en-US Sun, 24 Apr 2022 19:37:57 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg 75605 One of the few great and perfect works of poetic imagination written during this century - Elias Canetti on The Transformation

A companion volume to The Great Wall of China and Other Short Works, these new translations bring together the small number of Kafka's stories that he thought worthy of publication.

This volume contains his most famous story. The Transformation, more popularly known as Metamorphosis. Other works include Meditation, a collection of his earlier studies; The Judgement, written in a single night of frenzied creativity; The Stoker, the first chapter of a novel set in America; and, A Fasting Artist, a collection of stories written towards the end of Kafka's life. There is also a fascinating occasional piece, The Aeroplanes at Brescia, Kafka's eye-witness account of an air display in 1909. Taken together, these stories reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought.

Front cover drawing by Franz Kafka]]> 236 Franz Kafka 0140184783 Dava 0 currently-reading 3.90 1915
author: Franz Kafka
name: Dava
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1915
rating: 0
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date added: 2022/04/24
shelves: currently-reading
review:

]]> 828484
The history of the Middle East is an epic story of tragedy, betrayal and world-shaking events. It is a story that Robert Fisk has been reporting for over thirty years. His masterful narrative spans the most volatile regions of the Middle East, chronicling with both rage and compassion the death by deceit of tens of thousands of Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Robert Fisk’s remarkable history is also the tale of a journalist at war � learning of the 9/11 attacks while aboard a passenger jet, reporting from a bombed-out Baghdad, interviewing Osama bin Laden � and of the courage and frustration of a life spent writing the first draft of history.]]> 1368 Robert Fisk 1841150088 Dava 5 currently-reading
If this were the only book I was currently reading, I could quite easily slip into a state of despair about the state of the world and the corrupt centres of power therein.
Thankfully it isn't my only current read and so I can dip in and out of it, as and when I feel ready to take in more of Fisk's comprehensive, first hand account of the Middle East carve up.

Five Stars already!]]> 4.47 2005
author: Robert Fisk
name: Dava
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2005
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/07/16
shelves: currently-reading
review:
Robert Fisk is a journalist of admirable integrity, and clearly a hard working one at that. And sadly, he is (it seems), probably amongst a dying breed of independent reporters who are prepared to go the extra mile to tell it like it is, rather than be swayed by an employers political bias or the need to water the facts down.

If this were the only book I was currently reading, I could quite easily slip into a state of despair about the state of the world and the corrupt centres of power therein.
Thankfully it isn't my only current read and so I can dip in and out of it, as and when I feel ready to take in more of Fisk's comprehensive, first hand account of the Middle East carve up.

Five Stars already!
]]> 394964
"Deliciously funny...absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious...a brilliantly vivid reading experience." � The New York Times Book Review

"Touching as well as hilariously lewd.... Roth is vibrantly talented. " —New York Review of Books

Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift fĂĽr Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.]]> 274 Philip Roth 0679756450 Dava 3 3.69 1969
author: Philip Roth
name: Dava
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1969
rating: 3
read at: 2009/07/09
date added: 2009/07/09
shelves:
review:
A funny, filthy, Jewish rant from start to finish.
]]> 378585 256 Geoff Dyer 0349116237 Dava 3
Worth a read it if you get chance, though the author's style and humour might not
be everyone's cup of tea.]]> 3.44 2003
author: Geoff Dyer
name: Dava
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2003
rating: 3
read at:
date added: 2009/06/27
shelves:
review:
Funny, alternative travel writing.

Worth a read it if you get chance, though the author's style and humour might not
be everyone's cup of tea.
]]> 687278
� Using painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion, and courage
� Communicating so as to encourage others to open up rather than shut down
� Practices for reversing habitual patterns
� Methods for working with chaotic situations
� Ways for creating effective social action]]> 148 Pema Chödrön 1570623449 Dava 4
I returned home to find out that my mum had died, interesting.

Good, solid, no nonsense Buddhism which prompted me to change the way I dealt with (and still deal with) difficult experiences, both within and without.

"Steer to the deep" as someone once said.]]> 4.27 1996
author: Pema Chödrön
name: Dava
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1996
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/06/27
shelves:
review:
This book fell off a shelf onto my head in a book shop in New York, so I looked at the title and thought it looked worth a read.

I returned home to find out that my mum had died, interesting.

Good, solid, no nonsense Buddhism which prompted me to change the way I dealt with (and still deal with) difficult experiences, both within and without.

