Ok, just to be honest: I’ve been very lazy with this challenge, and only visited a couple of reviews now and then. Even so, I’ve enjoyed reading my five (1. Banker to the Poor; 2. My Life with Mozart; 3. Water Wars; 4. Shakespeare. The World as a Stage; 5. The Millennium Problems; which were not my original five) and found many titles to add to my wishlist:

• Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris (seen here)
• Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree (seen here)
• Chandler Burr, The Perfect Scent (seen here)
• Matt Rogers, When Answers Aren’t Enough (seen here)
• Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire (seen here)
• Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz (seen here)
• Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss (seen here)
• Stephen King, On Writing (seen here, but already on my wishlist before)
• Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari (seen here)
• Bob Curran, The Truth About the Leprechaun (seen here, makes me wish to try my luck with Ireland again)
• David Mas Masumoto, Four Seasons in Five Senses (seen here)

It was a very nice experience, though, and helped me get to some of that non-fiction waiting forever on my TBR pile… Thank you, Joy.

I was almost giving up entirely on the Second Canadian Book Challenge: 13 books, 2 months gone and I still had to read my first. Then I realized that it’s not entirely so. Somehow inadvertently, I have read two books that fit the bill. So here’s reviews. (And this is how I jump over the Ontarians and turn into a Quebecois. Which I wouldn’t mind to turn into, except for the cold weather. But then again, that must be the same for any corner of Canada. I’d better keep to my (almost) sunny Italy. )

The book: Saul Bellow, The Actual

The edition: a somewhat oldish Italian edition translated by Vincenzo Mantovani. (I couldn’t find the right cover anywhere on the Internet, so I put this one instead.)
The story: Harry Trellman and Amy Wustrin share a personal history that goes back a long time. Yet, she married Harry’s good friend, then divorced him under a scandal, then remained a widow. Even under the circumstances, Harry is not able to propose, if he  is not pushed into her arms.

My thoughts: I liked the way Bellow weaves the story as if he was embroidering a tapestry collecting small beads with his needle. The book is one big flashback with continuous minimalist flashbacks and flashforwards inside it (a style that I have come to appreciate, although it means that you only throughly enjoy a book the first time you read it), but it is seamless, you don’t feel like you’re jumping here and there in time. Rating: 8/10.

Counts as: 2ndCC book #1 (I don’t know how this fits into the challenge, as it didn’t tell me anything about Canada, but Bellow was Canadian-born, so it counts ).

The book: Anosh Irani, The Song of Kahusha

The edition: Italian translation by Anna Rusconi. As you can see, the Italian cover (left) is much softer than the original (right). I didn’t expect the book to be as harsh as it actually is.

The story: A 10-year-old orphan in Bombay, Chamdi suddenly decides to leave his orphanage and look for his father. He is completely unaware of what racial tensions mean for people living in the city, and even less aware of what life is like on its streets, of the brutality of a life of begging and crime. He makes friends with two other children who live on the street, and starts working (i.e. begging) with them for a big and cruel criminal boss. Chamdi dreams of a city where everything is good and everybody is happy, and this helps him survive to brutality, but his dream can only stretch so far.

My thoughts: it is very very harsh and violent, and even though I understand that things are probably realistically portraited (more than, say, in The Kite Runner), and I am fine with the fact that a happy ending is unrealistic here. But as you see everything through Chamdi’s dreamy eyes, you keep expecting everything to turn out fine. Which in turn makes the book’s violence and harshness even less bearable. It made me sick. Rating: 6/10.

Counts as: 2ndCC book #2 (Again, there’s nothing about Canada, but the book figures here, so I thought it would be fine.)

Autori: ma quanti sono?

Panda: non c’è solo questo.

Parole: perché ci seducono.

Ufficio: miti e realtà del lavoro da casa (via).

The edition: Italian translation by Isabella C. Blum

Contents: the seven Millennium Problems were identified and presented in 2000 as the most important problems now open in modern mathematics (ok, apart for one which, it seems, has been solved by now). The Clay Insitute has offered one million dollars to the solvers of each problem. Devlin tries to make it as simple as possible — which is not at all simple, though.

Pros: Devlin knows his way in math communication. As far as possible, the book is clear. Sure, you need a deep interest is the subject to go through it, but the author succeeds in giving a human touch to all the math. Be prepared not to understand everything.

