Thursday, January 23, 2014

Forgive me for I shall document



Aside from movies, books are my favorite things to snack on. In between my Oscars craze (3 titles left to watch: "Nebraska", "Philomena", and "Gravity"); a Woody Allen binge (close to half a dozen movies in the past couple of weeks--my favorite of the lot being the hilarious "Love and Death"); and hunting for Joaquin Phoenix movies (I had "Walk The Mile" for lunch yesterday), I also read.

These are the books I've read these past few weeks:

The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
Amrita by Banana Yoshimoto
Play it as it Lays by Joan Didion
Fates Worse Than Death by Kurt Vonnegut
The King of Nothing to Do by Luis Katigbak (all in all, I've read this collection three times)

I tried to restrain myself from listing down the books I read during the final months of 2013, but I lost. So, off the top of my head, here:

In the Country of Last Things by Paul Auster
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon
Poems (1962 - 2012) by Louise Gluck
The Double by Jose Saramago
Blue Nights by Joan Didion
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Here by Wislawa Szymborska

Right now, I'm reading Neil Gaiman's American Gods and 158 pages into the novel, I still can't decide if I like it, or not. Excepting Smoke and Mirrors, my feelings for Neil Gaiman's writing tend to be ambivalent. It took me a while to get the hang of Neverwhere, and it's taking me forever to finish this one.

As it is, I'm itching to move on to either Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. Decisions have to be made.

Meanwhile, I shall nap.