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no one asked but I wanna talk about my favorite books of 2020 (a thread):
7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This dude (Raskolnikov) kills his pawn broker and then starts losing his shit bc he's afraid of getting caught so ur just like watching him go insane then u have Dostoyevsky hating on rich people and the nihilist movement. It's great
6. Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov. Basically, this man moves from Russia to the USA and becomes a professor. Essentially, it's about alienation. Nabokov's prose is infused with so much irony which he uses to mock academia. Below is a paragraph that captures alienation so fucking well
5. Metamorphoses by Ovid. I got into Classic literature and Greek/Roman mythology this year and I know it's been around for agessss but this was such a pleasure to read. David Raeburn's translation is beautiful also this kickstarted my obsession with the myth of Icarus
4. Amulet by Roberto Bolaño. This book is whack. This woman, who calls herself the Mother of Mexican Poetry, is locked for 12 days in a university's lavatory and it's like is she hallucinating? is she not? There are moments when time ceases to exist. It's like a fever dream
3. The Tunnel by Ernesto Sabato. This painter who's so pretentious and alienated meets a woman who's the only one to notice this minor detail in his painting and he's like omg we're soul mates, becomes obsessed with her and ends up murdering her. It's his account of that murder
2. Água Viva by Clarice Lispector. Someone described Lispector's work as "beware it's not literature; it's witchcraft". This book is poetry? prose? meditations? who knows. Idk if this makes sense but u know how we have thoughts that we can't word, theyre more like sensations-
that's what Água Viva feels like: the closest we'll get to putting those thoughts into words (also água viva means 'living water' which is a perfect title for this book imo) there's a paragraph about mirrors that I can't get out of my head
1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márque. Ngl I'm always kind of wary of books that are academically acclaimed bc they're often pretentious but I randomly decided to read this and I can't even explain why I loved it so here's just my goodreads review of it
