Sometimes the word “a book” does not describe a creation well enough. All books are different but some books are just more than books. Apart from telling you a story, they bring a whole new world along with them. I don’t mean a world like the one with Tolkien’s hobbits, lands and languages. It doesn’t have to be that gigantic. But when you read it you start being aware of something that hasn’t been there before.

Everything Under is this kind of book. In no way is it just another story. In fact, the story itself is quite transparent. You can easily guess what’s going on if you read carefully (or if you google the book and get a major spoiler in the first lines of the description. Don’t google the book!)

Everything Under is a story about a river, a mother, a daughter. It has fantasies that merge into lives and become a reality.

The main treasure of the book is its language. It’s been a lifetime since I saw something so beautifully, intricately written. You can take a sentence and watch it as a separate piece of art. I read some of the phrases aloud several times just to see how beautifully they unfold.

If there were prizes for the best magic performed with words Daisy Johnson would be the winner. She doesn’t just give you descriptions. She lays out words that you don’t expect to see but then you watch them grow into a perfect construction conveying exactly what the author meant. When it’s getting late and the characters are near the river, the author doesn’t just say “it was getting dark”. She says: “The water had lost its colour”

The water had lost its colour… Precise and perfect.

I’ve marked a lot of phrases in the book. I go through them like through a gallery of beautiful paintings. There’s a whole collection now taken from one short book.

Everything Under will not be beautiful for everybody. You’ll have to savour the lines to see what they mean and how they unravel. Also, some moments in the book will make you cringe, although even my prude self shut up this time to let me enjoy the book. But if you like watching the beauty of the words put perfectly together, and you are looking for something special for your literary senses this book is for you.

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?

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?

Anyway, here’s my humble list from the books I read in that category, ranked from those I liked the most to those I liked less:

1. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

4. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

5. Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood

6. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

8. Short stories by Anton Chekhov (Although that’s not fair. There are many stories. How can one judge all of them as one piece?)

9. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Hey, is there anybody out there? Are you reading this? What books would you suggest to read from that Best Books Ever list?