Like any proper witch I have cats. They like books, partially because every time a book arrives it’s a novelty and it’s cozy to lie on. Looks like Kindle is not that cozy to lie on.

Pirate the cat was the first one to get his paws on the book this time. Thus, he’s happy to present to you: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington!

The first special thing about this book is that it’s not available on Kindle. This blog says there are 6 million books available on Kindle, but The Hearing Trumpet is not one of them.

The book promises to be Alice in Wonderland for adults. Judging by some of its illustrations it’s definitely not for kids.

It feels almost unfamiliar to be holding an actual book. Don’t your hands get tired of books? You can’t simply position a book wherever you want. You have to control this pile of papers so it doesn’t fall, or close, or get flipped over to another page.

Also, the quality of the print is not that good. The pages feel like cheap toilet paper and the paint spreads around letters like on a sponge. The letters on Kindle look much sharper.

It’s not a big deal, of course. A book is still a book no matter the format. Don’t you think so? I’m off to read it now. I’ll let you know if I like it.

Continuing my talk on the best books ever here’s a new piece of information. After Book Depository had posted their list of best books of all time many readers wrote to the site team accusing them of wrong choices and offering their variants instead. Book Depository reacted by publishing a separate list of best books ever according to the readers.

The list is quite peculiar. As my husband noticed, “they are movies, not books”. It does feel that way. A big part of those books were made into movies. I wonder if the movies made people pay attention to the books or books with a bigger cinematographic potential originally draw more readers.

I’ve read only three books from this list, out of which only one was my personal choice. That book was Anna Karenina, and although I’m not sure it would end up on my best books ever list, it is definitely a very good book with believable well-crafted characters. Two other books, War and Peace and The Picture of Dorian Gray were on the list for required reading at my school and university which means I can’t judge them until the poison of required reading wears off. It’s been decades but this hasn’t happened yet.

Do you see the books that you like in that list?

My friend NeoWatercolour asked me this question. The first seemingly obvious answer was “no”. These are two different words, so they must mean two different things. Right? Apparently not.

I spent some time googling for the “goodness” criteria in Booker or Pulitzer prizes. Guess what? There’s none. It’s up to judges to choose the best book, and they choose the best book according to their personal opinions, i.e. they choose the one they like the most. Thus, the difference between “the best” and “favourite” comes to nothing here. The “official” best books are those that were simply liked the most by people who made books their profession. Thus, when it comes to best book lists the main question is who made those lists.

Human brain adapts to impressions. In 1896 a black-and-white silent movie about an approaching train horrified the audience in the theatre. Now they need a 3D system and surround sound to be that impressed. A similar thing happens in the world of books, although it’s not linear (Tolstoy wrote better than many modern authors). The more a person reads the more demanding she gets of characters, dialogues, language and plots. In Primary school a teacher asked me to speak about my favourite book in front of the class. I loved the book so much I accidentally persuaded the whole group of eight-year-olds, who hated reading, to line up to borrow my book. When I was eight that book was in my “best books ever” shortlist, but the list was indeed short. Today, the book wouldn’t get there.

Your personal experience influences your opinion too. People like the books that they can relate to. That creates a tricky situation when at one moment of your life you like the book and at another one you don’t.

Some best books were pioneers in a genre, so they stay in the lists out of respect to them or a habit. In the same way that the 50-second silent black-and-white movie about the train has 7.4 IMDb points.

Thus, there is no such thing as the best book ever. There are only lists of best books according to someone and then you have to choose whether to trust the source or not.

I, for example, stopped trusting Nobel Prize in Literature after it was awarded to Orhan Pamuk. I had only one encounter with his work but that was enough for me to never come close to his books again. It was a physical copy of Snow which I had to go and urgently discard, and wash my hands of it. The language was too primitive. It might have been a problem of translation but only if the translator had malignantly crippled the book.

In my experience I only once found the list that I could trust. I trusted the list because I tried several books from it and liked them all. The list was originally posted in a Wikipedia article called “100 best novels of all time” but then the article mysteriously disappeared. Only thanks to Reddit was I able to recover the list. Apparently, it has been posted in an article under a different name. I’d suggest to save the list in case it disappears again. It really has many worthwhile titles.

What about you? Which best books lists do you follow?

I guess I don’t have many readers yet, but if you are out there, I’d love to meet you. Drop a line in the comments, if you feel like it. Let’s keep in touch!

Genre: Memoir
Stars from Goodreads: 4.04
Stars from me: 5

A Moveable Feast has a complicated history. There are two editions, each corrected by relatives from Hemingway’s different marriages. Thus, the first edition was published in 1964 by his fourth wife, Mary Hemingway, who was accused by some scholars of taking parts out of the manuscript. Those were the parts about Hemingway’s first wife Hadley Richardson where he spoke about her kindly and apologized to her. The second edition was issued in 2009 by Seán Hemingway, Hemingway’s grandson from his second wife Pauline Pfeiffer. Seán was blamed for taking out the parts that spoke unkindly about Hemingway’s second wife, Seán’s grandmother.

The chapters also changed places in the book, some added, some merged. The sad thing is, we cannot know what the book would look like had it been published while Hemingway was still alive. Both editions were published posthumously.

