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Showing posts from December 29, 2019

Success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed.

Looking back to Manarola, the path from Manarola to Corniglia, Cinque Terre National Park, April 2017. So I managed to read 112 books for 2019. Somewhat ahead of my goal of 80 , and about 110 more than TV shows that I saw. The highlights? Well, I gave five stars to the following: Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (dogfighting and Hurricane Katrina) Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett (a wonderfully dark 1980s Aussie suburban coming of age novel) Jarett Kobek's blistering I Hate the Internet (Vonnegut for the post-ironic age) Andreï Makine's dreamlike The Archipelago of Another Life (a chase across the Siberian taiga at the tail-end of Stalin's rule);  Żanna Słoniowska's complex The House with the Stained-Glass Window (a wonderfully translated cross-cultural, multi-generational tale of the women in one particular family in Lviv);  This Is Not a Novel by Jennifer Johnston (an original novel framed around fragments of memory and the ways with which parent