I don't generally look for Romance novels specifically. But some of the best love stories I've ever heard of were in books I've read. Stories of an amazing ability to wait until the loved one is finally by your side, such as Jane Austen's Persuasion, or of love making you mad and getting you to leave your home and family in its pursuit, such as Orhan Pamuk's The New Life.

Although I recommend these series, it does not mean I haven't had my share of genuine romance novels. I had this friend in high-school, Diana, who had a huge collection and she got me into reading a few. What I will always remember is a trilogy by Sandra Donovan. A story of three girls on their search for love. They also run into a lost treasure in the end. Why the books are so important to me? Well, it was my first actual acquaintance with romance literature. And I found the name Kayla there. I loved it so much, I've been using it as a nickname ever since.

I look for romance in different places right now, in novels that do not focus so much on looks, on nice photos on the cover, but I still look for it. Because I think we need it in the end. We need to be reminded of love, of how beautiful it is and of how fairytale like it can turn out to be at times.

The books I read always leave me wanting more. More books to read. Of these, some let me know how much I should still read and learn. They have this power of emphasizing all the areas in which I lack basic knowledge. One of these books is the one I am currently reading: a collection of essays by Jorge Luis Borges. A lot of information and interesting ideas on literature, philosophy, religion, movies and much more.

The first thing I learned: what a gaucho is. Unlike other books that made me want to know more by simply mentioning a never-ending list of authors I should pay more attention to, Borges' essays follow different paths to this same idea. In discussing one work of art (be it movie or novel or poetry), not only do you make the acquaintance of the author and work itself, you are also brought into the world of similar works and their never-disappearing critics.

I will tell you more about this book when I finish it.

Two Swedish archaeologists, Allan and Cecilia Klynne, have wrote a book on ancient records. The book focuses on interesting and sometimes weird records of the Greek and Roman ancient cultures, established in a world of great acceptance for what we would call immoral today.

The book presents the record of Roman empress Messalina who won a sexual competition after challenging the best prostitute of the time. Another strange record is that of a shepherd, known as the cleanest zoophile. The most expensive building was the castle of Nero, a Roman Emperor. The man who drank the most was a soldier of Alexander who drank 13.5 liters of wine. Unfortunately, the record also killed him.

According to the online edition of Evenimentul Zilei, Mircea Cartarescu is the contemporary writer with the largest number of translated books. 30 of his works have been translated in 12 different languages.

After being translated into Spanish, "De ce iubim femeile" (Why do we love women") became one of last year's best sold books in Spain. The Romanian author is going to have his entire work translated into German in the near future.

Cartarescu is my absolute favorite contemporary writer. The first book I read was "Nostalgia", borrowed from my good friend Oana. Then I read most of what he had published, including two diaries.

As of 2006, the Romanian Cultural Institute is helping Romanian writers getting their works translated, as stated in the same article. The Institute's projects might bring several Romanian authors into the spotlight of the international scene.

Authors, Books, Mircea Cartarescu, Romanian Writers

It started Friday evening. I left the office quite late, again. And went to my place with Silviana with one purpose in mind. Change my hair color :) Two hours later, lots of pain and lots of laughs, it is done. As my hair was all wet and I kinda fell asleep instantly, I did not see the results. I saw a little something at about 2 am (don't ask what I was doing up at that time, cause I still don't get it). Then in the morning I met the Morticia/vampire person/etc in me :D Yeah, my hair is all dark brow (almost black) again. Photos - coming soon.

I now look more like my mom, I remember daily that I wanted to live with the Apaches because of a book called Winnetou, and that I really like myself with darker hair.

Oh, I also managed to see "Monty Python and the Holly Grail" after two attempts that ended up with my falling asleep at the exact same moment of the movie. It is quite funny though, in a very silly kind of way. An interesting comedy that I recommend to you all.

Later on Saturday night I met Cris V. Had not seen her in ages and we wanted to have some tea in Carturesti. Tough luck, they were preparing for a nice little concert there. So we went to a little cafe we both knew, had pizza and tea and talked a lot. I loved the way she seemed so glow. She looked great and I could feel a certain strength and determination in her that have been growing in the meanwhile. Good for her! Do stay childish as you are, you are so at the right moments :)

For some unknown reasons (all being crappy around me: cold weather, lots of stress, lots of work and me translating all weekend, no significant other, no fun ahead, looking for a new place to move in, school has started etc), I feel great lately. It all hit me at a certain point: I did forget myself for feelings I considered wrong at the time, for not doing everything I wanted. I've been feeling happy and free. I feel the world is at my feet and that it will all keep going from great to even better than that.

