The One With 10000000 Books

I seldom make any resolutions. However, for some reason, at the beginning of this passing year, I challenged myself (on Goodreads) to read 128 books. Maybe I thought it would be the way to bring my reading habits up to speed again, after a long period of degeneration...?

Anyway - it worked! And it worked beautifully! It was difficult sometimes, but I have managed.
What surprised me, though, was that the hardest part was not to make time for reading - the challange was to actually find, in a short period of time, so many books I really wanted to read.

What helped:

• audiobooks + commuting // I spend plenty of time in buses, but I can only read in trams or trains, unfortunately; listening to books turned out to be a solution;
• e-books // sometimes easier to get, more available than a traditional book
• comicbooks // provide long series that you can simply follow, instead of figuring out what to read next.

Stay tuned.

The One Where You Get To Meet The Delightful And Utterly Fabulous Miss Phryne Fisher

I'm concealing a lot of things. That's what a lady does.

The Fabulous Miss Phryne Fisher in Queen of the Flowers by Kerry Greenwood

I have not managed to lay my hands on any book of the Phryne Fisher series yet. In fact, I had no idea there was any, until I started watching the tv Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries series based on the books.
And what a show it is! Fabulous - as its heroine. Brilliant, glamorous, ravishing, dashing, colourful, funny, witty - all that and more.
And, apparently, moving. First time in I-don't-know-how-many-years I actually felt touched.

Stay tuned.

The One In The Book Fortress

Visiting a library I got books from almost all departments (good thing they all have separate limits):

• adutls'
• chldren's
• comic books'
• foreign languages'
• youth's (despite the fact that I am not really allowed to borrow books from there, since I am neither youth nor any pedagogical sciences student)

And a new library card, even though my old one was still in a good shape.

Incidentally, I made at least one person's day better on that occasion - a librarian smiled looking on my 'book lover' pendant and said she should get one too.

The most successful book hunt in ages.

And the best part is I do have time to read all that - Summer is here!
(Btw, is it weird that my dream holidays do not include me laying in a sand fortress on a beach, but me surrounded by a book fortress anywhere...?)

Stay tuned.

The One Where You're 2 Books (1%) Ahead Of Schedule

- What are his powers?
- He reads. He reads everything.

Fables by Bill Willingham

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I have started reading James Joyce's Ulysses, but not finished yet.
I managed to get a copy - barely, since there are lots of them in the library, but most of them constantly borrowed...
Also, this is too busy a time for me.
So I have not kept the resolution I made last year.
But I have not abandoned the task - just need some prolongation on the deadline.

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At the beginning of this year I challenged myself to read 128 books. And, surprisingly enough, this whole challenge idea works for me. Most of all, it gives me motivation to look for new titles and check out new series.

Stay tuned.

The One With Where 10 Books Moves Out, 10 Moves In

Another book exchange in Cracow (I had already been to one before).
Actually, it is the whole series. They organise such event one a month in the city centre.
It works a tad differently: you get the ticket with the number of books you have brought and you are allowed to take out the amount of books up to that number. It you take less, the ones that are left are going to be passed on to the library.

Rip Van Rinkle, a collection of children's classics by Washington Irving (in English!), seems to be the most promising part of my today's haul.

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The moment I was closing the door behind me, leaving to catch a bus, I thought I could go by bike as well. And so I did.

First time a sign like this came in handy. More than once, actually.
It turns out there are quite a lot of them in the city centre. And thank heavens for that!

Stay tuned.

The One On The Bench

Talking to a girl who - with regard to the hunger for books - seemed like a young me. Only less reticent. Much less.

Girl: Did C.S. Lewis get a Nobel Prize?
Karo: Did he? The Nobel Prize in Literature?
Girl: I don't know. But if he didn't - he should have. He was a genius!

Stay tuned.

The One On Bloomsday

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

Walt Disney

It is difficult to chase your dream, though, when you are still not sure what this dream actually is.
So I guess I should start figuring it out...

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I solemnly swear that by the next Bloomsday I will have read James Joyce's Ulysses.

Stay tuned.

The One With The Statue That Wasn't There

I had been wondering if I could find a theme for spending a weekend in Poznań and it finally dawned on me: if in Paris or Rome you can follow the characters from the books by Dan Brown (grrr, I call him: Umberto Eco for the birds), then in Poznań you can search for all the locations from Jeżycjada, a series of youth novels by Małgorzata Musierowicz. And I was right to suspect that this plan would get approval from the friend I was visiting.
We followed some guides, lists and maps found on the web. However, neither of us remembered many details, so there where moments when we did not exactly know what we were looking for. At some point, wandering around the city, we tried to find the monument of a deep-sea diver. We went back and forth, but did not manage to localise it. There was an option that there was no staue at all and it was only a literary fiction; but that was highly unlikely, since Musierowicz always writes about things that do exist. Alternatively, the statue had been removed or somebody had made a mistake placing it on the map. After getting back home, we checked and found out there had actually never been any statue - one little girl used to put flowers underneath a fire hydrant and call it a deep-sea diver...

