Every Book I’ve Ever Read
When you read a lot, you tend to forget what you read after a while. Sometimes, I can’t remember a book a few weeks after reading it. So, inspired by Art Garfunkel’s website, I decided to keep a list of every book I’ve read, along with a short review. When I say “review,” I mean more a description of how I came to read the book, which I find more interesting than what I actually thought about it.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
When you reread a book that made a big impression on you early in your life, it’s difficult to know how your new reading of it has changed. My immediate assumptions—from the very first, hilarious descriptions of Joe Gargery mouthing, through cupped hands, the word “hulks” Pip so that Mrs. Joe wouldn’t notice—were that I didn’t have the reading comprehension to pick all this up as a teenager. But I remember loving this book just as much as I do now, and I know that for all I’ve changed, I was perceptive at that age. So, perhaps I did understand it, but over time had forgotten almost all. A particular scene about Pip running into stuck out in my mind as an important, but incomprehensible passage, but when I read it (Trabb’s boy keeps running around the block to make fun of the newly fortunate Pip in various ways), it was neither important, nor very difficult to understand. This time around, I imagined the whole book as a movie in the style of The Simpsons. For some reason, it seems like this adaptation would work. No Simpson’s characters in the adaptation, but I guess Orlick is a kind of Sideshow Bob character, and the Aged could easily
The Balloonist by MacDonald Harris
“Oh, it’s like Around the World in 80 Days?” a friend asked when I told him the plot. The comparison hadn’t occurred to me when I started reading this book, mostly because it’s nothing like that book, even though there is a hot-air balloon. I came across this book while scouring the National Book Awards website, for which the book was nominated in 1977, after reading about books that were nominated but didn’t win the award (was it Beloved everyone is still mad didn’t win?). The website struck me at the time as an incredible database to uncover popular books that didn’t stand the test of time, and this was the easiest book to get my hands on. I liked reading this enough to finish it, but can sort of see why it’s not talked about very widely any more.
SPQR by Mary Beard
The arc of ancient Roman history is skewed by the very first historians who assembled the story of their city-state soon after the events unfolded. Those stories weren’t as rigorous as some of our histories tend to be today. So, at every turn of this book, Mary Beard disassembles the mythology of ancient Rome, while always explaining that there is also some truth to those fantasies. Caligula, for instance, may not have been as cruel or insane as later senators made him out to be—one story in particular claims he made his soldiers pick up shells on the beach, but the Latin word musculi may have been confused with another meaning, military huts—but his reign must have felt self-indulgent and aggrandizing of the emperor in a way that others hadn’t. Perhaps most memorable for me, is the description of Hadrian’s wall, which was meant to define once and for all the extent of the Roman empire in Britain. But it was easily scalable—the wall, like the nation-borders of today—aren’t meant to block foreigners from entering, but maybe the emperor who never saw the wall in its entirety was led to think that it could do that.
2023
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
When you set out on a book that’s more than 800 pages, you don’t know what you’re getting into. If it’s good enough, you will soon enough be well on your way to completing it, but not near the end at all. Months may pass. You’ve been reading the same book for what seems like the whole year. I picked up this book after reading about Larry McMurtry, not knowing this was a famous novel that almost everyone seemed to know about. Multiple people told me it was one of their favorite books, and when I went to visit my dad over the holiday, I had a feeling he would say something, and sure enough he did.
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
We’re passing this book around between friends on a trip to Portugal as if it were a secret, only it’s on everyone’s lips because the movie directed by Martin Scorcese is about to premiere. It shouldn’t have been a movie, I think, it should have been a TV show. This is like a real-life season of The Wire.
The Man Who Watched Trains Go By by Simenon
Simenon has been having a moment. Even though I love Poirot and Colombo, somehow I never heard about Simenon. But either he had a centenary or a new translation had just come out, because in the past few months there were several articles about him. Behind the scenes at the library where I work, there is a long three shelves of used books that I gather were donated by a voracious reader, but could never be entered into circulation because they were too used, or weren’t needed. So, library staff can pick from them, and either return them or take them forever. This man was evidently a Simenon lover—he has over 50 books by him, which seems like more books than any one writer could write. I picked this one first. The NYRB translation made me think it was worth picking from the pile of older, dime novels that made up the majority of Simenon books there. And I felt it was just right.
Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère
Once, I sent a first-edition copy of Auschwitz by W.G. Sebald to my friend Reed, living in Irvine. “Reading it,” he wrote to me, “is like breathing air.” I feel that way about Sebald too, but I also feel that way about Carrère’s books. I read this while traveling abroad to Denmark and Portugal for the summer. After I had finished Yoga, we found ourselves at a fish restaurant on the cliffs overlooking a beach outside Lisbon, the sun setting and blazing in my face. We were with one French man, Patrick, and his boyfriend, an American who lived in France for more than a decade. What was the opinion of Carrère, I asked, over there in France? I knew that as a writer, he was more like a celebrity over there, but wondered if his personality was remarked with disdain by a certain upper-educated, certain circle, as my knew French-based friends seemed to come from. Instead of giving their own opinion, Patrick told me how his mother just died, and she certainly was famous and well-respected overall. Then, the American asked me why I didn’t read it in French—we were speaking in French. I’m lazy, I said, and I’m on vacation. And in the back of my mind, I thought, and I need to breath air.
The Shortest Way to Hades by Sarah Caudwell
There are certain sentences in this book that I wish I had written down while I was reading them. Caudwell’s writing is like a perfectly formed dish recipe, where not one ingredient or direction is out of place. It takes her a short sentence to describe someone’s reaction where others might have spent three or four. I also love the meta quality of the book, where Hillary Tamar is always aware they are speaking to a reader, even conscious of how much left in the book there is to go at a certain point in the narrative.
Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen
Since reading the UK translations of the first two books of Ditlevsen’s trilogy, I’ve been waiting to read the third. Every Danish person I met has read this, and they all say the third one is devastating. If you mention Ditlevsen, they will tell you her life was horrible, but the first two books don’t seem that bad. Maria said in the third one, a doctor keeps her hostage and drugs her for years. Finally, I checked out the US translation which came out last year. It wasn’t exactly as Maria said—while the doctor, her husband, does facilitate her drug addiction to heroin, Ditlevsen is equally culpable. This was by far the best of the trilogy. The twists and turns of her life are so dark as to be comic—it’s not even funny, just so sad and perverse that it almost makes you laugh.
Sunny by Taiyō Matsumoto
Having not read manga or other comic books when I was younger, I suspect that I missed out on a great range of action literature, so I tend to seek these books out in between reading regular literature. I so enjoyed reading Shigeru Mizuki’s grand personal and national history that I wanted to be more fully immersed in the world of Japan through comics. I started reading this, and put it down after a few days, confused by the introduction narrative. Then I picked it up again and read it in one or two days.
Skim by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
I missed out on the coming of age graphic novels in high school. It was either difficult to find good graphic novels then, or I just wasn’t looking. But this would have been a good one for me to read. I felt, reading it now, that I wasn’t the intended audience.
Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell
If you pick up a book that a friend is reading on the beach, and are sucked into the story within the first few pages, you will always remember that moment. That is how it began, but it was the second book of this tax lawyer murder mystery quadrilogy. Although I found it difficult to follow how the murder actually happened, the dialogue and writing makes this book well worth the time spent reading it.
A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux
I wasn’t super into the first Annie Ernaux book I read, A Girl’s Story, but I was encouraged to try another one after reading an article by Rachel Cusk in the Times. I recognized the mother and father who ran the grocery store in a small town in Normandy. This book captures exactly what I look for in literature: the expression of a time and/or place that isn’t like my own. I read this in two days.
The Drowning Novel by Kenzaburō Ōe
I read he passed away and that he wrote almost exclusively about post-War Japan and his son who had a disability but was an accomplished pianist. Recently, I was intrigued by the story of the first few hours just after the atomic bomb exploded in Hiroshima—how would Japan learn about the destruction of the city if it was completely annihilated? Then, I was interested in learning more about what happened in the years that followed. This book by Ōe is quirkily written, with a lot of superfluous narrative and dialogue, but after getting through a few hundred pages I felt that I couldn’t put it down. I was searching for the sentiments of the generation alive during the end of World War II, and still want to learn more.
