Entwurf

Some weeks ago, I travelled for the first time to Athens. Since I like to read local literature on my travels abroad, I decided to take with me a book that has been on my wish list for a long time: Herodotus Histories . It may seem an odd choice to pick a 2500 year old book with around 700 pages of dense text (in the Penguin classics edition), but this book has been mentioned in so many of my previous readings, so I felt that now was the time to engage this beast. And since I was travelling alone and had plenty of time to burn, why not?  In this post I will try to answer the following question: - what is this book and what is it about?  - why read it?  - which kind or reader would (probably) enjoy this book? - what is my impression of it? - recommendations for further reading.  What is Histories and what is its subject? Histories was written by the Greek writer and traveller Herodotus ( Ἡρόδοτος , c. 484-425 BC) from Halicarnassus (nowadays Bodrum on the west coast of Turkey) and it w

En kuriositet som stikker ut i nåtidens sosialmedialandskapet er presset på målbarhet og sammenligningsgrunnlaget til helt alminnelig daglige aktiviteter. Dette sees i eksempler som antall steg man tar i løpet av en dag, søvnkvalitet målt på antall vekslende syklus av dyp og lett søvn, eller antall kalorier man spiser seg gjennom over en tidsperiode. Alt kan loggføres, måles, kvantifiseres. Og vises, publiseres, markedsføres. Selvfølgelig. Sånn er det digitale kutyme i den 21. århundre.  Men en av de daglige aktiviteter som jeg har et nært og lidenskapelig forhold til er lesing. Det er også blitt en veldig fasjonabeltaktivitet blant Gen Z (eller Generasjon Prestasjon, hevder noen), skrives det i de siste tider. Kanskje som konsekvens av en verdensomfattende pandemi, Boktoks gryende popularitet, eller kanskje som en form for eskapisme fra et aggressiv og inntrengende informasjons- og kommunikasjonsteknologi som krever stadig mer av oss. Kanskje folk vil bare ha noen minutter av ro.

Recently I started posting on social media the books that made a strong impression as I read them, and a friend of mine wrote me asking how do I manage to read so fast, especially taking into consideration how busy people are with their jobs, family and social life. I get asked this question quite often, so this post is an attempt to answer this question.  I want to start by writing that I do not include the easy tricks that can be used to get the reading frequency up (there are plenty of blogs and vlogs about that issue already), since I do not see reading as a competitive sport or a way to self promote oneself. Some of these tricks include switching to shorter reads (thinner books), switch to audio books, divide longer books into their equivalent partial chunks (like some people could divide Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings into three books and count each one of them separately, for example), include work or study literature on your reading lists, etc. In some cases it can be just

When I was 17 years old, I met a friend at highschool that was a bookworm like myself, so we naturally gravitated towards each other and started discussing literature. After a while, he surprises me with the revelation that he never read fiction, because he meant that only non-fiction teaches something, while fiction is just for entertainment and time-passing. This month's list is a late reply to this claim. For one of my present book club meetings, I chose five titles that, in my eyes, are five absolute masterpieces of fiction literature, because of their originality and thought provoking content, mastery and artistic use of the written language, and width in geographical and historical context. They both entertain, teach you and make you wonder.     So, here is the list: 1. Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders [Perfume - The Story of a Murderer] ( Patrick Süskind , Germany, 1985)     - This is, until now, the best debut novel from an author I have ever read. Superbly well wr

I have joined the website Goodreads in the beginning of 2015. Some weeks ago I suddenly realized that I have passed my 400th registered read title in the website, and I have been going through the lists to try to distill the books that have left the strongest impression. I found out many books that would fall into that category, but when forced to shorten the list I came up with the somewhat arbitrary number of 15 works. So here it is, my list of  15 memorable, interesting, captivating, and somewhat unusual titles that I have read in the last 7 years. They comprise both fiction and non-fiction, a bit of biography, science and history. There is an overweight of technical/historical books on these list. The books are ordered by chronological order of reading (from 2015 to the present).   So here it is.  1. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Richard Rhodes, 1986) : This list starts with a bang! This is an impressive book, combining both the history behind the Manhattan project, short biograph

  I have recently travelled to my birthtown and had the chance to meet old friends and relatives that I have not seen in a long time. Most of them have stayed in Portugal most of their lives, while some emmigrated to other countries- They have moved mostly to other countries in Europe, due to the dire socioeconomical situation that Portugal has passed through the last decade. We met for a couple of social events and the reasons for emmigrating came up often as a conversation topic. I knew beforehand that there is a big fraction of portuguese emmigrants (emmigrants, yes, I do not understand why some people prefer to classify themselves as ex-pats, as if the word immigrant is some sort of insult) to whom the main reason for migrating has to do with the improvement of work conditions or   economical situation. With the real danger of sounding pedantic or pretentious, I would say that probably one of my biggest personal motivations to emmigrate is the chance of being challenged and to