Despite so many manipulations of suspicious motives the book turned out to be the only one carrying Hemingway’s voice so clearly. It’s hard to say if it is the effect of writing in the second person “you” (as in “you would notice”, “you would feel”) or the power of some magic he used but the book really transports you to those times and those places, putting you directly beside Hemingway himself. You go to the same places, you eat in the same cafes, drink a lot of wine together and smell roasted chestnuts in cold Parisian air. You get introduced to the Fitzgeralds. Yes, to both of them, the husband and wife. The wife, apparently, was a very interesting person too. You meet Gertrude Stein. You meet all those famous, striking people before they turned into bland black-and-white photos on the covers of their books. You see them as they were in life, or at least the way Hemingway saw them. This is an unforgettable experience.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know” Hemingway said in A Moveable Feast. And it became his truest book.

I’m really looking forward to Less by Andrew Sean Greer. It sounds clever and fun. I’m also hopeful for Watching You and You were Made for This because Ova said they were good and I trust her opinion. I probably won’t conquer Carthage Must be Destroyed, but I’ll try.

Which of these would you try?

The rest of the books are:

1. The South by Colm Tóibín.

2. Eight White Nights by André Aciman (Because Call Me by Your Name was awesome!)

3. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan.

4. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg.

5. Summer Wives by Beatriz Williams.

6. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones.

7. Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene.

8. The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.

9. Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky (It has a super high rating of 4.41 on Goodreads!)

10. You’re Just Too Good To Be True by Sofija Stefanovic (Because I loved her Miss Ex-Yugoslavia memoir.)

11. Close to Home by Cara Hunter (Although I’m still a bit grumpy that the audiobook is not licensed to be sold in my country. Also, I’m suspicious of everything that is series. It can mean no proper ending.)

12. Pretend I’m Dead by Jen Beagin.

13. The Terrible by Yrsa Daley-Ward.

14. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman.

15. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin.

16. The Martian by Andy Weir (It sounds a bit boring to read a book after watching the movie, but I was told the book is much better. Taking into account that the movie is also quite good, The Martian should be an interesting read.)

17. Find a Way by Diana Nyad (Nonfiction about an endurance swimmer.)

18. Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox (Another endurance swimmer in VERY cold waters!)

19. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky (Couldn’t ignore the title!)

20. Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić (Another epic book on the history of places near me, written by an author who’s very famous here. He’s also a Nobel Prize winner.)

Have you read any of these? What did you think?

I’m omnivorous when it comes to the medium. I consume books from paper, e-books or audiobooks. My Kindle library is spread throughout several gadgets, including the actual Kindle.

Out of a wrong habit I try to minimize physical copies, so I buy them only when there’s no e-book available. My main reason for doing so will sound funny to some, and, probably, should sound funny to all. I’m sad for the trees. The reason is wrong because, apparently, books are not made from some free wild forests. They are made from the trees grown specifically for this purpose. Thus, it’s better for our air. The more books we buy the more trees they plant, the more oxygen is produced while the trees are growing. As for plastic Kindle and other gadgets… Well, you know where I’m going with this.

Another advantage of a physical copy is that it’s yours. No publisher will knock on your door and take the book back because there was some mix-up with license. That does happen to electronic versions. You also won’t be prosecuted for passing your copy to a friend, or simply leaving it on a bench in the park. But what is it called when you leave your book online for others to read? Right, it’s a crime. As a cherry on top, with a physical copy nobody is spying on you. What you browse, like, dislike or underline in the book stays only with you, unless you decide otherwise.

Still, my library is dominated by electronic copies. I wave off my privacy, my freedom to handle a book the way I see fit, in exchange for emptier shelves and lighter suitcases. And, well, for a life of a tree

I’m not a professional critic, but I’m a natural one. If you scratch the surface of any professional critic, there must be a natural one. For, what kind of job is that? What is its purpose? The job grew from a desire to ruin with words a creation constructed by others. Then it becomes a question of ambition, your either earn from it or you blog about it.

I give in to my nature, which my idol would have never approved of. “Eunuchs of literature”. Perfect choice of words, as always.

There’s more: “Critics are men who watch a battle from a high place then come down and shoot the survivors.” But another metaphor brings it more home to me. It’s about big mindless fishes that come to the boat and devour a fisherman’s treasured and hard-earned catch.

I’m the fish, although a very self-aware one. I pick my books very carefully, and I stay away from anything predisposed to devouring.

My literary self survives on Kindle and Book Depository. While everybody knows about Kindle, not many heard about Book Depository, hence the post. Enjoy!

Read Miss Ex-Yugoslavia.

If there was only one phrase I could say about this book, that would be it – read it!

I loved the book so much I was ready to send the copies to everybody I knew. Unfortunately, most people I know either don’t read English, or don’t read at all. So I created this blog to say it to the world – read Miss Ex-Yugoslavia!

Read it, even if you have no idea about Yugoslavia, or any other socialist country, or what it feels like to be a bearer of two different cultures. In fact, read it exactly for this reason. The book will show you something new. And isn’t it the primary treasure of books, to let you experience what you otherwise would have never experienced?

Read it because it’s honest and clear, like anything that is true art. Miss Ex-Yugoslavia will teach you more about history, people and wars than all school books combined.

The book will make you laugh and cry, aloud and alone. And how often does this happen nowadays?

Finally, if you were born in a socialist country, if you know what it is like to acquire a new different culture, if you know what it feels like when different truths contradict each other and are still equally real, this book is definitely for you. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will reconnect with times and spaces that you considered long lost. This book will not just be an exciting read but a journey.

My heartfelt thanks to the author Sofija Stefanovic for this amazing experience!