It all gets real

Still life

Perception. I think it's Thomas King who talks about people rushing through life in The Truth About Stories. Life doesn't rush by you. And then I guess there's the opposite: sitting, waiting for life to happen. A friend once said, "It's like you're sitting at a stop sign, waiting for the light to change."

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin describes a world whose technological progress may seem to be at a standstill if only observed for a relatively small amount of time. She then reminds us that progress can be a matter of perception:

Compare the torrent and the glacier. Both get where they are going.

Image Source: Dru!

Latin American Literature

A couple of reading suggestions from my good friend who teaches Latin American literature in Peru:

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano.

The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa. I've read The War of the End of the World, which was great, so I'm looking forward to reading more. According to my friend The Time of the Hero is "...the novel that made him famous, and opened the doors for the Latin American boom of literature in the 60's."

Reading List

Now that I am finished my course, I can read whatever I want again. One of the words that came up regularly in the course was bildungsroman: a novel of personal development. I was reading up on it while I was studying and came across a list of books that falls under this category. There are some real gems on the list; a few of which I've read, many authors and books I've been curious about and more that are entirely new to me. It could take a lifetime to read all these. Here they are:

Pre 1930

• the 13th century Hrafnkels saga
• Louisa May Alcott, Little Women
• Jane Austen, Emma
• Leslie Barringer, Gerfalcon
• L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
• Charlotte Brontë, Villette
• Frances Burney, Evelina
• Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Netochka Nezvanova
• Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
• Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (novel)
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
• George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
• Jeffrey Farnol, The Amateur Gentleman
• Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
• Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship
• Maxim Gorky, In the World
• Maxim Gorky, My Universities
• Hermann Hesse, Demian
• Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
• Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf
• James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
• Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
• Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
• Robert Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless
• Daniel Owen, Rhys Lewis
• Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
• Leo Tolstoy, Childhood/Boyhood/Youth trilogy
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter
• Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
• Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

Link

Post 1930

• Sherman Alexie, Smoke Signals (film)
• Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
• Paul Auster, Moon Palace
• Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road
• Pío Baroja, El árbol de la ciencia (Tree of Knowledge)
• Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
• William Boyd, Any Human Heart
• Camilo Jose Cela, La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte)
• Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• Leonard Cohen, The Favourite Game
• Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
• Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One and Four Fires
• Abha Dawesar, Babyji
• Samuel R. Delany, The Tale of Gorgik, Empire Star, Phallos
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
• Janet Fitch, White Oleander
• John Fowles, Daniel Martin
• Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
• Peter Goldsworthy, Maestro
• Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song
• Shannon Hale, Princess Academy
• Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
• Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
• Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
• John Irving, The Cider House Rules
• John Knowles, A Separate Peace
• Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird
• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• Doris Lessing, Children of Violence Series (Martha Quest, A Proper Marriage, A Ripple from the Storm, Landlocked, The Four-Gated City)
• Hisham Matar, In The Country of Men
• Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing
• Michael McClure, The Mad Cub
• Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
• Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
• Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
• Frank O'Connor, An Only Child
• Sylvia Plath, the Bell Jar
• Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City
• Terry Pratchett, Mort
• Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
• John Ringo and David Weber, Empire of Man series
• J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth
• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
• Jack Vance, Maske: Thaery
• Tom Wolfe, I Am Charlotte Simmons
• Richard Wright, Black Boy
• William Maxwell,The Folded Leaf

Link

Image Source: callumscott2