"Steer to the deep" as someone once said.
]]> 10461
Originally published in 1965, this autobiographical novel covers a key year in Jack Kerouac's life—the period that led up to the publication of On the Road in September of 1957. After spending two months in the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascade Mountains of Washington, Kerouac's fictional self Jack Duluoz comes down from the isolated mountains to the wild excitement of the bars, jazz clubs, and parties of San Francisco, before traveling on to Mexico City, New York, Tangiers, Paris, and London. Duluoz attempts to extricate himself from the world but fails, for one must "live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry." Desolation Angels is quintessential Kerouac.]]> 409 Jack Kerouac 1573225053 Dava 5
Yet to put it so simply feels like a crude summing up of what Jack Kerouac was really about. His ability to capture the highs, the lows, the humor and the horror of life is nothing short of inspiring. And who am I, really, to comment on such a great mind.

In the final chapter of this book, Kerouac writes (in relation to Neal Cassidy, though he is obviously making a wider point):

'He is a believer in life and he wants to go to Heaven but because he loves life so he embraces it so much he thinks he sins and will never see Heaven ... You could have ten thousand cold eyed Materialistic officials claim they love life too but can never embrace it so near sin and also never see Heaven - They will contemn the hot blooded life lover with their cold papers on a desk because they have no blood and therefore have no sin? No! They sin by lifelessness! They are the ogres of Law entering the Holy Realm of Sin!'

This is a typical moment in the book, where Kerouac merges poetry with prose, so that there is no clear distinction between the two. But it is what he is getting at here that felt so significant to me, something clearly beyond any idealistic view of the world and our experiences within.

aye.


]]> 3.93 1958
author: Jack Kerouac
name: Dava
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1958
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2009/06/26
shelves:
review:
My favourite Kerouac book so far. If there is a continuum of idealism, which starts from 'On the Road' and on through 'The Dharma Bums', it is at this book (which follows on from 'The Dharma Bums') that the cracks are really beginning to appear in Jack Kerouac's experience.

Yet to put it so simply feels like a crude summing up of what Jack Kerouac was really about. His ability to capture the highs, the lows, the humor and the horror of life is nothing short of inspiring. And who am I, really, to comment on such a great mind.

In the final chapter of this book, Kerouac writes (in relation to Neal Cassidy, though he is obviously making a wider point):

'He is a believer in life and he wants to go to Heaven but because he loves life so he embraces it so much he thinks he sins and will never see Heaven ... You could have ten thousand cold eyed Materialistic officials claim they love life too but can never embrace it so near sin and also never see Heaven - They will contemn the hot blooded life lover with their cold papers on a desk because they have no blood and therefore have no sin? No! They sin by lifelessness! They are the ogres of Law entering the Holy Realm of Sin!'

This is a typical moment in the book, where Kerouac merges poetry with prose, so that there is no clear distinction between the two. But it is what he is getting at here that felt so significant to me, something clearly beyond any idealistic view of the world and our experiences within.

aye.



]]> 975185
Oblivious to the bizarre ways in which their lives intersect, nine characters—a terrorist in Okinawa, a record-shop clerk in Tokyo, a money-laundering British financier in Hong Kong, an old woman running a tea shack in China, a transmigrating "noncorpum" entity seeking a human host in Mongolia, a gallery-attendant-cum-art-thief in Petersburg, a drummer in London, a female physicist in Ireland, and a radio deejay in New York—hurtle toward a shared destiny of astonishing impact. Like the book's one non-human narrator, Mitchell latches onto his host characters and invades their lives with parasitic precision, making Ghostwritten a sprawling and brilliant literary relief map of the modern world.]]> 436 David Mitchell 0340739754 Dava 3 4.00 1999
author: David Mitchell
name: Dava
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1999
rating: 3
read at: 2009/06/18
date added: 2009/06/20
shelves:
review:
I thought this was a superb first novel from David Mitchell. His choice of characters and places is eclectic and inspiring, as is his ability to link one character's experience to another's. The subtitle of this book is 'A Novel in Nine Parts' and that is really what I felt like at the end of the book, like I had read nine short stories that had elements of conditioning from each other. It was interesting to read this after 'Cloud Atlas', as I could see some of Mitchell's ideas that form the basis of his style, perhaps in their earlier embryonic form. The two stand out chapters for me were 'Petersberg' and 'London', for their attention to detail, and at times, emotional richness.
]]> 315233 310 Jack Kerouac 0140185216 Dava 4 But I generally don't read books twice, so I'll leave it with the four stars that reflect how much I enjoyed it when I read it.]]> 3.53 1957
author: Jack Kerouac
name: Dava
average rating: 3.53
book published: 1957
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/06/04
shelves:
review:
I read this book in my early twenties and really enjoyed it for it's rich, lively prose, detailing Kerouac's travels around America and his experiences in and amongst his contemporaries. There was definitely something I found infectious about Kerouac's ability to appreciate anything and everything, and to a certain extent, something of that has stayed with me. Yet there was also a reckless side to his behavior that I remember appealed to me at the time, and perhaps on a second read, it might be these aspects of the book that would leave me feeling that it was a book to read at a certain time, at a certain age.
But I generally don't read books twice, so I'll leave it with the four stars that reflect how much I enjoyed it when I read it.
]]> 381624
By turns funny, scary and heartbreaking, they are always illuminating, and further evidence of one of the most original and brilliant imaginations in contemporary fiction.]]> 192 Mick Jackson 0571225497 Dava 4 3.91 2005
author: Mick Jackson
name: Dava
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2005
rating: 4
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date added: 2009/06/04
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review:
A wonderfully grim collection of woeful yarns.
]]> 11650 Pulitzer Prize Winner (1998)

