Thanks to Goodreads, I know that I read 39 books in 2017. Too few? A lot? I know there are many superreaders I'm not even close to reach in their ability to absorb books (100 books per year? Whaaaaat?), but I guess it's not that bad either. I know people who read at most the vacuum cleaner manual or the public city hall announcements. And they are perfectly fine and happy.
For me, books are a necessary part and contributor to my overall happiness in life. They have always meant an opportunity to live in stories different from my real one, at least for a moment. As I grew older, I developed a certain openness and I read as well weird books which make me suffer until the last page. (Yep, I'm one of those people who need to finish stuff in order to say it's crappy. What if a particularly bad book changes completely in its last ten pages and becomes amazing or even THE book of my life?) I'm not too fond of reviews, I can't bring myself to read them, the strict format quote from the book - facts about the author copied from Wikipedia - another quote from the book - the reviewer's conclusions what the author might have wanted to say irritates me intensively.
I like sustainability in reading and prefer e-books or borrowing books over buying them. I read when life's busy, when my head hurts and my eyes get stuck on the blank spaces between the words. I read also when I have more time on my hands and when there's time to reflect.
Now the time has come to write a bit about books. Voilà! These are my book-related - good and bad - highlights of 2017.
The Mixed-Feelings Book
Concentrated awkwardness was what I felt while reading Mischling by Affinity Konar. Wiki-facts meet the Young-Adult genre and poof!, a controversial book is created. Many readers praised, many others called this book torture porn.
For sure the author made a lot of effort and did a lot of hard work researching (and indeed, she used almost every google-able fact and detail about living and surviving or dying in the Auschwitz extermination camp). I honestly don't believe she wrote the book with bad intentions. And she even used a lyrical style in order to bring some poetry into a topic as far away from beauty as possible.
The reviews of this book are polarizing. Many readers consider this book impactful and strong, but for me, reality remains the most brutal and heart-breaking story to be told about this utter darkness of humankind. This fictional story of the twins Stasha and Pearl felt like an inadequate banality in comparison to reality, to facts, to real tragedies.
Regarding such a difficult motive, I'll stick to non-fiction.
The Disappointing Book
When I was younger, I used to be pretty judgmental about other people's reading choices. You prefer THAT garbage over Russian classics? I wouldn't even TOUCH those pages!
Now I'm quite tolerant, not raising eyebrows or judging people based on their choices of books. As I said, each person has their own preferences in life, in work, in travel, in books. To each their own.
What still fills me up with skepticism are motivational and self-help books. First, they make you feel you are missing something and you need to improve or change. Be more productive, trick your body into sleeping less, quit your job. They are written very catchily and by someone who achieved what they are selling via the book. (Who cares that the other 99.9% who tried failed brutally - these people will never write books about their failure, unless they succeed in the end.)
As I like to read out of my comfort zone sometimes (sorry, Dostoyevsky, you're not always my chosen one!), I picked one of the most popular and praised life-guide-books, Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon. Half of this small and thin book are pictures and in the other half, the author is recycling ideas and quotes of others. Or - why not? - he recycles himself.
I didn't have big expectations to begin with, but... Whom this book was supposed to help in any kind of way, I don't know...
The Best Book Moment
I have two.
The first one being my friend Alba asking me for book-recommendations. I swear, I have never worked on and have never been this proud of an Excel-sheet in my whole life!
The second was me being finally able to make it to the Prague Writer's Festival. The day before the event in the beautiful hall of the Senate I picked up my book-prize in the Goethe Institute. They had a competition going on, where you had to guess who will win the German Book Prize and I was selected from the correct answers. (Call me Nerdstradamus, baby!) The next day I was already seeing the author, Robert Menasse, at the festival. His book was in my bag.
After he was interviewed and after he read from his book, Menasse disappeared. I left the event as there was a social gathering after the literature-part and I was not to keen on small-talking with strangers. After grabbing my coat and leaving the building, I noticed Menasse standing outside in the misty rain, with a cigarette in one hand and with a glass of champagne in the other. I've never been a collector of autographs, but how else was I supposed to start a conversation with a writer enjoying his solitary moment?
That's when I ended up standing in the cold, talking to a real writer, a good writer, a person making a living with writing words and populating pages with sentences. A person paying his bills by doing meaningful work. We talked about his new book and how a Berlin-based alternative theater will read out loud his book, the whole book. All. Night. Long.
If I would have been a fan of the Backstreet Boys back in the days and if I had met Nick Carter, that's I guess how I felt when meeting and talking to this writer.
The Book That Hit Me Hard
I'm not going into details here. A Little Life is something hypnotizing, strong and it will absorb you completely. It will break your heart, pull out the pieces one after the other straight from your chest, throw them on the ground, make a nice little pile out of it, stomp on it with Dr Martens boots. Once it's finished, you collect the soft shapeless mass from the ground, asking the book - hey, and what should I do now?
The book will stare back emptily in your eyes, turn around and walk away.
The Book with Wit and Charisma
Accidentally, I once clicked on an article with the list of the funniest books to read. I don't know if it was the author's favorites list or something more general, but among the books listed, there was as well The Break by Marian Keyes.
It's a charmingly written story with a high readability factor. (Fun fact: some people got sick from too much food and drinks during Christmas. I was dizzy from too much uninterrupted reading of this book.) It's nothing Danielle Steel-like, it's not a book-version of a romantic B-movie, the characters are graspable and you can vividly imagine them standing in front of you in flesh and blood.
This is not a super-deep philosophical elaboration, but a catchy real-life story, ideal to read during the last days of the year. The flow of the book is captivating, the style light and fresh, the wit present in both the lighter and darker passages of the book.
The First Book of 2018
Saving the best for last or saving the last for... first? Picking the second option, I saved the last book of the Neapolitan Novels series by Elena Ferrante for the first days of 2018.
Elena Ferrante was still mega-trending when I was in Italy last September. Until this very moment I regret not buying that tote bag with Ferrante Fever printed on it in disco-robotic neon letters. I even had the crazy idea of buying the entire series in Italian, which would have been - I admit - not such a great idea in the end. Luckily I realized this still in Italy, not while dusting off those books back in Prague.
I postponed reading The Story of the Lost Child for months! You know those absurd deals you sometimes make with yourself... This was my "You Fulfill The 2017 Goodreads Challenge" reward...
I'm looking forward to wrap up this books series and finally form a conclusive opinion about this Italian collection of noise, dirt, smell and feminism compressed into four books. Finalmente!
You've seen it, you've read about it - my 2017 was a year full of reading, of great pages and unforgettable characters, of time flying by thanks to the talents of some writers. I stuck to my preference for sustainable reading, for supporting books circling around instead of standing on my shelves. And I lived in many cool stories. At least for a moment.
May 2018 bring us only good pages to read!
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