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imagine you’re cleaning a room
Imagine you’re cleaning a room, and you kill a cockroach with the door of a wardrobe… What would you do next? (A) keep cleaning the room?, or (B) think about your reason to exist? Or do both things belong to the same process readingthisweek Back to my Brazilian Literature project, I just started reading A PAIXÃO SEGUNDO G.H. (“The Passion According to G.H.”), by Clarice Lispector. Written in a very difficult moment for Clarice, the book is the monologue of a woman simply identified by G.H. drawn in an existential crisis after a random episode in her life. It all starts when G.H. decides to clean her maid’s room in…
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CULTISH, book review
Have you ever seen words being used as a form of power to influence people or common words being used in a way that scared you? CULTISHby Amanda Montell First off, let me say. Amanda is not just an incredibly talented writer and language scholar, she gives me hope and evidence that the future of language and young brains are not as doomed as I thought they were. Every time we chat, I leave the conversation with new ideas, a smile on my brain, and something new to study. She has a gift I rarely see these days. Thanks to Amanda I dived into a thousand articles on the internet…
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it starts with a plane crash…
Book review. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding.
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What We See When We Read
Dear reader, You know, it’s like the pictures were projected on the pages, and the scenes and characters and worlds suddenly become clear in my head. Everything around me just disappears, and before I realize, I’m flying over the story. The words, I mean the ink and lines, they just fade out, and I hear the narrative and dialogues, I see through the paper, and it’s like I’m over a hill, or I’m a fly on a scene, I’m inside a mirror, I’m a lamp, or the button of a shirt. You know what I mean? There’s this book called What We See When We Read, by Peter Mendelsund. You…
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How to read and why
“It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgements and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest.” Harold Bloom The book is How To Read and Why. Harold Bloom starts by advocating for deep reading. Reading classics or reading great works that enrich our culture and mind is basically the reason we should read. Then Bloom goes through the works and authors he believes to be the best for this quest, this adventure and journey of reading…
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The whole world is an enigma
“I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.” Umberto Eco, in Foucault’s Pendulum It all starts with a man hiding in a museum, a friend in need, and files of a word processor in a computer. A few pages later, we’ve already embarked on a perfectly crafted page-turner thriller that has semiotics, secret societies, religious and historical mysteries of mankind, and nonsensical conspiracy theories as the main characters. This book is for readers who can laugh at philosophical jokes, chuckle when Templars are compared…
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Why read the classics?
A classic does not necessarily teach us something that we did not know already; sometimes, we discover in classic something which we had always known (or had always thought we knew) but did not realize that the classic text had said it first. Italo Calvino “Why Read the Classics?” is a short essay written by Italo Calvino and first published on L’Espresso in 1981. It’s a provocation and elegant advocacy for reading those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading…’ In the book that begins with this essay and other essays he wrote of great classics of the world’s literature, Calvino presents his definitions…
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Macunaíma, the hero of our people
It’s said that Mario de Andrade wrote Macunaíma in six days in Araraquara (a city in the countryside near São Paulo), lying on a hammock, like the hero of his story would be in many scenes of the book. Although this novel is the fruit of years of studies of the Brazilian culture in every corner of the country, when I read that he wrote it in six days and thought that I’ve been trying to write my way simpler dystopian literary fiction for seven years and that I also have everything in my head, I just thought… yea, f you, Mario de Andrade. *laughs* I’m kidding. He was a…
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If on a winter’s night a traveler
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Italo Calvino, in If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler Actually, you’re about to begin reading my review of a book written by Italo Calvino, so do relax and concentrate, but forget what you expect from a book because this one is nothing like you’ve read before. Before I talk about it, between the lines… Why should you read this book? — Because it’s different. Because you…
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Backlands, by Euclides da Cunha
The land. The men. The battle. And then there was a sea of blood in the backlands. I’m trying to digest rereading this book after a long time. Even with better knowledge and background these days I still can’t decide what I feel about what happened in my country and what’s been repeating and repeating and repeating. Not the kind of repetition I encouraged this week. As part of my Brazilian literature project, I read Backlands (“Os Sertões”), by Euclides da Cunha, this week. This book is a beautfyl literary narrative and a history book about a racially diverse land, its people, and their massacre, or one of the deadliest…