In general, Poznań tuned out to be a charming city. Before the visit I had not had any great expectations. Yes, Poznań is the capital of Greater Poland and it is a big city, and an old one too. But nobody ever praises it, everyone always talks about other places e.g. Wrocław or Gdańsk.

What I can say to describe the city accurately is that it is anything but flat. And I mean it in both literally and figuratively.
First of all, the ground is hilly. Which makes the city panorama all the more interesting. There are many spots from where you can see various areas and recognise different landmarks, and these views keep surprising you.
What I personally got crazy about were the historical tenement houses. They contribute greatly to the city unique character. They are marvellous and what I find extraordinary about them is that they are truly three-dimensional: so many balconies, roof-towers, bay-windows and all kind of architectural ornaments, slopes and curves, that they seem to be more like living creatures, growing on their own, not just artificial, man-made buildings. Moreover, they are everywhere - not only in the strict centre, but also in the neighbouring districts - and each of them is one of a kind.
The main square is very colourful. Truth to tell, the whole city is.
And the number of fastfood restaurants is very low, you can hardly spot any place of this kind. Instead there are plenty of small cafés, pubs and bistros.
What is interesting the oldest part of the city is not the main square and the area around, but the district on the other side of the river, where the first cathedral in Poland was build and where the first kings were buried.

The full photo-journal can be found, as always, on Picasa.

The one, huge obstacle that currently makes it difficult to enjoy Poznań is that the city is going to host the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship. Which means that at this moment it is one, large construction area and a work in progess. Still, this commotion is going to be over soon and didn't make me like the city less.

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I do love travelling by train. You get a few hours of undisturbed solitude. You can read, listen to music or simply watch the landscape changing. And there is absolutely nothing to distract you. I believe tranquillity is the word best describing my state of mind on such occasions.

Stay tuned.

The One With The Spring Epidemic

Yep, there is something in the air, definitely.
People around me are getting smitten, married, pregnant etc.
Days are getting longer. The skirts I wear are getting shorter.

Yesterday I spent a few hours at the riverbanks, beneath the Wawel Castle - reading a book^*, listening to music^** or simply staring at the waters running and glistening in the sun. Such a lazy day - despite the fact that I visited four different, nonadjacent city districts to run some errands.

Today I personally felt the scent of Spring. I recognised it the moment I caught it.
And I can still feel it. Actually, I cannot stop - it keeps haunting me...

Stay tuned.

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^* I was passing by a discount bookshop and just could not help stopping by. I should choose my path more considerably, bearing in mind that I am simply not able to resist the temptation that a half-price (or less) new book means to me. Especially, like this time, the book I had been thinking of for a long time and was really anxious to finally lay my hands on.

^**I thought I had found something new I liked, but it turned out Jónsi was the lead vocalist of Sigur Rós. So it only confirmed the hypothesis that I had a thing for Scandinavian music.

The One With The Biggest Disappointment Ever

D'Artagnan: Journal d'un cadet

Well, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration... Or mabe not...
Anyhow, I stand by my opinion that every variation on Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers is better than the original book itself - may it be a movie, may it be, as this time, a comic book. As much as I love historical novels, I passionately hate this particular one.

D'Artagnan: Cadet's Journal by Nicolas Juncker is based on the Dumas' book, the one we are all familiar with. Or, at least, we are familiar with its countless film adaptations.
Some of the movies based on The Three Musketeers are quite good, some are terrible. The one from 1973, staring Michael York as D'Artagnan (plus Richard Chamberlain, Charlton Heston, Geraldine Chaplin, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee...), is my personal favourite. It was the first one that did not treat the subject so very seriously, but was not over the top with humour either - already a comedy, not yet a parody.
There are many more, however, and I have got my own system to distinguish one from another - namely by the way Constance de Bonancieux dies: she gets shot, stabbed, poisoned (as far as I recall, this one conforms to the book), strangled with rosary beads, etc... and there is even the case where she survives (sic!).

D'Artagnan actually existed - or rather there lived a musketeer named Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, Count d'Artagnan. He served at the court of Louis XIV of France, not Louis XIII, but never mind that. He was d'Artagnan's model and indeed wrote a journal. Which inspired Dumas to write his novel. Which, in turn, inspired Nicolas Juncker to create the comic. But what I am just trying to say here is that the very idea of giving the narrative form of a journal is not entirely out of the blue, not at all - in fact, it brings the whole story closer to the source.
Furthermore, making d'Artagnan's journal a comic book is a clever move - it results in an extremely efficient means to disclose the contrast between what the characters believe they do and how others perceive their actions, between what they say they did and what they actually did. As a result, we get plenty of self-explanatory jokes, which otherwise would require tons of additional paragraphs of text.
In this case, the comic book has all advantages of the book and movies and hardly any of their disadvantages. It focuses on the details that almost every film purposely overlooks: background threads e.g. private lives of secondary characters. Here, the main affairs are only mentioned in between, casually, randomly, by the way, as if they were more accident than design and only supporting the main plot.
Quite refreshing.

