Tangerine's PoV

Finally I got the time to upload some photos on Flickr so that you can see the not so little baby. Here is the link: Alex. Enjoy!

This year has been an year of changes, and I really do not know how I could make time for reading but I eventually did so here’s the list of the books I’ve enjoyed reading this year:

1. The Divine Child, by Pascal Bruckner. Review here.

2. La Sombra del Viento (The Shadow of the Wind), by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I consider it a “must read”. I enjoyed every page of this book, I loved the main character. It’s a book where fiction meets reality in neutral territory. I’ve posted an opinion on my other blog in Spanish but Bruno somehow deleted the database user so I’ve lost it all. Anyway, I earnestly recommend this book.

3. Marina, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. One of the first books that Carlos Ruiz Zafón wrote, actually you can see clearly that The Shadow of the Wind was somehow based on this novel. Very good novel, not as good as The Shadow of the Wind, but much better than many bestsellers that we can see in the libraries nowadays.

4. The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. The opinion about this book is also on my other blog, so, in other words, lost. This was a strange reading experience: this is a book that needs all of your attention, you have to read each page carefully 2 or 3 times, and you have to know some facts about Kafka’s life to really understand the book. Otherwise it will always be a book about a human turned into a bug, with no other implications. I don’t pretend that I have understood exactly what it is about. I think it’s about making an opinion on your own about the book as there is no “official position” regarding the true meanings of Kafka’s novel.

5. Figure Humane (Human Faces), by Giovanni Papini. A very human writing that shows persons we think that cannot exist, but I think that we all have inside pieces of these persons that we’d like to hide, or show, or improve, or forget.

6. África Llora (Africa Cries), by Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa. This author is one of the authors that I don’t understand how they do it to write so many and so well-written books. He wrote more than 80 books, and what’s more impressive is that every book is very very well documented. I really don’t know how he does it. I enjoyed Africa Cries a lot, it shows Africa as it is, the story is based on a real story so it can give us a quite correct image of how life in Africa is.

7. Manet’s Painting, by Michel Foucault. Foucault is a philosopher that knows about art what his common sense tells him about art (of course, he has read about art and studied a little, but he is not an art professional, or a critic in the field). This book is based on a speech he gave on Manet’s art. His way of analyzing the paintings is just different from all we can read about Manet, or impressionism, but it is so obvious that you stop and think “how didn’t I see it?”. This speech was a great success for Foucault, and it is nowadays a very important reference in the study of art.

8. Laughable Loves, by Milan Kundera. I went to the library in search of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and as I did not find it I took this one. A very easy reading book, with ridiculous love stories that make you laugh and make you think that it can happen to you. Recommended.

9. El arte (The art), by Juanjo Saez. A peculiar interpretation of art, with sense of humor.

10. Maus, by Art Spiegelman. BRILLIANT!!! Just brilliant. Very very very recommended.

11. Anne Frank: The diary of a young girl. A moving story of a 13 years old Jewish girl who is forced to hide together with her family from the Nazis. I liked it a lot, but as I read it after reading Maus I liked more the story told by Artie. Just a personal opinion.

12. Why we love women, by Mircea Cartarescu. Maybe if I would have read it in Romanian I would have liked it more, but I read it in Spanish and the translation was lousy, very very lousy.

13. Mischiefs of the bad girl, Mario Vargas Llosa. Review here.

14. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was nice to meet with the little prince again. I always have a very pleasant experience when reading this book. I’ll teach Alex to love the little prince just as I do. I hope he eventually gets to love him.

15. Brooklyn Follies, by Paul Auster. I enjoyed it. I like Paul Auster’s style. Now I’ve just bought Travels in the Scriptorium. I hope it’s at least as good as Brooklyn Follies.

16. Todas Putas (All Bitches), by Hernán Migoya. I’ve been looking for this book in all libraries and I never saw it. I saw an interview with the author in a show that I use to watch, Noche sin tregua, and I thought it would be a good book. Finally I got it but it disappointed me a lot. The style is very exaggerated, he continuously try to surprise the reader, and this starts to annoy at a certain point. Also the stories told are not that interesting, at least I did not like them.

17. Putas es poco (Bitches is not enough), by Hernan Migoya. This is the book Migoya published after the controversy caused by the publication of his first book (Todas Putas). This is like a second part of the first book. I started to read it because I bought it and I wanted to know if it was better than the first one. It’s giving me a hard time, I don’t like it at all, the style is somewhat different but not my type either. Many errors and many stories that have no sense at all, and I like non-sense stories, but these ones…