A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo
If I had it my way, I would only read a book that was mentioned in the previous book I read. Each one would be strung together like a necklace of literary referrals, no matter the content or style. A Rumor of War was mentioned by Richard Hell in his memoir, so I decided to check it out, being a fan of The Things They Carried. I search this book for other titles to keep it up.
I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp by Richard Hell
Richard Hell’s name stuck in my head before I knew who he was. I watched The Smithereens without, still, knowing what he did. Then, reading about punk history in previous books, a vision of him formed in my head until he was very clear. In this book, Hell kisses and tells, almost every famous punk world woman in the ‘70s and ‘80s. I still feel heartbroken thinking about how it ended up between him and Lizzy Mercier Descloux.
A Girl’s Story Annie Ernaux
After she received the Novel Prize for literature, I put my name down for a random book by Ernaux. Months later, I was alerted that it was my turn.
Showa: A History of Japan by Shigeru Mizuki
Reading graphic novels is a super-ephemeral activity—the act of reading flies by. But this four-set graphic novel epic is a hefty amount of reading material. One day, while I was in the middle of the series, I spoke to a man from Georgia, the country, who remarked how little Americans know about the strife around Russia and the Caucasus. Reading this history of the Showa period in Japan, through the lens of Mizuki’s life, I thought the same: Japan and its involvement in World War II seems like a forgotten past, especially to me, as an American, erased by its contemporary stature in the world. This is the kind of graphic novel I wish I could write.
2022
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
Waiting for other coworkers to join a video call, one curator waxed at length about this book, and seemed to run out of words to describe how amazing it was and hastened to tell us he didn’t even usually read literature. Before he finished, I had checked it out. Somehow the book that was published the same year that Finnegans Wake came out escaped my field of vision, and it does feel like a more legible Joyce book. In high school, we had to interview people who were in the profession we saw ourselves in in the future, and I spoke to a Joycean. I wish had, instead, told me about Brian O’Nolan.
Ducks by Kate Beaton
I got into Kate Beaton first through Twitter. After long absences, she would suddenly start posting these comic strips about her family life, especially whenever she went home to Cape Breton. I loved her father, grew fond of her worrying mother. Kate typically write children’s books, but I yearned for her adult-themed barrage of mini graphic novel reports from home. So, I immediately bought Ducks when I saw it came out, and was just as pleased with this bound edition of true-life comic story.
Olav Audunssøn: Providence by Sigrid Undset
I didn’t think the second and third part of this tetralogy were translated, but somewhere behind the scenes of the library I found an edition that came out in the 70s with the entire series in English. I read nearly the entire second part in this outdated translation before it started to fall apart. Exasperated, I searched online and found the additional translations had already been published. Still, I preferred the cover of the 70s version, which reminds me of the old Herman Hesse books I found in my parents garage back in high school, featuring a painted collage of characters and landscapes central to the book.
Broken April by Ismail Kadare
I prepare to travel in the strangest ways. Maria and I are going to Albania in August 2022, and I wanted to read another book by Ismail Kadare, after reading The Siege a few years ago. So I had to buy this book on the internet because it was hard to find. It turned out to be a good book to read before traveling there because it’s a story that exposes the complex history and nuances of the Kanun, the code that governs blood feuds in the mountains of Albania.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow
In another life, I was an anthropologist—dissecting humanity through still-existing marginal cultures across the world. Reading about this book, I fully buy into the idea that the notion of the Age of Enlightenment is merely a metaphor that has corrupted our understanding of the past. Everything is more complicated than it seems, and we’re wont to simplify what we can’t see—especially if it happened 20,000 years ago.
Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig
The title of this 1976 book feels impossible, and evokes something beyond what the book is actually about. But it’s a jaguar woman who kicks it off, and that feels even better in some way. How this became a 1980s musical also seems impossible, but that’s just one of many intriguing enigmas of the book.