Stay tuned.

The One In One Room With Two Extremely Irritating Individuals For Three Days

Trying to figure out an adequate name to call my parent's new computer, I did a short survey among my friends to find out who was the most irritating popcultural character. The list includes:

• Ross, Friends
• Rachel, Friends // now that I think of it it seems like 'Ross & Rachel' as a couple are horrible as well
• Pink Panther, The Pink Panther // not sure which series, though
• Amber, the 'Cutthroat Bitch', House, M.D. // ha!
• Prince of Persia's nameless protagonist, Prince of Persia (2008 video game) // later on superseded by Klayman from The Neverhood video game
• Gaius Baltar, Battlestar Galactica // can't tell - haven't seen (yet!)
• Alvy Singer (~Woody Allen), Annie Hall // hmmm...
• Joffrey Baratheon, Game of Thrones
• Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter

Their previous machine was only irritating because it was sooo old and slow. Thuth to tell, not its fault that it hadn't been upgraded (hardware, I mean) for a few years, so it could not match the constantly increasing requirements level. Other than that, it was pretty good, reliable even. I thought it was a bit like Joey: logy, sluggish - you would always have to wait patiently, until he finally got the joke and responded.
So now it only fits that the successor becomes the 'Ross'. He's quick, but already stubborn and believes he knows better than everyone else. (But that is only due to 'cutthroat bitch' being too long and difficult, and [just] 'Amber' being to cute a name).

Stay tuned.

The One Where Karo Feels Stupid

The Prague Cemetery

(...) it's quite enough to talk about something to make it exist (...)

The book covers a similar subject as one of Eco's previous novels, Foucault pendulum - namely, the idea of conspiracy theory - but it takes a whole new perspective.
It already starts singularly - with the dissociative identity disorder of the main protagonist. Simone Simonini, has some memory leaks. Following the advice of an Austrian Jewish doctor named Fröide (yes, he means the dr Freud, but he is not aware of that at the time), Simone tries to reconstruct his memories by telling the story of his life to somebody. And, in the absence of any close friend who could be that somebody, he decides to write a diary and tell the story to himself. Soon enough, he discovers that a certain priest, Abbé Dalla Piccola, reads his diary-book while he sleeps. Moreover, the priest becomes a co-author and co-writes the diary, as he recalls the events that Simonini has repressed. Needless to say, they are in fact the same person. So they both cooperate in order to try to figure out what was the trauma that made them split.
Simonini is not a man to be liked. The narrator describes him as 'the most hateful man in the world'. He is a master forger in the employ of various secret services. He does not even care which secret service - Italian, French, German or Russian - hires him, as long as he gets paid adequately. His alter ego, Abbé Dalla Piccola is not a nice person either, but certainly more remorseful. Abbé seems to be Simonini's conscience and makes him recall the awful deeds he chose not to remember. Together they struggle to recreate the events of their past up to now. And that now means year 1897.

Well, I am no expert in the history of the 19th century Europe, so at first I got totally lost with what and who, and why... But then I remembered that the book was supposed to be the literary vision of how The Protocols of the Elders of Zion originated. What was more:

The only fictitious character in this story is the protagonist, Simone Simonini. His grandfather, Captain Simonini, is not invented (...).
All the others (except for a few incidental minor characters (...)) actually existed, and said and did what they are described as saying and doing in this novel.

At that point, I did a quick research, learnt about The Protocols and the role that Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, Maurice Joly , and others played in the process of that document invention, creation and development.
And then I really appreciated The Prague Cemetery. It all clicked. I was happy. Up untill I read the final paragraph:

The Narrator is aware that, in the fairly chaotic plot sequence of the diaries reproduced here (moving back and forth, using what cineastes call flashbacks), the reader might have difficulty in following the linear progression of events, from Simonini's birth to the end of his diaries. (...) The Narrator, to be honest, has often found it difficult finding his own way around, but feels a competent reader need not become lost in the detail and should enjoy the story just the same. However, for the benefit of the overly meticulous reader, or one who is not so quick on the uptake, here is a table that sets out the relationship between the two levels (common, in truth, to every, what they used to call "well-made," novel).

