Book of Clouds

I bought this book by Chloe Aridjis in one of my favourite bookshops in Ghent for ten Euros. Not much for a book, but then again, it only counts little more than two hundred pages. It caught my eye (despite its slimness) because of the lovely colour of the cover: a dark blue with big white swirly letters.
The storyline is fairly simple: it’s about a girl from Mexico City in her twenties who is staying in Berlin for a couple of years. She’s quite a loner, and she reminds me a bit of Amelie Poulin: she notices details no one ever seems to notice, and she’s not the best at interacting with others.
In the six months she shares with us (written in first person past tense- yay!) she tells us how she got a job working as a transcriber for an old professor, who sends her around town to do interviews for him, and how she meets Jonas, who is fascinated with clouds.
 
“I used to pretend to keep a cloud garden, which I fed daily. And when the clouds were big and strong I would unfasten them from their roots and let them drift upward, into the sky, and…”
“And what?”
“Well, I would unfasten them from their roots, but only after months of nurture, during which they prepared for the big ascension, the main event in their lives. Aerial histories were recounted, wind currents and nephological formations explained, navigational skills honed…”[…] “Once in the sky, however, the cloud had to accept that its life would be ephemeral. At best it’d become a rain-laden nimbus and depart in a thunderstorm- and, to everyone but dreamers and meteorologists, it would be indistinguishable from its colleagues.”

There is no big event in the book. No quest, no romance. It’s just the girl walking around the city and noticing things mostly… But because of the atmosphere (pun intended) of the book I couldn’t put it down. When she is in a basement with no lights she panics, and I felt claustrophobic just by reading it. And when she leaves her apartment, her mixed feelings of nostalgia and sudden boldness and saying goodbyes are so relatable that I was sad when the book was over. When she stares at interesting people or goes up to talk with them, I feel curious and jealous, because I often feel like I want to do the same things if I wasn’t such a stranger/danger girl. And when she sees Hitler wearing a red scarf on the metro I laugh; but haven’t we all thought we recognized someone in real life who is in fact long dead? (For instance, one of our customers at the library is the spitting image of captain Haddock – including hat and beard, except his beard is white.)

This was definitely one of the better books I’ve read this year, and if you happen to see a slim, dark blue cover on your next shopping spree, I would recommend you giving it a chance.

Until next time,

Bejoes

Internet vs. Books

Don’t laugh; it’s a struggle. I am a very lazy person, and when I come home from my part-time job (those four/eight hours of constant work! Moan! Sigh!) Or from wherever, I usually don’t feel like I want to indulge in the mental exercise reading can be. (I’m looking at you, Shakespeare.) What I do feel like is switching as many levers down in my head as possible and play some minecraft or scroll through 9gag, curled up in a blanket with one arm sticking out so I can reach the mouse.
Granted, not all books are like that. Some fantasy novels just absorb all my thoughts (Name of the Wind, Lord of the Rings, Robin Hobb’s many trilogies) but such books are hard to come by, and since I’m using this book-a-week challenge to broaden my literary horizons it’s unlikely that I’ll experience this addictive absorbing feeling often. (Although I heard a rumour I might be getting a fantasy novel for my birthday that’s supposed to be really good. You know who you are!)
I guess this is why many nine-to-five adults still read books like Harry Potter or the Hunger Games, although why anyone would enjoy a book written in first person present tense is beyond me, and why I’ve seen several mothers take a copy of twilight for themselves during my shifts at the library. And although I wouldn’t say no to reading Harry Potter for the fiftieth time (probably not such an exaggerated number as it ought to be) I feel like I need to read these other, older books that are more… literature-ey. Like the Shakespeare, Kafka, the Oscar Wilde. I don’t get nearly as much instant entertainment out of them as I do out of these books for teens, but they teach me what works or doesn’t in a book, and how books can be Different. With these books I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time, like I feel when I’m sitting in front of my laptop. Some books open worlds beyond my own ridiculously huge imagination, or make me ask questions, or make me see things from a different point of view. Sometimes I’m confronted with a quote that’ll pop back up in my mind when I’ll need it most; for example, when I was terrified of my first driver instructor, I kept thinking about Frodo’s words when Boromir offers to take the ring, to take the burden of his shoulders. “I’m afraid. Simply afraid.” – It didn’t mean he was about to quit.

