There’s this thing about self-help books: they only have one good idea. The rest is mostly fluff.
You know, punch the damn keys to reach the necessary word count.
This book, sadly, is no exception.
But the main idea is brilliant. And makes this book well worth a try.
What’s that idea you ask?
Well… self-awareness. Continue reading Book Review: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
Cormac McCarthy is a genius. One of the best contemporary American writers. Of course, he’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Which is that, you ask?
Well, in case you haven’t seen the brilliant movie adapted from this novel, he’s in the business of depicting life as a series of strange coincidences that have fatal consequences. I just made that one up, and I think it sounds clever. No. Really. He writes about drugs and murders and the desert. Maybe this sounds better.
Don’t know what else to say about this book. Some guy finds a briefcase filled with two million dollars worth of drug money. Everyone’s looking for him. All hell breaks loose. Stuff like that.
It is written in McCarthy’s style, which is impossible to describe or define. It’s just brilliant. The words flow effortlessly. He has moments of poetry. Fantastic dialogue. Lots of sarcasm. And quite a bit of philosophy.
No Country for Old Men is a must read.
From the book’s description:
Unfinished at the time of his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon is a story of doomed love set against the extravagance of America’s booming film industry. The studio lot looks like ‘thirty acres of fairyland’ the night that a mysterious woman stands and smiles at Monroe Stahr, the last of the great Hollywood princes. Enchanted by one another, they begin a passionate but hopeless love affair, starting with a fast-moving seduction as slick as a scene from one of Stahr’s pictures. The romance unfolds, frame by frame, watched by Cecilia, a thoroughly modern girl who has taken her lessons in sentiment and cynicism from all the movies she has seen. Her buoyant humor and satirical eye perfectly complement Fitzgerald’s panorama of Hollywood at its most lavish and bewitching.
If the great Francis Scott Fitzgerald would have finished writing this novel, it would have been his masterpiece. Yes, it would have been better than The Great Gatsby, which is my favorite novel of all time, and the only piece of writing I’ve been reading once a year since I was seventeen. Besides Dune. Continue reading Book Review: The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Some might say the trickiest part is actually selling the book. Or writing it? Opinions differ. But what really sells a book? What marketing tool? What recipe to follow? Is there a recipe?
Well, let’s analyze one of my favorite novels, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, and hope that I’ll be able to offer some insight as to how people decide to buy a book. Continue reading What Really Sells a Book?
Remember this commercial?
Well, the truth is that there will always be rebels. The crazy ones. The ones who are cursed with knowledge of possible futures, rather than the known hell of the present.
And literature has its fair share of rebels, of characters who don’t think outside the box, but they think like there’s no box. Outsiders, weirdos, eccentrics, all of them are allowed a bit more freedom within the confines of books than they ever were allowed in real life.
So, yeah, here are four books about rebels. For rebels. Continue reading Four Books about Rebels
From Amazon.com:
A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers’s best stories, including her beloved novella “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose café serves as the town’s gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes “Wunderkind,” McCullers’s first published story written when she was only seventeen about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist. Newly reset and available for the first time in a handsome trade paperback edition, The Ballad of the Sad Café is a brilliant study of love and longing from one of the South’s finest writers.
There’s something about these stories that makes you empathise with the human condition; we are who we are when we can help it, when there’s nothing else to be but ourselves.
The characters that inhabit these little stories are what one would define as misfits, rebels. But that’s the magic of stories: we realize that we are all made of the same stuff. We are all human. We are all the same. Different, but the same. At the same time. The paradox of human nature.
What I am trying to say is that these misfits feel the same emotions as we do, and they teach us so much about ourselves, our own fights and defeats, and also make us realize that oftentimes what sets us apart must also make us feel lonely/live a life of solitude.
A must-read, The Ballad of the Sad Café contains stories about other people, stories about the kind of people that we might never encounter in real life, but those stories teach us so much about ourselves.