And I felt dumb again - as always when I read a novel by Umberto Eco: I feel sooo content each time I manage to figure out an intertextual affiliation; at the same time I realise that I have missed a dozen of other references and get depressed. This time I did my best to catch up, but end up being called 'incompetent', 'overly meticulous' and 'not so quick on the uptake'.
Oh, well... I bet Eco cannot programme in Haskell, so we are even.

Stay tuned.

The One With The Book Exchange

Where: Café Szafe, Cracow.

When: Sunday evenings, from time to time - the aim is to make the event happen every other month or so and this was the second edition. They announce it on facebook.

What: the book exchange.
It works simply enough: you bring some books you no longer need or want, for whatever reason. People come and look and if somebody likes a book of yours they offer you one of their own in exchange. You browse through theirs collections and bargain.

Although there were not so many titles, there was a wide variety of genres, so it was not at all hard to find something interesting. I only had one book I could spare with me, but made a good deal out of it. Moreover, I got lucky and incidentally won an additional book. Next time I am going to be prepared more adequately.

The One With The Stitches

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

The litany against fear of Bene Gesserit, from Dune by Frank Herbert.

Bene Gesserit use this incantation to focus their minds and calm themselves in times of peril.
I find it equally handy and keep repeating while sitting in the dentist's chair. Or, like today, while being cut open by a surgeon.
Actually, I believe any piece of text would suffice in this kind of a situation: a song for example, or just some random paragraph or verses - anything to hold on to and concentrate on in order not to think about what is going on in reality. But I like this particular fragment - it makes me realise that my little problems are indeed not as serious as I perceive them. And so I stick to it.

Stay tuned.

The One With All The Comics

This morning I left with one book in my backpack.
I came back carrying two more books and two comic books. And not some thin, a-few-sheet-long comic books - but quite solid ones, the ones that do deserve the name.
I would have brought more... but 4 is the limit on how much you can borrow.

And I met a man who, while talking about comics and theatre, used such fancy words as entourage or transgression in a very natural manner, and who I know to be a quick-witted, popular artist.
At the same time, the man embodied all the stereotypical features you could associate with somebody who, hmmm, let's say a person who you would believe not to even have heard any of such words. Or at least somebody who had never heard of Guy Fawkes (but should have).

All that in the library, where a comic book section was brought to life some time ago, and where comic related meetups are hosted ever since.

Stay tuned.

The One Not At Home

Or I could call it The One In Auschwitz, if you will.

Peter Broderick's song, as remastered by Clint Mansell (score composer to Black Swan and some other films by Darren Aronofsky):
Unfortunately, the original score to Last Night, the movie this piece comes from, has never been released separately. There is the soundtrack album, however, quite extra-ordinary, one of my favourites of the kind.

Gunnar Goes God

A semi-documentary film presenting an existential crisis of a middle-class, middle-aged, Scandinavian guy, whose life - from the perspective of a casual observer - could be perceived as almost perfect.
Actually, there was not much about God. There was more about finding one's goal in life and the meaning of one's life, and about living your life consciously.

If you take it lightly, it may seem a grotesque, a comedy even, filled with nonsensical answers to pointless questions.
If you decide to look deeper, it will become a very sad story of... Of what? I believe the answer depends on the person who watches the movie.

The Alchemist

Paulo Coelho's books qualify to what I call things you ought to familiarise with (no matter how painful it might be to do so), in order to know what everybody is talking about and to be able to state your own opinion on the matter. And so I did, eventually.
Surprisingly enough, in this case it was not that painful. To tell the truth, not painful at all - I quite liked it.
If you think of chapters or couples of chapters and consider them separate short stories, they are pretty good, some of them ingenious even. If you take the whole story, it is not bad either, although a tad too optimistic.
The weak point I can see here is the main character with his devil-may-care attitude - which is unfortunately too big a thing to overlook or come to terms with and spoils the general impression of The Alchemist.
As for the bombastic phrases that Paulo Coelho is notorious for: they do not seem so irritating when intertwined with corresponding events and normal dialogues and descriptions.
All in all, Santiago's treasure-hunt journey did not turned out to be that big torment I had expected.

Stay tuned.

The One Where Karo Stays

My friend (and current flatmate, btw) loves this passage from the Moominvalley in November:

The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst. They can grope their way up the walls looking for a way in, but they won’t find one, everything is shut, and you sit inside, laughing in your warmth and your solitude, for you have had foresight.

It's a beautiful, charming, warm, little book. What amazes me most is the fact that there are literally no Moomins present in it - and yet there are there: in every other character's thought, driving their every action. Despite them being physically gone, they actually appear on every page. Astonishing.

The funny thing is that my favourite part goes right after the passage above:

There are those who stay at home and those who go away, and it has always been so. Everyone can choose for himself, but he must choose while there is still time and never change his mind.

So this year, for a change, I have decided to stay. And, in a way, to go away at the same time.

And you - stay tuned.