Also, I would like to congratulate myself for reading as much as I had planned to during the first two months of 2007. The target I had set was of at least 3 books per moth. Up to now, I've been doing great, I will even receive bonus points for February :)

I hear of Joseph Conrad in a movie. Yes, you can find good tips on what to read next practically everywhere. So on my next trip to the Dalles (Noi) bookstore, I stopped at the English section and looked for something by him. This is how I found "Selected Short Stories".

They are stories speaking of inner daemons, of going crazy, of love, of peasants and aristocrats, of patriots and anarchists, of children and grown ups, of exotic places and strange people, and more often of life on great ships wandering on the seas and oceans of Earth.

Although everything is described in great detail, each shade, each feeling, each glance and word, Conrad's stories never seem to limit the extent to which one can use their own imaginations to build around the stories one is reading. The great waves seem to touch one's skin, the desperation and ultimate joy seem to make room into one's heart. And all the magical colors of distant lands seem to be brought to life.

Escapism. You are no longer in a train, crowded and with all the alarms of personal space invasions screaming in your head. You are traveling in a small boat on a great river, hunting crocodiles and talking to a fierce Malay whose beloved wife is about to die. You are walking free in a world of superstitions, in perfect cohabitation with new ideas. You have haunted friends, acquaintances who wear a daily mask of fortitude.

You see the weak, those fearing their own chances to a better life. And those accepting every challenge with an ironic smile on their face. Those denying nothing and those denying everything. A beautiful, mad world.

About the Author

Józef Teodor Conrad Korzeniowski was born on 3 December 1857 in the Russian occupied city of Berdyczów, Ukraine. He was the only child born to Evelina Bobrowska (1832–1865) and Apollo Korzeniowski, (1820–1869) patriot, writer, and translator of such authors’ works as Victor Hugo’s and William Shakespeare’s.

As a child he dreamed of a life at sea and of seeing the great Black Continent. He grew up to become a master mariner and at the same time a great writer. More on Joseph Conrad here.

...I wake up at 6 am and change my alarm to 6.30, allowing myself a little more lingering. I get up in 5 or 10 minutes and get on with my day. Get ready for work and go to the subway station. It is always crowded and my only concern is to have enough space to keep my book open. Sometimes, reading in such trains is quite a challenge.

What I did notice lately was more people reading books while taking the subway train. Less papers and just empty stares. People actually read. Different ages, different books, some really soapy. But people do read. There are still those giving me killer looks because I dare keep my book open in a crowded train. Or those giving me ironic looks, of people thinking I read just to seem cool. But their numbers are decreasing.

Today, I was rushing to my office, almost running. I was not even close to late. But it was severely windy. Then, an hour later, I looked outside the window. It's bright, surrounded by warm sunlight.

Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray

there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

Intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think.

There is a fatality about all physicaland intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit quietly and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others nor ever receive it from alien hands.

You know how I love secrecy. It is the only thing that can make modern life wonderful or mysterious to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it.

the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas,reveals himself.

A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

If one puts forward an idea to a real Englishman,— always a rash thing to do,—he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it one’s self.

the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be colored by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices.

There is nothing that art cannot express

The harmony of soul and body,—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is bestial, an ideality that is void.

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Those who are faithful know only the pleasures of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.

‘There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral,—immoral from the scientific point of view.’
‘Why?’
‘Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals,the terror of God, which is the secret of religion,—these are the two things that govern us.

I believe that if one man were to live his life out fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream,—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal,— to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man among us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of atemptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed.

It is only the sacred things that are worth touching

People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.

There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one! To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional colored life of the intellect,—to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they became one, and at what point they were at discord,—there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

Soul and body, body and soul—how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?

It was the passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.

no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating,—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

The one charm of the past is that it is the past.

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic.

As he looked back upon man moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self- denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, Nature in herwonderful irony driving the anchorite out to herd with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.

Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and charming. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and the highest respectability is of less value in its opinion than the possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays charming. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.

Each of us has Heaven and Hell in him

But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

There are only two ways, as you know, of becoming civilized. One is by being cultured, the other is by being corrupt.

Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly-built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of color in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings strange memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play,—I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven.

This article is old. But I happened to get a quote from it today, via YIM from Ryan. I got pissed off immediately. Well, I am not here to question Nintendo consoles or if they are a great pass-time or not. But I have to say the author has no idea how a book lover thinks or acts. So he should either pick a lot of books and read them until it feels natural, or simply never touch the subject again.

If you give me a good book and a Nintendo gadget and ask me to pick, I will surely pick the book. No other game playing device will make me change my mood so suddenly as the author states. I won't loose my interest in books just to win some bonus points and extra lives. Not everyone becomes a gamer when a game is in reach. Or they do, for a short while, then it dies out.

Tags: Books, Games, Nintendo

This post will have it's own link on the blog's sidebar as it will be frequently updated (or at least I hope so). It contains a list of the books, each with a link to it's dedicated post. Enjoy!

1. Orhan Pamuk - The White Castle