The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
I’ve read and enjoyed Norman Mailer in the past, but I never would have picked this book up or thought to read him recently. He seems like an author that has been and will be again cancelled. But, I met someone who was working on a PhD about Mailer’s bid to be mayor New York with Jimmy Breslin, and he recommended this book. Picking this up from the library, I honestly thought I would never finish it. It’s 1,110 pages—and it turned out to be the quickest 1,100 pages I’ve ever read.
Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea by Guy Delisle
We were cat sitting at Dan and Caitlin’s house. We decided to spend the weekend there, rather than go back and forth between our houses, even though we live in an adjacent neighborhood, and treated it like a vacation. Their house is full of books, the kinds you would find in a second hand store. I had just finished my last book, so I looked through the bookshelves and stacked books to find something I could read in the single weekend we were staying there. This book was perfect: I was immediately hooked and by the first day had almost finished it.
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy by Rachel Cusk
I’m always drawn to Rachel Cusk’s writing because I felt it mirrors my own. Recently, I decided to check out something that was an early or lesser known work by her, and this 1996 travel memoir sounded perfect. I’ll read anything that takes place in Italy. This book met all of my expectations—I actually felt it was better than some of her more recent works just because it feels more personal and true. It also includes one of the best descriptions of Italian cuisine that I’ve ever read.
Seven Gothic Tales by Karen Blixen
I always love to take a book from a shelf at a place where I’m staying temporarily and read it. This was on my parents-in-law’s bookshelf in my wife’s childhood home. Every Danish household has read their share of Karen Blixen—she’s a national treasure, and the opening lines to Out of Africa are like the beginning of a national anthem. I was delighted to read that Seven Gothic Tales was her first book and it was published simultaneously in Danish and English to much acclaim.
Malice by Keigo Higashino
I rarely read crime books, but this was passed on to me by a friend. The book is just one long description of what happened—very straightforward, but that’s exactly what makes it a page turner. Still, I wish that it had more affects and extras that make crime noir books special. It would be have been interesting to learn about life in Japan through the details within a murder mystery.
The Corner That Held Them by Sylvia Townsend Warner
This is one of those historical books that is hard to believe it was ever written. I would say it’s almost an experimental novel, concerning itself with an abbey or nunnery, which holds still as life blurs by like a timelapse. Don’t try and remember anyone’s name in this book, but instead, blur your eyes and enjoy their emotions and trivial worries in the face of Black Death, hunger, or labor shortages. Every human emotion and activity could take place today, but it doesn’t.
Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Richard J. Evans
Years ago, in a class on postmodern literature, a professor cited an essay by Eric Hobsbawm that argued while artists in the Renaissance were leading the pack in developing new technologies, like Leonardo da Vinci, artists today were merely followers, stuck in a rut with their old tools. Much later, I wanted to read that essay and had to order it online. It came printed in hardback with a red textured cover, and soon after I received it, I lost it in a cab (it was called “Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the 20th-Century Avant-Gardes”) before I had a chance to read it. Years later, again, I tried to read something by Hobsbawm, and found it difficult to follow. So when I noticed there was a new biography about him, I picked it up. Whenever there is a writer or philosopher whose ideas are too incomprehensible for me, I will turn to their biographies in lieu of their actual writing.
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Stendhal is one of those names you hear a lot in college, but if you never took a class reading one of his books, chances are you aren’t familiar with his work. I realized that even though I knew his name, I never knew why his work was so often mentioned. What I do in this case is always the same: I’ll look up the author on Wikipedia to get a sense of which book is their most respected and discussed, then I’ll check it out from the library.
Little Gods by Meng Jin
I love books where each chapters are devoted to characters who can’t really speak to each other. The story of Little Gods is filed away like little library cards containing information that is connected, but can never intersect.
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
While watching Pretend its a City starring Fran Leibowitz, I caught a glimpse of the movie that Fran says she saw with a room full of directors. I looked it up, and found out that it was a book that came out just after the author’s death. I love old literature, and anything about Italy is also wonderful. This is both, and it’s very digestible. So enjoyable to read!
Lives Other Than My Own by Emmanuel Carrère
I devoured Carrère’s book The Kingdom when it came out, and it struck me as exactly the kind of mixture of history, biography, and theory that I love. I decided I should read more by him, and this book came up. In the end, I thought it was ok, but when I was reading it, I almost couldn’t put it down.
