BOOKS


In omnibus requiem quaesivi, et nusquam inveni nisi in angulo cum libro
- Thomas a Kempis

Other fictions the Hippo liked):

  • The Midnight Library - Matt Haig
  • Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
  • The Daughter of Dr Moreau - Silvia Moreno Garcia
  • My Name Is Asher Lev - Chaim Potok
  • Gallant - V E Schwab
  • The Latinist - Mark Prins
  • Dangerous To Know: The Chronicles of Breed - K.T. Davies
  • The Hanging Artist - Jon Steinhagen
  • Stories of Your Life and Others - Ted Chiang
  • The Devil and the Dark Water - Stuart Turton
  • Black Sun - Rebecca Roanhorse
  • Panacea - F Paul Wilson
  • Goldenhand - Garth Nix

  • Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
    Just like you, they are desperate and aching for you as well. The San Clemente Syndrome. Today's basilica is built on the side of what once was a refuge for persecuted Christians. The home of Roman Consul Titus Flavious Clemens, it was burnt down during Emperor Nero's reign. Next to its charred remains, the Romans built an underground pagan temple dedicated to Mithras, over whose temple the early christians built another church dedicated to Pope Clement, on top of another church that burnt down, and on the site of which stands today's Basilica. Like the subconscious, like love, like memory, like time itself, like every single one of us, the church is built on the ruins of subsequent restorations. There is no rock bottom, there is no first anything, no last anything, just layers and secret passageways and interlocking chambers.

    I wanted this walk never to end. The silent and deserted cobblestones glistened in the damp air, as though an ancient carrier had spilled the viscous contents of his amphore before disappearing underground.

    He came. He left. Nothing else had changed. I had not changed. The world hadnt changed. Yet nothing would be the same. All that remains is dreammaking and strange remembrance.

    How wonderful, to walk half drunk with a lemonsola on a muggy night liek this around gleaming slat cobbletones of Rome with someone's arm around me.

    Had never had contact with neapoticans. But the strains of the doleful song stirred such powerful nostalgia for lost love and for things lost over the course of one's life and for lives ... whose memory I wanted to share word for word with ...

    If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, dont snuff it out, dont be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner that we'd want to be forgetten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! Our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us cant help but live as though we've got two lives, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there's only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to be near it. Right now there's sorrow. I dont envy the pain. But I envy you the pain.

    Time makes us sentimental. Perhaps, in the end, it is because of time that we suffer.

    Finally encountered the life that was right for me but had failed to have it. They can never undo it, never unwrite it, never unlive it, or relive it, it's just stuck there like a vision of fireflies on a summer field toward evening that keeps saying, you could have had this instead. But going back is false. Moving ahead is false. Looking the other way is false. Trying to redress all that is false turns out to be just as false.

    He was more me than I had ever been myself, because when he became me and I became him in bed so many years ago, he was and would forever remain, long after every forked road in life had done its work, my brother, my friend, my father, my son, my husband, my lover, myself. In the weeks we'd been thrown together that summer, our lives had scarcely touched, but we had crossed to the other bank, where time stops and heaven reaches down to earth, and gives us that ration of what is from birth divinely ours. We had found the stars, you and I. And this is given once only.

    I stopped for a second. if you remember everything, i wanted to say, and if you are really like me, then before you leave tomorrow or when you're just ready to shut the door of the taxi and have already said goodbye to everyone else and there's not a thing to say in this life, just this once, turn to me, even in jest, or as an afterthought, which would have meant everything to me when we were together, and, as you did back then, look me in the face, hold my gaze, and call me by your name.

  • The Warrior Within - Angus McIntyre
  • Seveneves - Neal Stephenson
  • The Codex - Douglas Preston
  • Mrs Poe - Lynn Cullen
  • The Secret of the Seventh Son - Glen Cooper
  • Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
  • Anathema - Megg Jensen
  • Tha Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
  • Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
  • I Am Number Four series - Pittacus Lore
  • The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield
    Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grow pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.

    Only when it was too late did they realize the price they must pay for escaping their destiny. Every Happy Ever Happy was tainted. Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negociations, ends up exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.

    The tales were brutal and sharp and heartbreaking. I loved them. There is no end to human suffering. Only endurance.

  • Damaged, Sin - Josephine Hart
  • Assya, Mumu, First Love, Clara Milich - Ivan Turgenev
  • The Girl with the Pearl Earing - Tracy Chevalier
  • Pompeii - Robert Harris
  • The End of Eternity - Isaac Asimov
  • The Dante Club - Matthew Pearl
  • In the Hand of Dante - Nick Tosches
  • The Alienist - Caleb Carr
  • White Oleander - Janet Fitch
  • Night Fall - Isaac Asimov
  • House of Sand and Fog - Andre Dubus III
  • The First Man - Albert Camus
  • The Sensationist - Charles Palliser
  • The Magus - John Fowles
  • The Rapture of Cannan - Sheri Reynolds
  • Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
  • Cannery Row - John Steinbeck
  • Jude, the Obscure - Thomas Harding
  • The Bucanners - Edith Wharton
  • Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
  • Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevskey
  • Anna Karenina, War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  • Mitlas Pass, Trinity - Leon Uris
  • Snow Falling on Cedars - David Guterson
  • The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
  • Désirée - AnneMarie Selinko
  • The Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling
  • Angela Ashes - Frank McCourt
  • The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
  • The Eight - Katherine Neville
  • 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea - Jule Vernes
  • Life and Death in Shanghai - Nien Cheng
  • The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
  • Body and Soul - Marcelle Bernstein
  • The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • The Sun also Rises - Ernest Hemmingway
  • The Mother, This Proud Heart - Pearl Buck
  • The Sunne in Splendour - Sharon key Penman
  • Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
  • Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
    Oak's eyes followed the serpentine sheen to the other side, where it led up to a huge brown garden-slug, which had come indoors to-night for reasons of its own..."
    "the creeping things seemed to know all about the later rain, but little of the interpolated thunder-storm; whilst the sheep knew all about the thunder-storm and nothing of the later rain."
    "absolute hunger for pity and sympathy"
    "ponder what a gift love used to be"
    "morbid misery which wrung him"
    "meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be"
    "lonely and miserable... as the solitude of a mountain is to the solitude of a cave"
    "having drawn her breath very sadly in and sent it very sadly out"
    "we learn that it is not the rays which bodies absord, but those which they reject that give them the colours they are know by; and is the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all."

  • The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
    "Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. For if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."

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    That's all folks !!!

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