And I get it, it’s all in how you use your internet connection. Going in full foetal mode isn’t what it’s supposed to be all about. Internet isn’t all about yogscast and memes, it’s also about millions of articles on Wikipedia, communities, a platform for your creativity.
It’s just hard to say no to the easy-to-please part of my brain. (nucleus accumbens, you whore.) One quick fix of cats falling down and looking quizzically because they’re not used to being  ungraceful, that’s what I promise, and then I’ll be productive. But it never happens. One video turns into three and a link to a .gif on tumblr or whatever of pets wearing sunglasses or tortoises humping footwear, and suddenly it’s one in the morning and you’re wondering if you can afford a mandolin.

Derp

This is why this challenge is doing me a world of good. It forces me have to make time for reading, plan which books I am about to read next, think about when I should write my reviews, and makes me spend more time researching opinions on Librarything . I try to make a habit out of posting something every Thursday, however I go climbing on some Thursdays and by the time I’m done with the workout my arms have turned into quivering jelly and I réally can’t do anything but scroll. So I write reviews as soon as I’ve finished a book, and, eh, review my reviews when I post them. This means I am being productive, reading a lot more (I’m about two or three books ahead of schedule right now so I can take more than a week to read bigger books) and reading more critically, bookmarking quotes I can use for the blog and comparing what I’m reading with other books. It’s a perfect harmony!

link to yogscast on youtube

Until next time,

Bejoes

Absurdistan

What? Non-fiction?
Well, it couldn’t hurt.

Absurdistan is a book written by Eric Campbell, an Australian journalist who decided to work abroad in 1995, and ended up in Moscow, Beijing and the middle-east. I decided to read it because one of my customers at work had just read it and he told me it was really good; I leafed through it and liked the writing style.
The beginning is quite thrilling: it’s a prologue where Eric is wounded in a terrorist attack in Iraq. The rest of the book he explains how he ended up there, but also explaining a lot about the situation in the places he visited, places who were usually at war.
I found that I kept forgetting this was the real world I was reading about whilst I read this book. Some of the situations are just so unbelievably cruel – the work camps in northern Russia, war in Chechnya, Kosovo, secrecy and censorship in China,…

this is a excerpt  from when Eric was in Macedonia in 1999, when the Albanians and Serbian, well, disagreed with each other about Kosovo, to put it mildly.
(I apologise for my bad translation in advance)

… the Macedonian units enclosed a field near the border. The fugitives all had to find a place within the fence. They had no choice; they sat down on the ground with the meagre possessions they had managed to save. Everyone thought the camp was established to speed up registration. But the day went by and no one was let out…
…trains came and went. In two days there were more than 30.000 people in the camp. The UN fugitive organisation, UNHCR, predicted that another 200.000 people were on their way…
…there was no shelter, no water, no lavatories and no food. It was April and it was hot, the fugitives were thirsty. Because of a lack of toilets the fugitives just did their business wherever they could. We could smell the stench that was caused by that. The fugitives were only twenty metres away, but there was nothing we could do…

So yeah, it made me realise how ignorant I have been about the world. Granted, I was seven years old at the time, but I feel like these are things I should know more about.
Luckily, the book isn’t all woe. We meet Jack, a wannabe hero from America, people who still have hope after years of protesting, and Eric himself finds a wife and has a son along the road (figuratively). Those personal touches and impressions make the book much more readable – even though they can be quite horrible as well.

… I had a terrible toothache and gobbled painkillers to stay on my feet. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went to a dentist [in Moscow]. He told me a wisdom tooth had to be pulled out immediately. Five hours later I was home, heavily drugged, still in pain. The dentist called: ‘you probably noticed we accidentally cut of a piece out of your tongue, but you don’t have to worry.’
I hadn’t noticed, but hey, good to know. ‘We also accidentally drilled a hole in the bone’, he continued, ‘so that could stay painful for a while. You can always come by again if you have any issues’…

Should you read it? Well, I don’t know. If you read to escape from the real world, probably not. But if you read to cure ignorance, then yes, you should read this.

Until next time,

Bejoes.