Reading mediocre books is like being around toxic people. They are never too bad to be dropped straight away. By the time you realise they will never change, you already have lost too much time and energy.

That’s what happened when I was reading A River or Stars by Vanessa Hua. The book is not that bad. It actually introduced me to more aspects of a culture than it probably intended to. I don’t mean straightforward information like the facts about the life of Chinese people in rural areas, or the fact that Chinese people born in rural areas are not allowed to work or study in the cities (is it really so?!) There are other, more subtle cultural aspects noticeable in the book. For example, a man is still considered a good father figure even though he calls his previous children by ordinal numbers. He doesn’t care enough to refer to them by names because they are female.

A River of Stars promised to be way more dynamic than it actually was. Pregnant women on a run in a foreign country sounded like a story with possible adventures. The adventures never happened. The book does start with several fast-paced events but it soon falls apart into many irrelevant flashbacks from different characters which, while exposing the characters, still leave them looking flat and underdeveloped, probably because the characters themselves rarely do anything. They float around the book like oil stains on water, flashing their memories and tweaking their existence until everything arrives to a culmination that would have happened anyway even if they had remained absolutely still. One character’s life is parallel to the plot. The character is not really knitted into the plot but not dropped from it either. Another character’s behavior puzzles both readers and characters but is never explained.

The writing is decent. The sentences don’t look like written by a graduate from ‘How to be a popular writer’ course. The style is genuine and flowing. The phrases are nicely built. They just don’t have a structure to convey. There are tons of details and descriptions scattered across the book but they never play any role. They are sort of Chekhov’s guns gone wrong. The events with a potential to some salience are described distantly and monotonously as if the author herself is bored with telling them. The backward, flashback-based storytelling makes the book sound like those long detailed monologues of people who you can’t escape from because of some social situation. As soon as you allow yourself to skip a paragraph, it turns out you missed some important information, so you have to return and go through the boring part again.

I wouldn’t suggest A River of Stars to anybody. Even though it’s not a bad book, it still takes time that could be spent on a really good one.

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?

Genre: novel. Stars from Goodreads: 4.35. Stars from me: 5.

A Man Called Ove is a fairytale for adults. There are no dragons or harry potters, but its purpose is the same. It soothes and lulls you while telling you a story of kindness where good conquers bad. In this way, it’s similar to Woody Allen’s movies where the plots are clear, characters are understandable and the events develop according to the old school rules of story telling.

A man called Ove is a grumpy old chap, created so perfectly he annoys you as much as he annoys his neighbours. The book then goes on to show what happened to Ove to make him who he is, and who he actually is.

Not only does the book make you laugh and cry, it makes you do so simultaneously. It’s heart-wrenching and heartwarming at the same time.

The story is written so well that I eventually gave up on writing out the quotes. I liked them all. I ordered a printed copy, and when it arrives I will probably underline each phrase in the book. The author, Fredrik Backman, does overuse similes (similes are phrases like “when she giggled she sounded the way Ove imagined champagne bubbles would have sounded if they were capable of laughter”), but they are so good you just want them to keep coming.

The audio version, though, doesn’t do the book justice. The narrator can read, of course, but only comparing to people who cannot. He ignores even obvious leads from the text. The text says “she hissed”, the narrator groans, the text says “he mumbled”, the narrator screams. This oxymoronic reading screws with your brain. It’s tiring to be constantly watching the actual words and ignoring narrator’s intonation to adjust the perception.

I found out the book was made into a movie. The movie is also Swedish. According to my humble taste movies from that part of the globe are worth watching, especially movies based on such books. I was also excited to learn that there will be an adaptation starring Tom Hanks. He would be perfect for the role!

The book gets five stars from me and I would suggest checking out the movie too.

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: magical realism
Stars from Goodreads: 4.04
Stars from me: 5
Available on Amazon

As soon as I opened the book, I recognised the sensation, the feeling you get when you are reading a book where something surreal is being presented as ordinary. Soon I became sure it was written by somebody who was copying Gabriel García Márquez. I usually despise the impostors. This time, though, I didn’t want the imitator to stop. It was good, authentic.

This is selfish but when Gabriel García Márquez passed away, my first thought was: One Hundred Years of Solitude will never happen again. I felt orphaned. But now, here it was, a mystical world, flowing from the pages, resurrected. The resemblance was so strong it made me want to cry.

I then did my research on the book and quickly discovered that I got the connection right, but mixed up the sequence. Juan Rulfo was not copying Gabriel García Márquez. He wrote Pedro Paramo long before One Hundred Years of Solitude even existed. Márquez got a copy of Pedro Paramo and loved it so much, he learned it by heart, “forwards and backwards”, as he said. That was Pedro Paramo that inspired Márquez to create One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was not reading an impostor but a predecessor. Gabriel García Márquez opened the doors that Juan Rulfo had found.

If you love One Hundred Years of Solitude, read Pedro Paramo and meet your beloved ghosts again.