercule Poirot, the Detective, Dies’.”

Ali Smith, "The Accidental"

 – Penguin Books, London 2005 ISBN 978-141-01039-7

Read from February 3^rd till 21^st 2016

My rating :

Do you recall those books that make your day (your week, your year J)? Those books that laugh at you from cover to cover without malice, reminding you that art is nothing but ludic, that the pleasure of the text (to borrow Barthes’s phrase) consists in blissfully and effortlessly enjoying both form and content? Those books that do you sooo good?

Well, for example David Lodge’s novels have always done this to me. And now, I’ve just delightfully discovered Ali Smith’s Accidental, another one of those friendly-reading books that teases the reader without superficiality, that discloses its narrative techniques without becoming annoying, that challenges both the writing know-how and the oh-so-serious literary themes without trivializing them and, more important without intimidating the reader. A book that doesn’t believe in complicated channels to deliver its message, although its message is far for simple. A postmodern book that doesn’t let you forget it is postmodern, but that doesn’t let you grow an inferiority complex because of it, either.