The New York Trilogy by Paul Aster
When someone posts a random page of something that they’re reading on social media, with no description of what it is, what do you do? One day, I decided to type in a sentence from something my friend Kalliopi posted. It was the trilogy by Paul Aster, and when I realized that, it suddenly seemed like exactly the thing I wanted to read while I was away in California for the break. The writing and pace of the book was great, but it ended up not completely satisfying what I wanted out of it: an indulgent, literary scene report from 1980s New York City.
Olav Audunssøn: Vows by Sigrid Undset
I found out about this new translation on Twitter, by the person who has been resurfacing Sigrid Undset’s books. Reading Kristin Lavransdatter was so momentous for me that I had to immediately buy this new book. I’m writing a book myself, and struggle with the idea that it probably would never be published. What would I do then? People usually say, keep trying, keep writing! But, what, am I going to write another book? I read in the intro of Olav Audunssøn that Undset did exactly that. She wrote this tetraology and the publisher that she hoped would put it out was like, great, but it’s not for us. So she wrote Kristin Lavransdatter instead, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Elena Ferrante has a way of writing that sounds like she will gradually arrive to a point she can make by the end of the novel. The sentences progress like an argument she’s making, meanwhile telling about the early childhood of her narrator, and using parts of her life’s story as cases of evidence. When she arrives to the end, the whole thing spills forth as if the case has been made. It’s fun to think about the future books by Ferrante that I will read, and that I am in a glory period of her writing career, and I’m around to see it unfold.
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Youth by Tove Ditlevsen
Tove Ditlevsen has a beer garden named after her in Copenhagen, but it was always closed whenever we rode by it because I always visited in the winter. The memory of the first time I heard Tove’s poems coupled with the atmosphere I imagined the beer garden to transform into in the summer always made the place somewhat mysterious and magical to me, as if only Tove’s old friends, and maybe Tove herself, the ghosts of a past Copenhagen, frequented the spot in the summer. With all that I know about Tove, I have never read her poems, but in 2020 Maria visited Denmark and brought back two of Tove’s three Copenhagen novels about her life. Both because they are so modern, well written, and because I was seeking more information about the magic beer garden, I devoured them both.
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen
I suppose it’s not strange to say that since I married a Danish woman, I have also had almost as long a relationship with the famous Danish poet, Tove. I first came across her poems when I picked up the record Kvindesind by Anne Linnet, which are Tove’s poems set to music. It was a winter evening, and we were staying at an apartment that Maria’s friends had vacated for the holiday. They had this big collection of records, and I played this one almost randomly. The music was beautiful, and Maria told me the context of it. As we listened, we stood on the balcony in the cold, and watched an older couple across the building complex dance, and eventually kiss. I felt like I was looking at us in the future.
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
To prepare for an interview with Meshell Ndegeocello, who premiered an iteration of a project based on this essay in 2020, I ordered the collected essays of James Baldwin, one of those black books with the author’s pictures and a band of red, white and blue circling the cover. I love the format of an intimate letter to someone close to the writer as a way to expose difficult truths about the world that in other formats would be inauthentic. What does it mean to write letters anymore in a world that doesn’t seem to cherish them, especially letters to a future generation? Have we stopped thinking about correspondence when we’re constantly connected to everyone anyway?
On Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
I never heard of Bruce Chatwin until I was in a cabin in the Catskills at my friends Willa and Daniel’s house perusing the library that had been left by the previous owner. That person had amassed and left behind a ton of books by Bruce Chatwin. I’m always interested by travel literature, and find it odd that it’s a unique category unto itself—I often think about how it’s relegated to a basement corner of the Strand. References to Bruce kept popping up, until I saw a trailer for a movie by Werner Herzog about him. Maria and I had just postponed a trip to Peru because of the pandemic, so to assuage my depression about it, I checked out this book from the library.
Rage & Sex by Eve Babitz
I always enjoy when an old author comes back into style. A few years ago this seemed to happen for Eve Babitz. I didn’t read any of her work, but read reviews of her old books. But in 2020 my wife was hungry for literature about surfing, after starting to try the sport out for herself in 2019. In 2020, I was bored of the books I was reading, and picked up this one that she had finished.