In American Pastoral, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all the twentieth century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Seymour 'Swede' Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.]]> 432 Philip Roth Dava 0 to-read 3.93 1997
author: Philip Roth
name: Dava
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1997
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2009/06/04
shelves: to-read
review:

]]> 702033 496 Niall Griffiths 0099285177 Dava 4 3.88 2000
author: Niall Griffiths
name: Dava
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/06/02
shelves:
review:
A very well written book, capturing the various experiences of a rag tag bunch of drifters and dejected individuals who come together in and around a Welsh coastal village in the late 90's.
]]> 162847 A Scandal in Bohemia, A Case of Identity, The Red-Headed League and The Boscombe Valley Mystery.]]> 302 Arthur Conan Doyle 0140621008 Dava 4 4.07 1892
author: Arthur Conan Doyle
name: Dava
average rating: 4.07
book published: 1892
rating: 4
read at: 2003/01/01
date added: 2009/06/01
shelves:
review:
Bloody brilliant, must read more.
]]> 1127495 328 Haruki Murakami 1860468268 Dava 4 3.86 1993
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Dava
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1993
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2009/06/01
shelves:
review:
A selection of offbeat short stories where everyday life never seemed stranger. I would like to read more Murakami after this taster, he has an odd quirkiness about his writing that I found instantly appealing.
]]> 533653 531 David Mitchell 0340822775 Dava 5 4.12 2004
author: David Mitchell
name: Dava
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2004
rating: 5
read at: 2008/12/01
date added: 2009/06/01
shelves:
review:
An amazing read. The weaving together of different stories, times, places and literary styles into a work of inspired greatness. It would be easy to say too much about this book at the risk of spoiling the plot/s. I say dive in when you get a chance, David Mitchell is a wonderful author.
]]> 3536993
In pursuit of his subject, Saviano worked as an assistant at a Chinese textile manufacturer and on a construction site, both controlled by 'the System', and as a waiter at a Camorra wedding. Born in Naples, he recalls seeing his first murder at the age of fourteen, and how his own father, a doctor, suffered a brutal beating for trying to help an eighteen-year-old victim, left for dead in the street.

Gomorrah is both a bold and engrossing piece of investigative writing and one heroic young man's impassioned story of a place under the rule of a murderous organization.]]> 424 Roberto Saviano 0330450999 Dava 3 I considered putting this book down about two thirds of the way through, largely due to the unrelenting violence and depressing outlook (based on obviously harsh realities). It might be an idea to have a novel on the go at the same time as this, just to give the mind a bit of balanced input.]]> 3.68 2006
author: Roberto Saviano
name: Dava
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2009/01/01
date added: 2009/06/01
shelves:
review:
A stark journalistic account concerning the goings on of The Cammora, a mafia like criminal organisation originating in the region of Campania and the city of Naples, Italy. The book is a pretty intense read from start to finish, detailing the sheer scale of the operations run by the organisation (massive and far reaching), and the high murder rate in the areas in which they operate.
I considered putting this book down about two thirds of the way through, largely due to the unrelenting violence and depressing outlook (based on obviously harsh realities). It might be an idea to have a novel on the go at the same time as this, just to give the mind a bit of balanced input.
]]>