The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón, © 2001
mystery fiction; 480 pages
I read this book on a recommendation and immediately fell in love. It is an engrossing book with suspense and humor. I'll share with you the synopsis on the back cover and two of my favorite quotes from the book.
Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals from its war wounds, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mournes the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact. Daniel may have the last of Carax's books in existense. Soon Daniel's seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.
The first quote is by my favorite character, Fermín, about television:
Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.
The second quote is a thought from Daniel:
...the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
read it
February 4, 2011
January 13, 2011
resourceful
One Man's Wilderness - An Alaskan Odyssey
Sam Keith from the journals and photos of Richard Proenneke, © 1973
non-fiction/biographical; 220 pages
Lately I have been interested in all that is Alaska. My research lead me to this book, chronicling the daily happenings of one man 40 miles away from the nearest town in the middle of Alaska. He decided it was time he had some solitude and set out to build a cabin using only hand tools. The book mostly reads as a journal of Richard Proenneke's days. There are photos to show in detail the amazing cabin he describes building in the first half of the book. He then goes on to describe the incredibly cold winter (-54º F) he survives in his cabin and then some walks he takes around Twin Lakes and the wild life he encounters.
The thing I most enjoyed about this book was imagining myself in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness and the solitude of a glacial lake valley. He ends the book with thought provoking reflections on his experience of building his cabin and living a mostly solitary life for 16 months.
I had heard this was a PBS special.
consider it
Sam Keith from the journals and photos of Richard Proenneke, © 1973
non-fiction/biographical; 220 pages
Lately I have been interested in all that is Alaska. My research lead me to this book, chronicling the daily happenings of one man 40 miles away from the nearest town in the middle of Alaska. He decided it was time he had some solitude and set out to build a cabin using only hand tools. The book mostly reads as a journal of Richard Proenneke's days. There are photos to show in detail the amazing cabin he describes building in the first half of the book. He then goes on to describe the incredibly cold winter (-54º F) he survives in his cabin and then some walks he takes around Twin Lakes and the wild life he encounters.
The thing I most enjoyed about this book was imagining myself in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness and the solitude of a glacial lake valley. He ends the book with thought provoking reflections on his experience of building his cabin and living a mostly solitary life for 16 months.
I had heard this was a PBS special.
consider it
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