Paying the Land by Joe Sacco
When I was living in France in 2004, I saw a small exhibition at the Pompidou on graphic novel reportage, and discovered Joe Sacco. I devoured all of his books. While staying in California over the summer, I stopped into a comic book store in Santa Cruz where I saw this in the front window display.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
I love reading classics that I either skipped or haven’t read in more than ten years. I picked up this one because we were stuck in a house in Delaware during the pandemic and it was one of the few books in the library. Reading this book, I was desperate for some information about what it was like to live during a plague because it mirrored so closely the time we were living in. Yet, there is very little mention of cholera, but the few times it is brought up stand out in my mind, like when a seemingly empty boat floats down the river bearing the white flag that indicates people on board are sick.
The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas
We planned a trip to Peru that has been since canceled, but in the time following when we had purchased our tickets, I started to read up on the country in a circuitous way. Reading a profile of the artist Anselm Kiefer by Karl Ove Knausgaard, I noticed a mention of this famous Peruvian writer, and decided to check out a book by him. This book about a corrupt military academy seemed to explain something about Peru that I don’t think I would have picked up elsewhere, at least for the time it was written.
Vile Days by Gary Indiana
Gary Indiana is a favorite character of mine from anything I’ve ready by or about David Wojnarowicz, but I had never really read much of his own work until I read his review of a recent biography on Warhol. The review, unlike anything else I’ve ever read of that genre, made me feel like I wanted to know Gary Indiana when he was younger. This book of essays met my expectations.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Like so many things, I saw a mention of this book on the internet, and decided to check it out immediately for some reason. It was probably one of the best things I have read in years—I couldn’t believe it was written so long ago. I imagine that living in a corrupt Russia, where housing is scarce and people unliked by the government disappear, did evoke something of a patriarchal Satanic looming figure. That is to say, like most fantastical fiction, I read this book as a documentary.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
It’s interesting to me that this is Marilynne Robinson’s second book, published in 2004, after her first, published more than twenty years before in 1980. How time flies!
Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie at his most self-indulgent, long-winded, and basic in the contemporary sense of the word, and yet, I was driven by this story.
After Kathy Acker by Chris Kraus
In the beginning of this book Michelle Handelman is booed off the stage at Kathy’s funeral. I saw Michelle that summer and asked her about it, sort of embarrassed that I was possibly bringing up a sore subject. She was happy to talk about it, brushing it off as an anomaly of a moment, and we got to talking about other books.
Alexandrian Summer by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren
Herzog by Saul Bellow
I checked out this book after reading the quote in Ta-Nahisi Coates’ Between the World and Me where he quotes Ralph Wiley’s response to Saul Bellow’s dumb question, “who is the Tolstoy of the Hulus?” As dumb as this introduction was, I realized I had never read anything by the man.
Água viva by Clarice Lispector
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich
Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles
I am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
I checked out this book after trying to read A Little Life, the year everyone was seen reading it on the train. I felt like that more recent novel resembled my life too much, and didn’t feel it interested me. This one was more fantastical, and I liked that fantasy mixed with an anthropologists life.
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Once, reading this book on the subway, a woman approached me and said she was surprised to see me reading it because some of her male friends felt it was too feminine to read. “It’s not feminine enough!” I told her, just to be provocative.
Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
One of my favorite books. Ever since dating and marrying a Danish woman, I have been searching for books that capture a long lost period of Scandinavian culture, that today’s Scandinavians seem to know little about.
Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare
Hrag Vartanian suggested this author for me to read when he learned that my family came from Albania a long while ago. I was surprised to learn that Ismail, a famous writer all over the world but certainly in his country, was born in the same small town as my grandmother and her sister, Gjirokastër.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
Transit by Anna Seghers
The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
A friend, Julia Cooke, suggested this author. I thought it was a beautiful portrayal of the early 20th century, but was especially intrigued by a part of the book that reveals a phantom in a house, even though by every other measure the book seems completely nonfictional. It’s a ghost story that is left unresolved.
The Door by Magda Szabó