Cons: I hated that, again and again, Devlin tells the readers that they can jump over parts and chapters they don’t understand. He keeps telling you that it’s perfectly normal if you don’t understand. Ok, true, it IS normal not to understand many parts of the book if you are not a specialist, but as far as I know, jumping over passages is exactly what you don’t want to do if you are to learn and understand anything about maths.

Read this if: if you like math books such as Ian Stewart’s; if you are passionate about maths and specifically want to know more about the Millennium Problems.

Don’t read this if: if you hate maths; if you want to approach math communication, but have never read anything before (start with something easier).

Rating: 8/10.

My reasons for reading: it was given to me by the person who causes my interest in maths. It counts as NFF book #5 (and last).

Katrina at Callapidder Days is hosting the Fall Into Reading Challenge 2008. Post a list of books you challenge yourself to read between September 22nd and December 20th. The nice thing is, you get to choose the number and categories of books, so you can actually fit anything into the challenge! (And there’s book giveaways, too). BTW, Callapidder Days seems a good addition to the list of blogs I read regularly.

Enough with idle talk, here’s my list:

From TBR pile:

1. Denis Guedj, The Parrot’s Theorem
2. Maxence Fermine, Le Labyrinthe du temps
3. Alexander McCall Smith, Tears of the Giraffe
4. China Mieville, Un Lun Dun

For the 2nd Canadian Challenge:

5. Yann Martel, Life of Pi
6. Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept

From the library:

7. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta
8. Neil Gaiman, Stardust

For the Planet Earth Challenge:

9. Fritjiof Capra, The Web of Life

That should me more than enough to keep me reading through the season…

YouTube Direktvideo link

YouTube Direktvideo link

Sarà forse una trovata pubblicitaria, ma è ugualmente una bella notizia. José Saramago, a 85 anni, apre un suo blog. (Peccato che io il portoghese ancora non lo leggo…)

Synopsis: Bryson goes on his own quest to tell us the life of the Bard.

My thoughts: Bryson is surely not the first one to try and tell the story of Shakespeare’s life, many have done so, and most were more entitled than him to try. Still, Bryson is a good and witty writer, so when I saw this one out, I grabbed it at once, looking forward to the chance of having his distinctive voice telling me the story. Well, forget it: there’s none of his usual humour or lively prose. This is just another account as you can find plenty of in many literature books. So much so that the very few smiles I reversed on these pages were not due to Bryson, but to some funny features of the English language itself:

General admission [to the theatre] for groundlings — those who stood in the open around the stage — was a penny. […] The money was dropped in a box, which was taken to a special room for safekeeping — the box office.

All in all, Bryson must have been completely deprived of inspiration while writing this book. Rating: 5/10.

Counts as: July Book Blowout book #8(1), NFF Challenge book #4

Bonus review: News From an Unknown Universe

I only read half of this book before returning it to the library, but I want to write a short review nevertheless. I decided to add this review here, as it counts as the second half of book #6 for the July Book Blowout, and also because it is non-fiction, so that any visitor from NFF may be interested.

The book: Frank Schaetzing, Nachrichten aus einem unbekannten Universum

The edition: Italian fine translation by Roberta Zuppet. The Italian title is Il mondo d’acqua. Alla scoperta della vita attraverso il mare (Water World. Discovering Life Through the Seas).

Synopsis: the author retraces the origins of life (and of our planet), going through the story from the point of view of species living in the seas.

My thoughts: I’ve seen a lot of criticism about this book, basically because the author’s previous works were passionating novels (such as the Fifth Element. I will add here that I have never read any of those), while this is not. True, this is not a passionating novel. This is (passionating) science communication at its best. There plenty of science stuff and plenty of information, plenty to learn from it, and still you go through it as if through a novel. It belongs in that same Olympus of great science books as Bill Bryson’s Short History of (Nearly) Everything. And it picks up exactly where Bryson had come short: the parts about fossils and geology and dinosaurs. While Bryson tried to involve the reader by working on the scientists’ and discoverers’ quirks and witticism, Schaetzing works his way through cells and fossils and dinos by simply making them behave as human beings. (I loved the dinos proclaiming a Marxist revolution…)
Rating: 9/10.

Counts as: July Book Blowout book #8(2)