The History of the Siege of Lisbon - Jose Saramago

It is time that we should know the person about whom we have been talking indiscreetly, if name and surnames could ever add anything useful to the normal identifying features and other statistics, age, height, weight, morphological type, skin tone, colour of eyes, whether the hair is smooth, curly, or wavy, or has simply disappeared, timbre of voice, clear or harsh, weight, characteristic gestures, manner of walking, since experience of human relationships has shown that, once apprised of these details and sometimes many more, not even this information serves any purpose, nor are we capable of imagining what might be missing.

This book is a challenge to read and only worth the effort if you are a student of literature. The style includes extremely long sentences and paragraphs. For example, the book starts out with a one sentence paragraph which covers six pages. I counted seventy-one commas in another sentence which was just one page long. The translator says the stream of thought style provides a stronger sense of interaction and diverse interpretation. The diversity in interpretation perhaps comes from not remembering where a sentence began or what subject is being presented.

I wanted to like this book. It has a great premise: a proofreader alters history by changing a work in an author's manuscript and falls in love with an editor. Interspersed is a tale inserted into a historical time reinterpreting the Seige of Lisbon against the Moors. The author is a great thinker as well as a writer and there are brilliant thoughts and phrases in this book. For me, however, it is far too complicated to read and meanders off into too many uninteresting tangents.

The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald

For days and weeks on end one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life.


Sebald has crafted an intelligent, well-written book. This is a first person account of travels on England's Northeastern coast. Towns with profitable pasts during expansive industrial times are visited. They are mostly skeletons of cities now. The author uses the town histories to launch into tales about prior residents or the history that helped define the town in its prime. The digressions are often quirky and help contribute an overall feeling of other worldliness in this book. To enjoy this book, the reader must let his mind wander and enjoy details left out of history books. As someone who grew up reading encyclopedias, I loved it.

The author is superb at finding details to support a melancholic meander through a place time left behind. He leaves the reader pondering empires, wars, economic progress, rapid changes, and simple lives in forgotten places. A good book for a slow read.

Little People in the City - Slinkachu

The photographic traces collected in this book, capturing the evanescent existence of the diminutive in the great and troubling city, have all the power of "Gulliver's Travels" to impose upon us a realization of the asinine pride we take in the mere fact of comparison. Or rather: the asinine pride that derives from our environment and ourselves being to scale with each other. The built environment is an outgrowth of social form--Schelling's 'frozen music'--and thus an endlessly repeated sample of the same old tune: human domination and submission, leading to individual alienation.

I love this book. It is a small, and very reasonably priced, art photography book. The artist places miniature figurines throughout the city environment of London. You can see an example of the size in the cover photograph of a man protecting his daughter from an actual dead bee on a sidewalk. The book displays side-by-side photographs from the scene from a human perspective and closeups to give a perspective of the miniature people.

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The art is inventive provoking both deep thoughts and humor. My first reaction is too smile and then to view the city from a new point of view--that of people the size of small insects. This books works as much great art that challenges our perspective view of our world. It looks so simple, even childlike, but I find myself wanting to look at this book over and over. It makes me look at the world a little differently, which may one of the highest compliments for an artist.

Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather

The ride back to Santa Fe was something under four hundred miles. The weather alternated between blinding sand-storms and brilliant sunlight. The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, --and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

I admit that my enjoyment of this book is enhanced by a love of Northern New Mexico. Willa Cather has included many of the great places in this area which continue to lend to the mystique of New Mexico. It lives up to its title as the land of enchantment. And what could be more enchanting that seeing New Mexico through the eyes of a French-born missionary in the 1800s. As hard as life was with thousand mile horseback rides through snow-covered canyons, Cather leaves one wanting to experience this world so different from the rest of America.

The book is very sympathetic to the local people--Mexicans, Indians, and the early white settlers. While the title might lead one to belief that the story will center around the church, the author portrays the wonderful spirit and community feeling amongst the local people. It is a simple world where goodness lives in the hearts of people with simple tastes. A great book to read on a trip to New Mexico or a trip anywhere.

The Plague - Albert Camus

Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.
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They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for and sometimes attain, it is human love. But for those others who aspired beyond and above the human individual toward something they could not even imagine, there had been no answer.

A great piece of literature which reads as well today, and possibly better, as when it was written sixty years ago. A plague enters a North African town in modern times resulting in its quarantine from the rest of the world. The people and the town are stripped of normal routines and relationships as death and isolation take their tolls.

Camus writes beautifully and evokes emotions and introspection. He raises many questions about the foundations of society. The town and its people are suddenly taken out of time and what results is all forms of human nature. Camus creates a very real and believable world within a world where he expertly examines human nature. A great book which should be on all must-read lists.