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Recently finished books include...
Nov. 19th, 2010 08:07 amAtt springa by Maria Sveland is an incredibly depressing novel about rape, abuse and systems of power. It's a novel written with a really pretty journalistic motive, and I wouldn't say it's beautifully written, but it's really powerful social commentary. It's sometimes pretty fun along the way but in the end it's very, very bleak.
Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster by Theodor Kallifatides is a book about being an immigrant, about language, and about how we perceive the world (and how it perceives us). It is beautifully written, with a lot of clarity and very elegant simplicity, and it says a lot of things that I've thought or felt (in fact basically all of the things I said about language on this journal recently, it turns out) but says them much more clearly. Also it's really nice to read a book by a not-so-young dude and think, when he describes relationships and how they work, "yeah, that sounds about right."
Now I zoom off to pack my bag. Giving a short talk about Swedish lit at school today as one of those "getting people to stand up and use their linguistic skillz in front of the class" things, then going to go and chill out at Val's parent's house, which is about the best place in the world for just curling up and reading for eight hours straight.
Ett nytt land utanför mitt fönster by Theodor Kallifatides is a book about being an immigrant, about language, and about how we perceive the world (and how it perceives us). It is beautifully written, with a lot of clarity and very elegant simplicity, and it says a lot of things that I've thought or felt (in fact basically all of the things I said about language on this journal recently, it turns out) but says them much more clearly. Also it's really nice to read a book by a not-so-young dude and think, when he describes relationships and how they work, "yeah, that sounds about right."
Now I zoom off to pack my bag. Giving a short talk about Swedish lit at school today as one of those "getting people to stand up and use their linguistic skillz in front of the class" things, then going to go and chill out at Val's parent's house, which is about the best place in the world for just curling up and reading for eight hours straight.
